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Author Archives: Steve Davis

 About Steve Davis

Stephen Lee Davis is the AVP for Transportation Strategy at Smart Growth America.
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The country’s civil engineers agree: $1.5 trillion didn’t produce good infrastructure

Despite historic levels of investment in infrastructure over the last twenty years, America’s 2025 infrastructure grades for roads, bridges, safety, and transit look mostly the same. No one should consider putting a single penny more into a program with such bad results. Unfortunately, raising new money is at the top of the list for our country’s association of civil engineers.

The 2025 infrastructure Report Card, released by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) today, grades every aspect of U.S. infrastructure every four years.1 While ASCE has made some notable improvements (we’ll cover some below), they’ve also stuck to their guns: The #1 solution to the poor condition of our roads, bridges, and transit systems is to spend more money. We just aren’t spending enough.

Consider:

  • Roads scored a D in 2001 and a D+ in 2025
  • Bridges scored a C in 2005 and 2025

Noting that these failing scores happened during a period with a huge infusion of funding in the 2009 stimulus and historic amounts of money for roads in the 2021 infrastructure law, perhaps it’s finally time to stop calling for more money as a potential solution?

There’s an obvious problem with telling taxpayers the price before they tell us what we’re buying. (Especially coming from those employed in building the stuff. ) ASCE has been described by Strong Towns over the years as part of the “Infrastructure Cult”—those who believe that prosperity can always be achieved through more growth, and that any and all infrastructure spending is always a good financial investment that leads to growth. ASCE’s report cards of years past were sometimes comically half-baked when it came to the math: Chuck at Strong Towns examined the numbers in the 2011 report:

…The total cost to households and businesses is $1.042 trillion. Well, ASCE states that to reach “minimum tolerable conditions” (a pretty sad standard) would take an investment of $220 billion annually. Over 10 years, that’s $2.2 trillion. Yeah, you read that right. The American Society of Civil Engineers wrote a report suggesting that over the next decade we spend $2.2 trillion so we can save $1.0 trillion. And you wonder why we’re broke.

Credit where it is due

ASCE has made some significant improvements to their specific recommendations and how they talk about some of the problems. Having read these report cards for 15 years now, they have truly evolved and improved many of their specific recommendations, even just compared to the 2021 edition. (“Solutions That Work” in their parlance.) But there’s a real likelihood that these specific improvements in their recommendations will just get lost in the overall clarion call to the public and the media this week of “bad U.S. infrastructure needs more money.”

The obsession with many states and transportation agencies to fight congestion and delay is a fool’s errand, according to ASCE. We need to instead “dedicate resources to preserving a state of good repair, because no nation can build its way out of congestion,” according to this year’s recommendations. That’s a pretty stunning admission you’re not likely to hear from your state DOT and definitely not from the trade association for concrete manufacturers. They recommend focusing instead on “travel time reliability,” which is much closer to what people actually care about.

And they call for more frequent, accurate, and up-to-date data on road/bridge condition, along with more transparency within state DOTs to explain how they chose individual projects. For bridges specifically, they rightly note that the rate of improvement for repairing bridges in poor condition has drastically slowed in recent years, and they call attention to the skyrocketing number of bridges in “fair” condition, which is really where deferred maintenance shows up as good bridges degrade because maintenance is deferred.

When it comes to roadway safety, they are coming around on the power of design in impressive ways: “Incorporate infrastructure design choices that can help save lives, including reducing lane width and implementing low-cost features such as asphalt art, which can heighten the visibility of crosswalks.”

All of these changes represent a pretty significant departure from past report cards, and a pretty stark break from how they talked about these things 16 years ago. But if no new money is coming, how hard will they fight for more disruptive ideas like halting the expansion of the system in order to prioritize repair? We have learned a clear lesson from numerous reauthorization debates over the years: once new money is identified and in the bank, the impulse to talk about any policy changes evaporates.

More money will not get us where ASCE wants without making some hard choices

Here are a few facts on infrastructure spending:

  • We can’t even afford to maintain the system that we currently have. ASCE says we need to spend $87 billion per year from 2018 to 2038 just for basic rehabilitation of highways. By comparison, states reported in 2022 that they spent ~$89 billion collectively across all capital costs for roads.
  • We certainly cannot afford to keep expanding our system. Each new lane-mile costs ~$24,000 per year to preserve in good condition. (And those are estimates from 2019!)
  • From 2008 to 2018, even with the one-time infusion from the 2009 stimulus, the share of roads in poor condition eligible for federal funds got worse overall, increasing from 16 to 23 percent.
  • The 2021 infrastructure law (the IIJA) increased highway funding by 50 percent. In 2022, states reported that they spent $22 billion on highway expansion.
  • Voters don’t want to keep expanding highways. In a 2020 T4America poll, 79 percent agreed the government should fix existing roads before building new ones and 73 percent said state governments should have to justify building any new roads. In another 2023 poll, “building new highways and freeways” was the least popular long-term solution for reducing traffic.

