Gabe Klein is a key figure in the Biden administration’s plans to build out infrastructure for America’s future electric cars, buses and trucks. Klein, who has run transportation departments in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, was named in September executive director of the new Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which was created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Joe Biden last November. His primary job at the new office is to oversee the $7.5 billion that the infrastructure law allocated to support the construction of EV charging stations over five years. But he also has a long-standing passion for bicycles — he previously served as director of stores for the bike superstore Bikes USA, and his stints in Washington and Chicago saw bike lanes installed on Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House and in downtown Chicago. In an interview two weeks after his hiring, Klein discussed his plans for infrastructure dollars, ways to cut through bureaucracy and what the U.S. can learn from successes elsewhere. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. How do you view the mission of the joint office? It's a collaboration of DOE and DOT and also has quite a bit of interaction with the White House as well. Because this is obviously, you know, a key initiative for the president and the White House, not only in terms of transportation and infrastructure, but also from the standpoint of creating great American jobs. It's sort of high-profile, and we really want to accelerate this idea of affordable, equitable, reliable, safe and convenient — I would say frictionless — transportation. It's rather complex, and it takes public and private coordination and collaboration. And for the last, you know, six years or so, that's been a lot of what I've done is work on public-private partnerships, and to foster understanding between public and private and try to align incentives, and therefore align outcomes. We also want to help to think about: what are the things that the market isn't going to solve for that we can go out and we can pilot? We can work with states and maybe even cities. You're not only moving from city-level to federal government, but to this office that straddles two huge federal departments. It’s like bureaucracy on steroids. What are the challenges of working at this level? My perception is that it is a very unique office with a very unique value proposition that does straddle multiple agencies. And I think they wanted somebody who was entrepreneurial, who would work within the construct but also push the envelope, that was mission-driven and had experience in leadership and leading people in a collaborative way. And, you know, not to toot my own horn, but that's basically what I've tried to do my whole career. And I like to take on really big, complex challenges. And this might be the biggest that I've seen. But it's also the biggest opportunity. A key role of the joint office is establishing federal guidelines for EV-charging infrastructure. People are divided on some key standards, like the amount of uptime a charging station should have or whether a station should require payment by credit card. What are the specific issues you're wrestling with? Yes, there's some technical standards that have to be hashed out, and there's payment standards and all that. I'm not personally terribly worried about that. I think that the biggest barrier to this program is going to be overcomplicating it. Then we create giant infrastructure projects where there’s no need to be. That means also looking at benchmarks from countries that may be much smaller but may be ahead of us in implementation, whether it's Norway or Germany or other places where they've tested things like [light] pole-based charging for a few years. We can learn like: how much did that cost per charger? Or per port? How have the maintenance issues been? There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. If somebody's doing something great, we want to learn from it. And we want to bring it here and make it really easy for our state and local government partners to adopt that. Your experience is mostly in cities. But many future users of EV infrastructure are in suburbs and rural areas. Why should they trust you to manage this national program? So, a couple of things. One is I grew up in a very rural place in Connecticut, where we had well water — we didn't have running water. And then I grew up rural in Virginia. It wasn't until later that I actually moved to Washington. So I understand, personally, the different contexts and that you need to be context-sensitive. I also think that it's absolutely crucial in America to focus on intercity, suburb to suburb. For instance, I think that the Ford [F-150] Lightning pickup is probably one of the most consequential vehicles that we're going to be putting on the road in this country. Because I think it's going to change the hearts and minds of people that weren’t traditionally thinking about an electric vehicle. And you can probably guess that I think that we should be looking multimodal. We've already found out there's some amazing programs [and] pilots that we think can be expanded. I think it'll be a paradigm shift to have clean electric transportation that serves a particular use case that that person has that day. When you go to other countries — you go to Amsterdam or something, you go to Copenhagen — people are like, "Yeah, you know, I'm gonna drive today. I'm gonna cycle the next two days. I'm gonna walk." So we don't need to sort of pit one mode against another. Americans love choice. And I think this reinvention around renewable energy and electrification, if we do it right, is going to give Americans so many choices — not dictating what they should do, but giving them the opportunity to get out of their car, if they want to.
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