With respect to the regulatory process, the T- REX project, which involved both highway and light rail, is informative. The project's sponsors consider their encounter with Federal regulatory agencies a success, working out differences fairly easily. FHWA assigned a full-time representative to the project and FTA had an active Project Management Officer (PMO) based in Denver. The agencies formed a "One DOT" working group to assist the project and tried not to create issues in which something was okay with one and not the other. There were certain Federal policies that couldn't be waived, such as Buy America, but the Federal project team cooperatively worked through issues on a case-by-case basis to determine the appropriate regulations to follow, such as whether FTA or FHWA procurement regulations applied to particular purchases.
On the other hand, T-REX faced issues with local permitting for station and other construction activities. The agency had a lot of early discussions with affected city and county governments, which did not always move as fast as RTD would have liked. In the end, the project reached mutually agreeable compromises with most of the impacted jurisdictions, but project leaders have learned that it is important to have agreements in place up front with localities to avoid complaints that the project is moving too fast, trying to steamroll them or keep them out of the loop.
WMATA found that some regulatory processes are not geared to be on the fast track because they are process driven, and can be a significant impediment if the project does not have the energy or political champions to push it through. The environmental review process for the
Largo Metrorail Extension was not structured to facilitate the fast-moving nature of a design-build project. WMATA also discovered that regulatory agencies did not have a lot of trust for the private sector, so the project was structured so that WMATA, as the project owner, would always interface with regulatory agencies.
For the Hiawatha Corridor project, where a highway agency was responsible for building a light rail line, differences between the management style of highway and transit agencies played a role. Initially, MnDOT approached construction of the light rail line in a similar fashion to its approach to highway projects. This contrasted with FTA's procedures for managing projects that it funds, and Metro Transit, as the New Starts grant recipient for the project, worked with MnDOT to modify its approach to comply with FTA requirements.