It’s clear that ASCE values their role as the clear-eyed engineers in the room, and they do not want to prescribe how new money should be spent. But they fail to understand: To refrain from prescribing how money should be spent is to reinforce the broken status quo of how that limited money is currently spent.

The INVEST Act—a much better version of what became the 2021 infrastructure law—included an unprecedented change. States aiming to use formula highway dollars to build new road capacity would be required to demonstrate that they could maintain that road long-term. Paired with other provisions in the law, the INVEST Act would have finally started to prevent states from expanding their road networks when it comes at the expense of their repair needs. This incredibly responsible approach from 2020 was not mentioned in either the 2021 or 2025 Report Cards as a real world solution.

We really need groups like ASCE (and others) to look more critically at a federal program that has failed to deliver on priorities like safety and maintenance and may have outlived its usefulness. Can ASCE think in these terms? Despite all the good recommendations throughout this report that we really like, they’re still focused on an overall number: According to ASCE’s Bridging the Gap report, surface transportation needs from 2024 to 2033 about $3.5 trillion, of which $2.2 trillion represents the nation’s roadway system. If funding levels included in the IIJA become the new baseline for annual investment, the nation’s roadways will have a funding gap of $684 billion over the next 10 years.

Just to translate that a bit, if the IIJA—which increased highway funding alone by 50 percent—becomes the new baseline for federal transportation investment for the next 7 years, we’d still need $684 billion more? And that’s just for roads.

After 27 years, ASCE has evolved. But they aren’t quite ready to admit that the federal government has spent $1.5 trillion since 1991 on surface transportation and it’s resulted in subpar transit systems, crumbling roads and bridges that aren’t improving enough, historic levels of traffic deaths, and the largest sector for emissions. If you think that doubling that price tag is going to improve those outcomes, I’ve got a (poor condition) bridge to sell you.

We don’t need a penny more for a program with failing scores that have barely changed in 25 years—no matter how you measure them. We need better priorities.

What President Trump should tackle on transportation

If President Trump is interested in claiming the mantle of “infrastructure president,” here’s a list of specific actions the president can take to make significant improvements to the federal transportation program.

As we’ve done for past presidents, we’ve put together a list of specific actions that President Trump should take on transportation in his final term. Buckle up for this detailed list of 14 specific to-dos across five different areas:

  1. Finally fix stuff
  2. Actually improve safety
  3. Streamline the process
  4. Reconsider the (broken) models
  5. Improve transparency

As T4A director Beth Osborne wrote recently, the federal transportation program has been failing to deliver for decades. Spending more money has failed to improve congestion, emissions, efficient access to jobs and daily needs, or reduce the number of people struck and killed while walking. President Trump could make a powerful statement by acknowledging that our current strategy isn’t working and urging Congress to beach this rudderless ship of a program that’s sailing off in no particular direction at all.

1) FINALLY FIX STUFF: President Trump can be the first to finally focus federal spending on fixing things first

He should aim to have “the best” infrastructure rather than just “the most”

Unsurprisingly, the American public doesn’t know much about the federal transportation program.2 Most Americans do not realize there’s no requirement to first repair existing infrastructure before building new assets that require decades upon decades of new, additional maintenance costs. Requiring states to repair things first would likely have immense public support if Congress proposed it, yet a bunch of supposedly fiscally conservative Senators lost their minds at USDOT merely suggesting that states consider doing so.

At some point, we will have to stop expanding a transportation network that is already too large to realistically maintain, or go broke trying. Repair Priorities showed that we’d need $231.4 billion per year just to keep our existing road network in an acceptable state and bring the backlog of roads in poor condition into good repair over a six-year period. Yet across all units of government, in 2015, we spent just $105.4 billion on all highway capital projects. Step one is to stop digging the hole, especially when the gas tax, the primary source of federal funding, has only been covering a fraction of checks that Congress has been writing since as far back as 2008.

President Trump should step in and tell the freeloading members of Congress that the free lunch is over. Tell them their states can’t just expand their transportation system forever with zero thought given to how their children and grandchildren will pay for its upkeep.

(A) Reward areas that are making improvements in the condition of their roadways with competitive grants and limit the grantmaking for those who are not.
More than $200 billion of the $643 billion in the IIJA went to competitive grants, and every administration puts its own stamp on the projects they choose to advance. Add in criteria to reward those who are being the best stewards of the other federal dollars they have received. Those who are begging Congress for more free taxpayer money to expand roads they can’t afford to maintain should not be rewarded with more grant funding to do anything.

