Why Listening Matters for Moonshot Programs: ARPA-I’s National Tour
When the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced the creation of an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Infrastructure (ARPA-I), it wasn’t just launching another federal initiative. It was signaling something bigger: that the way we fund, design, and deliver public infrastructure innovation needs to catch up to 21st-century challenges. Modeled after proven agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) of the U.S. Department of Energy, ARPA-I sought to apply similar methods geared toward high-risk, high-reward research and development (R&D) to transform the U.S. transportation system.
With a mandate so large, it would be foolish to presume that launching a research agenda developed by a small group behind closed doors would suffice. Recognizing the power of the national transportation infrastructure expert community and its distributed expertise, ARPA-I took a different route that would instead bring the full collective brainpower to bear around appropriately ambitious ideas.
At the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), we have built our reputation on structured listening and translation. At our core, what we do is policy entrepreneurship: find the right experts with the best ideas, wherever they may be, and empower them to turn their insights into concrete policies, programs, and investments to serve the public. As such, USDOT engaged FAS throughout the launch and initial set-up of ARPA-I and enlisted us in helping design and lead a National Listening Tour that invited transportation infrastructure experts from all regions of the country to help shape the agency’s first major research pathways.
When we talk about “experts” in this sense, we don’t just mean tenured professors or policy advisors. The people who helped shape ARPA-I’s early direction came from every layer of the transportation system as well as adjacent industries: state DOTs, transit agencies, logistics companies, automation startups, local governments, research labs, and more.
These were people who know how infrastructure actually works, and perhaps more importantly, where it doesn’t. That collective expertise is powerful not just because of technical knowledge, but because it’s close to the problem. Including experts with non-transportation specific expertise in our efforts allowed us to engage with people beyond the transportation bubble and expand our view of what might be possible.
This was more than stakeholder engagement. It was a structured effort to understand the biggest transportation challenges worth tackling, deploy our most cutting edge technological and scientific advancements to overcome them, and translate those bold ideas into an ambitious ARPA-style research agenda. And it worked.
The Critical Role of Listening for Moonshots
Too often, public innovation programs start with the answer first. ARPA-I started with questions and, because of this, is set up with a cadre of expert partners and a deep understanding of both challenges and technological opportunities to work on.
Done right, strategic listening isn’t just checking a box. It’s agenda-setting, and it allows agencies to:
- Detect patterns before they crystallize into crises,
- Validate the urgency and feasibility of proposed technologies and solutions,
- And tap into the practical ingenuity and learned experience of the people working closest to our biggest constraints and challenges.
What ARPA-I modeled offers a playbook that other agencies and moonshot initiatives can follow. Undertaking a deliberate effort to draw out expert inputs early could be transformative in other areas of science, technology, and policy where the problems are complex, the expertise is distributed, and the stakes are high.
For example:
- When it comes to workforce and the national economy, ideas like an ARPA for Labor are gaining traction. Here, structured listening could help identify where technology is outpacing training systems, how automation is reshaping job availability and quality, or where new tools could boost productivity in critical and emerging sectors
- For the field of public health, more intentional listening across frontline workers, biomedical researchers, and care systems could help shape future R&D investments around areas like pandemic readiness, mental health innovation, or next-generation health infrastructure in support of moonshot agencies like the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
- In the growing field of regional innovation and place-based economic development, federal investments like EDA Tech Hubs, NSF Regional Innovation Engines, and others are building out new ecosystems, in some cases from the ground up. Structured listening can help surface lessons, highlight overlooked challenges, and uncover ideas from beyond each consortium’s region of service that cut across both geographies and industries and could advance the transformation efforts underway.
ARPA-I shows what’s possible when we treat expertise not just as a title, but as proximity to the problem: knowledge gained in practice, sharpened by constraints, and shared in service of the public good. If we want moonshot programs that hit the mark, taking the time to listen to those that are close to and actively working to solve our biggest problems is where we start. And continuing to engage and partner with these experts as our work takes flight is critical to get to our desired end.
What We Did
ARPA-I was authorized in 2021 through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. From the start, it was meant to depart from business-as-usual and fund transformational infrastructure innovation by using new methods of operating within the federal transportation research landscape. Its mission is to tackle the kinds of complex infrastructure challenges that traditional programs often can’t: developing technologies that reduce long-term costs, increase resilience, improve safety, and accelerate innovation where private capital may hesitate to invest.
