Getting a straight answer on a regulation

A lot of my week is small questions with big rulebooks behind them. None of them is hard. Each one can eat an afternoon of searching circulars.

The questions

Here are four real ones I asked Claude in a single month:

• Can federal transit formula funds pay for holiday lighting?
• Is there a federal rule against playing music on a fixed-route bus?
• How high should the opening of a wastebasket be when I mount one on a bus shelter?
• Can a paratransit van bought with grant money make a run to the post office?

What came back

Each answer came with the reasoning and the citations, which is the part I care about.

• Holiday lighting. No rule names it. But federal transit law pays for functional improvements and excludes the added cost of purely decorative elements, so seasonal lighting lands on the wrong side of the line. The answer ended with a suggestion to get that in writing from our regional office, for the audit file.
• Music. No federal prohibition. It is a local policy call. The catches are that stop announcements still have to be heard, operator distraction belongs in the safety plan, and music has to be licensed.
• The wastebasket. This is my favorite, because the honest answer was "I could not find a transit-specific height." Claude said so, then gave me the general accessibility reach range and the rule about objects sticking out into a walkway, and told me which section of the circular to read myself.
• The van. The "revenue vehicle" label is mostly a reporting and inventory concept, not a ban on every other use. The real reasons to send a support vehicle instead are practical: extra miles, shorter useful life and one less van for riders.

Where it falls short

It can be wrong, and it sometimes cannot open the document it is citing. I treat an answer as a map to the right section, then I read that section. For anything that touches money, I still ask the funding agency.

Try it

Ask the question the way you would ask a colleague, and add "cite the regulation and tell me what you could not verify."

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Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.