Common Ground

This argument doesn’t stand alone. It sits at the intersection of three conversations that are each, in their own way, already circling the same problem — without yet fully talking to each other.

Within Abundance

The abundance movement’s clearest success story is housing: land-use reform, permitting simplification, a shared diagnosis that artificial scarcity — not lack of demand or ambition — is the barrier standing between people and what they need. Transportation has its own version of that scarcity, documented by the same cost/delivery research (the Transit Costs Project, Liscow’s state-capacity work) that grounds housing’s abundance case.

Abundance’s superpower is reach. Klein and Thompson didn’t just make a wonky policy argument — they made it mainstream, turned “supply” into a word elected officials say out loud, and built a genuine bipartisan coalition around housing in a political environment that agrees on almost nothing else. That’s not a small thing. Most good policy arguments never leave the seminar room. This one got out, and it’s still moving.

What abundance hasn’t yet done in transportation is translate that same reach into a metric as legible as “units built.” Ridership, VMT, mode share — none of these lands with the public the way a housing-permit number does. (See “Higher-Order Outcomes vs. Proxies” for how this argument tries to close that gap.) Transportation abundance needs abundance’s superpower — the ability to make a technical argument land in the mainstream — pointed at a harder problem than the one that made the movement famous.

Within Civic Technology and State Capacity

A separate lineage — Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America, the Niskanen Center’s state-capacity work, the Recoding America Fund — has spent the last decade building a different kind of muscle: the discipline to do the hard, boring, unglamorous work of actually closing the loop between policy intent and results.

Civic tech’s superpower is honesty about failure. This is a movement willing to point at its own institutions and say plainly: this isn’t working, and the fix isn’t another coat of paint. Pahlka’s “cascade of rigidity” diagnosis, the product-manager-not-project-manager reframe, the insistence on measure-diagnose-test-learn cycles rather than one-time reports — these all come from a culture that treats institutional failure as something to name and rebuild, not something to quietly work around or prop up. That’s rare. Most reform efforts flinch at exactly the moment this one leans in.

That discipline has already reshaped digital government and federal benefits delivery. It hasn’t yet been turned on transportation institutions — not because transportation doesn’t need it, but because this movement’s attention has simply been elsewhere. The tools are proven. They’re one domain away from where they’re needed most.

Within Existing Transportation Advocacy

Transportation advocacy organizations — transit-riders unions, regional coalitions, groups like Seamless Bay Area — exist in nearly every city and county in the country, embedded in neighborhoods that no national movement or think tank will ever have a direct line into.

Transportation advocacy’s superpower is ground truth. These are the people who know which bus route actually gets cut when budgets tighten, which intersection is actually dangerous versus which one just looks dangerous in a report, which community will show up to a hearing and which one has been asked so many times without follow-through that they’ve stopped coming. Depth and breadth like that can’t be replicated from a research desk — it has to be earned locally, over years, block by block.

What this world hasn’t yet built is the institutional machinery to convert that ground truth into binding accountability. Jarrett Walker’s ridership-vs-coverage framework — probably the most-cited outcomes framework in transit planning — gets an agency to declare what it’s optimizing for. It doesn’t get the agency held to that choice once declared. The instinct for outcomes is already there, running deep, in every neighborhood chapter. It hasn’t yet been connected to a mechanism.

What Common Ground Adds

Put the three side by side, and something clicks into place: abundance can make an argument land in the mainstream, but hasn’t yet built the metric that would let it land in transportation. Civic tech knows how to build the accountability mechanism, but has never pointed it at transportation institutions. Transportation advocacy has the ground truth to know exactly where these mechanisms would matter most, block by block, but hasn’t had the institutional tools to demand them.

None of these gaps is fatal on its own — the missing piece is right next door, in one of the other two conversations. That’s the actual argument for common ground: not that these three movements should be nicer to each other, but that cross-pollinating what each already does best produces something none of them can build alone — a transportation reform movement that is politically legible, institutionally rigorous, and locally grounded, all at once.

That’s the same claim as the North Star: mechanism-agnostic on which higher-order outcome a jurisdiction prioritizes, uncompromising on whether it’s actually held to it.