FAS was engaged as a partner to help design a process that would root the agency’s early direction in real-world, evidence-based insight. We embarked on a National Listening Tour from September 2023 through June 2024 to gather insights from across the U.S. transportation ecosystem.
We held convenings across the country including in the Pacific Northwest, Southeast, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic, which provided opportunities for ARPA-I to engage with 280 leading transportation experts. Getting into communities allowed us to engage directly with people outside of DC, giving us a greater diversity of ideas. These convenings were supplemented by dozens of 1:1 interviews and brainstorming sessions to capture challenges and opportunities. Collectively, these outreach efforts pulled together a range of perspectives spanning urban planners, freight carriers, public utility leaders, technologists, researchers, state/local policymakers, investors, and more.
We curated this cohort to ensure that ideas came from across the full lifecycle of infrastructure development, from research and design to delivery and maintenance.
Each workshop followed a consistent format, beginning with plenary presentations from USDOT leadership that introduced the ARPA-I mission and emphasized the opportunity and imperative of broad community involvement. These sessions also grounded participants in the unique cultural and structural elements that set ARPA agencies apart: their embrace of risk, emphasis on empowered program managers, and commitment to milestone-driven, challenge-based research. Participants also heard how non-government partners could play vital roles in shaping and executing ARPA-I programs.
The heart of each session, though, was the breakout work. Participants were asked to engage deeply with questions like: What could U.S. transportation infrastructure look like 10 to 20 years from now? What are the biggest technical or systemic problems we need to solve? And what breakthrough technologies might finally make a dent in them? These discussions surfaced the kinds of grounded but ambitious insights that ARPA-I was created to act on.
From these sessions, several themes emerged:
- Digital infrastructure and modeling: There was strong support for real-time infrastructure intelligence, including the use of digital twins, advanced sensing, and simulation tools to improve system awareness and decision-making, with frequent emphasis on the applicability of AI to enable or augment these technologies.
- Resilience and longevity: Participants emphasized the need for infrastructure solutions that are built to last and designed to adapt, withstand extreme weather and shocks, cyber threats, and long-term operational wear.
- Deployment-ready innovation: Many flagged the gap between emerging technologies and public-sector capacity to adopt them. ARPA-I was seen as a crucial bridge to advance tools and materials that could move from lab to field faster.
- Infrastructure accessibility: Participants stressed the importance of building infrastructure that works for all users, geographies, and contexts where complexity, cost, or legacy constraints can be barriers to adoption.
- Data interoperability and access: Across sectors, stakeholders pointed to technical challenges in sharing, integrating, and making sense of transportation data. Participants called for tools and platforms that can translate fragmented datasets into usable insights, especially for agencies with limited in-house capacity.
The tour ultimately built and energized a network that ARPA-I can leverage for ideas, talent, and advocacy moving forward. In June 2025, the initial fruits of this effort ripened as ARPA-I announced its first two projects:
- X-BRIDGE (Exceptional Bridges through Innovative Design & Groundbreaking Engineering) focuses on integrating advanced composite materials, AI-driven structural optimization, and automated construction methods to answer the question: how can we deliver bridges that can be built in half the time, at half the cost, and last twice as long as conventional designs?
- INSIGHTS (Infrastructure Systems Insights through Geospatial Sensing) is pioneering the use of airborne LiDAR, synthetic‑aperture radar, and AI‑powered spatial analytics to create high‑resolution, real‑time digital twins, interactive virtual replicas of multimodal infrastructure systems that update as conditions change. These digital twins could enable state and local transportation agencies to spot all road hazards, prevent costly utility strikes on job sites, and instantly create safe evacuation routes during storms or wildfires. They also have the potential to generate precise virtual maps of roads to help pave the way for autonomous vehicles and infrastructure.
With its first two projects underway, ARPA‑I is already weighing the next wave of bold concepts aimed at transforming the way we move people and goods more safely, quickly, and sustainably. If you are a transportation expert, enthusiast, or even a transportation user that feels close enough to the problem to propose a solution, we invite you to submit your own idea for future ARPA-I project ideas.
The United States is in the midst of a once in a generation effort to rebuild its transportation and mobility systems. Meeting this moment will require bold investments in new and emerging transportation technologies.
ARPA-I is the newest addition to a long line of successful ARPAs that continue to deliver breakthrough innovations across the defense, intelligence, energy, and health sectors.