Abundance is the idea — most associated with Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s 2025 book of the same name — that many of America’s most pressing shortages (housing, clean energy, infrastructure) aren’t the result of insufficient ambition or funding, but of self-imposed institutional barriers: permitting processes, procurement rules, and review requirements that make it slow and expensive to build things governments and markets already agree we need. The abundance argument is that removing those barriers, not just spending more money, is the fastest path to more housing, more clean energy, and better infrastructure.

Klein and Thompson gave the movement its name and its clearest public argument. Alongside them, a state-capacity wing — Jennifer Pahlka (Recoding America), the Niskanen Center, and the Recoding America Fund — has focused specifically on why government institutions struggle to execute, drawing on lessons from digital government and benefits delivery. A YIMBY-adjacent wing has applied abundance thinking most extensively to housing. Transportation abundance sits at the intersection of these — closer to the state-capacity wing than to the housing-specific one.

Transportation has its own version of housing’s artificial scarcity: permitting and procurement rules that make American transit and road projects cost multiples of what peer countries pay, and take years longer to deliver. That cost/delivery conversation is already underway, led by research like the NYU Transit Costs Project and Yale’s state-capacity work on infrastructure costs. Transportation abundance starts there — but argues the movement needs a second, currently missing piece: accountability not just for building things, but for whether building them actually improves how people get around.

Most abundance work on transportation focuses on delivery — building infrastructure faster and cheaper. That’s necessary, but a growing body of evidence suggests it isn’t sufficient: highway widenings that get more congested within years of opening, rail systems that carry fewer riders per capita than they did decades ago, state climate policies that haven’t moved the needle on how much people drive. In each case, infrastructure got built — the outcome didn’t follow. The “fourth pillar” argument is that transportation abundance needs the same institutional seriousness applied to outcomes — ridership, access, safety, emissions — that it’s already applying to cost and delivery. Read the full argument.

Right now, this site is where I’m building and publishing that argument in public — synthesizing research from Brookings, Niskanen, and academic transportation economists into a case for outcomes accountability, and testing it with the researchers, funders, and practitioners closest to the problem. It’s also the foundation for what I hope becomes a more formal role: a fellowship, research platform, or organization built around closing the gap between transportation goals and transportation results. If that’s a fit for your work — as a funder, a collaborator, or an institutional home — I’d like to hear from you.

Related, but distinct. YIMBY movements focus primarily on housing supply and land use. Transportation abundance shares YIMBY’s instinct that institutional barriers, not lack of political will, are the primary obstacle — but it’s applying that instinct to a different set of institutions (DOTs, transit agencies) and a different set of outcomes (mobility and access, not housing production).

More funding without a mechanism to hold that spending accountable to outcomes tends to reproduce the same results at larger scale — more miles built, without necessarily more people able to get where they need to go. This argument isn’t against more transportation investment; it’s about ensuring that investment is structured to actually be evaluated, and adjusted, based on whether it achieves the goals it was funded to achieve.