Transit agencies across the US are navigating shrinking budgets, pressure to attract new riders, and growing demands to bring on new technologies. A new book from three veterans of Los Angeles Metro’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation (OEI) is the guide many in the field of public transit, and people who care about the mission of any government organization, have been waiting for. It offers a practical, honest account of what it actually takes to drive change from inside a large public agency.
New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector, published by Business Expert Press, is now available. The authors, Joshua Schank, Emma Huang, and Marla Westervelt Berg, worked together inside OEI, an office within LA Metro, to reimagine what a large transit agency could do. During that time, they launched on-demand transit, advanced congestion pricing, built a strategic plan that still guides Metro today, and learned hard lessons about what makes change stick and what makes it stall.
Schank, now a partner at InfraStrategies LLC and the Executive Director of the ACES Mobility Coalition, a public sector led advocacy organization dedicated to advancing shared autonomous mobility, says the book is built around what the authors learned on the job. “This is a practical guide drawn from authentic and often entertaining experiences,” he said. “It gets at how to build political capital and when to cut your losses. It covers OEI’s failures as honestly as its successes. This book is not just about ideas or plans. It’s about politics, personalities, process, power, and the amusing challenges trying to make change in the public sphere. We share our experience not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real!”
The lessons extend well beyond Los Angeles and LA Metro. Any public servant, transit professional, board member, or civic entrepreneur trying to move an institution forward will find something useful contained within the 234 pages.
New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies is available now in paperback (ISBN: 978-1-63742-944-0) and e-book (ISBN: 978-1-63742-945-7) through Business Expert Press and major booksellers. The development of this book was supported in part by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University.
(Picture: Joshua Schank/Business Expert Press)