(B) Before providing funding for anything new, require transportation agencies to demonstrate they have funding for its maintenance and repair throughout its useful life.
This is another fact that tends to shock people we’ve surveyed: agencies don’t have to prove they can afford to maintain anything they are building. And they can build something new even if it will jeopardize their ability to maintain things they’ve already built. If you or I are buying a house, we have to prove to the bank that we have stable and sufficient income. But when your state DOT takes federal highway formula money and decides to build a new highway with it, they don’t have to prove to anyone that they have enough money to maintain it even for just the next five years, let alone the next 50. It’s time for that to change. USDOT could institute a requirement like this tomorrow with many competitive programs. For formula programs, President Trump can tell Congress to institute this change in the replacement for the IIJA, which is due in September of next year.

(C) When infrastructure fails, whether by natural disasters or otherwise, require that it be updated for current needs.
When floods, fire, extreme heat, or other changes in weather lead to the loss of a road, bridge, transit line, or anything else, transportation agencies should consider whether that asset needs to be replaced, what needs to be done to reduce the chance of a repeat failure, and how the design should be updated to improve priorities like safety and connectivity. Expanding that asset should only be considered if there is a plan to maintain it, as discussed above.

(2) ACTUALLY IMPROVE SAFETY: Stop paying lip service to safety and get the U.S. off the bottom of the rankings

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy came in with a stated interest in improving safety. It’s sorely needed—the U.S. sits at the bottom of the rankings of the developed world on traffic safety. The numbers are even more dire for people walking. Safety is always described as a top priority, though states face no penalties for injuries or fatalities increasing on their roads. It’s time to put safety above all else, penalize those who use federal dollars to make it worse, and reward those who are moving things in the right direction.

(A) Reward improvements in safety.
Reward the cities, metro areas, and states with roadways that are getting safer with increased access to competitive grants, and limit the grantmaking for the places that are not. Consider serious injuries in addition to deaths, and especially evaluate the numbers for people walking, biking, or getting around outside of vehicles.

(B) Make it clear that cities and states can and should be testing to see what safety improvements work in what conditions, and fund them to do so.
The Secretary should write a memo making it clear that the guidance in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is never an excuse to stand in the way of progress on safety. If provisions in the MUTCD are leading to bad safety outcomes, states, and other agencies should not follow that guidance and submit reports to USDOT about provisions that make safety worse. USDOT should consider updating the guide to better prioritize safety or, even better, pare it back entirely to only cover the design of signs, markings and signals. The MUTCD was never intended to govern street design.

(C) Cap vehicle safety ratings at four stars for any vehicles that impede the driver’s ability to see in front of or around them.
As the vehicle fleet gets bigger, taller, and heavier on average, people in older vehicles, and especially people outside of any vehicle, are more at risk. Collisions that were only injuries 20 years ago are becoming fatalities today. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other relevant USDOT offices should stop dragging their feet and update the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) on crashworthiness and crash avoidance systems to account for people walking and biking. This is something that’s already been proposed by the National Safety Council. (Page 42)

(3) STREAMLINE: Cut red tape and speed up (good) projects

The President and Secretary Duffy are partially right—good projects do take too long. While we’re also glad that terrible, destructive projects also take too long, there’s absolutely some low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving the process by which projects get planned, designed, and built. Here are three:

(1) Streamline the grant application process for all USDOT grants so that rural and lower-capacity agencies can better compete.
While not easy for any unit of government to navigate, smaller and midsized cities face an uphill challenge with the complex process of applying for USDOT competitive grants. USDOT could do two things to improve that process: First, create an online application and a simple plug-and-play benefit-cost analysis (BCA) calculator so that these places don’t have to hire overpriced consultants. Second, reduce the paperwork and speed up the process for signing a grant agreement. What you might not know when you see that list released of RAISE grant winners (or any other grant program) is that it can take months to years to receive any funding because they have to negotiate a grant agreement with USDOT. Speed that up and simplify that process.

(2) Ensure that project streamlining efforts consistently extend to all modes, all regions, and all transportation agencies.
One reason transit projects get built more slowly (and at higher cost) than highway projects is because Federal Highways (FHWA) district offices and Federal Transit (FTA) regional offices interpret many of the same rules differently. For example, FHWA applies streamlining laws and regulations much more liberally than FTA does. Environmental review should be bypassed or abbreviated for more projects that have clear benefits. And the state DOTs demanding streamlining changes from Congress or USDOT, who subject their local governments to arduous requirements when they subgrant money to them, should stop. This process disproportionately harms the smaller and rural areas this administration claims to prioritize because these places don’t have the funding to take over the project or the size and clout to push back.

(3) Remove burdensome federal requirements to bring down costs.
Highway agencies often feel pressure from FHWA under existing design standards and project development protocols to do things that increase costs, like designing roadways with lanes that are unnecessarily wide for streets where lower speeds are the goal or having to do a costly traffic study before making commonsense improvements like new crosswalks or signals. FHWA claims that state and local agencies have flexibility, but their experience counters that claim.

(4) RECONSIDER THE MODELS: Stop wasting money based on bad data and travel models

(A) Take down the Secretary’s value of time memo.
Rescinding this single memo would have a significant impact overnight. USDOT’s enshrined guidance on the “value of time” leads to an enormous waste of federal money, with billions going toward trying to save certain people a few seconds at a time, claiming that those seconds add up to tens of millions of dollars in economic benefit. Rather than explaining further, just watch our video:

We’ve had the technology for years now to measure the actual time of trips instead of assuming that “slightly faster vehicles on road X = a better system.” The time for inaccurate and misleading proxies has long passed. President Trump should direct Secretary Duffy to rescind this memo yesterday.

(B) Review the accuracy of travel demand models.
Traffic models predicted unimaginable congestion without widening The Katy Expressway in Houston. Yet even after widening it to 26 lanes in some places, traffic got worse, failing to deliver on the projections from the flawed traffic models used to justify the billions spent on it. Yet those same models will be used again and again to justify other similar projects. Agencies (or Congress) almost never look back to evaluate if new projects delivered on the promises made or if the new reality comes close to the rosy projections. Like a weather forecast, we’re mostly just concerned about the predictions for tomorrow and rarely go back five years to consider the accuracy of a past forecast. USDOT should start rigorously comparing past projections with actual outcomes, reporting their findings, and updating the models when there are discrepancies.

graphic combining 20+ increasing projections of VMT

This near-comical graphic from the Frontier Group combines past federal projections of future growth in vehicle miles traveled. The darkest line is reality. Every year the models continued to project basically the same growth in miles traveled, even though every one continued to prove false.

(5) IMPROVE TRANSPARENCY: Make it easier for taxpayers to understand where their money is going and what is being accomplished

The simple truth is that it’s nearly impossible to get up-to-date data on where transportation money has been spent, and the conditions and performance of the transportation system. In fact, when the IIJA expires in September 2026, we’ll just have (an incomplete) picture of where the money went during its predecessor (the FAST Act) from 2015-2021. This means that the members of Congress who will decide how much of your tax money to invest in transportation and how to invest it, have almost no idea about how well the money has been spent for the last 3-4 years. Would you give your employees a raise when you have no idea if they’ve done a good job for the last year? This is yet another reason why public faith in the federal program is incredibly low.

(A) Require project sponsors to report on what their projects have accomplished.
Understanding where and how money is being spent is only part of the question. The administration should also make it easier for taxpayers to learn what has been accomplished with the billions handed out to states and metro areas each year. USDOT should create a new requirement for project sponsors to submit simple reports five years after completion to report on the performance of the project. Did the project deliver all the promised benefits? Did the promised congestion relief materialize? Did the project accomplish its stated goals for improving safety? How does today’s reality match up with the lofty promises used to justify each project?

(B) Standardize transportation spending data format and availability for annual state/metro area spending.
The State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) is a four-year list of projects a state has committed to funding, planning, and building. Though these STIPS are intended to help the public understand how and where their tax dollars are going and hold leaders accountable, good luck deciphering (or even finding, in some cases) your state’s STIP. USDOT should standardize the format and availability of this data so that the public can easily understand how their tax dollars are spent, compare spending across states and metropolitan planning organizations, and hold their agencies and elected leaders accountable.

(C) Require transparency regarding compensation in leadership positions, including bonuses at Amtrak.
One way to fulfill Amtrak’s mission of reliable, quality passenger rail service is by ensuring that every dollar possible helps them improve or expand service. It’s not unreasonable to provide good compensation to smart, motivated, and competent staff or executives, but salary and bonuses should be tied to serving passengers and justified by quantifiable, measurable results in improved service and travel experience. There should also be accounting for the total number of executive staff, their salaries, and all bonuses.

Stay tuned! We’ll be checking in on these items from time to time throughout this administration and reporting back.

Supercharge your community’s quick-build safety demonstration projects with Safe Streets for All

Overhead photo of a three-lane street in Chattanooga, TN, where a quick build demonstration project has resulted in additional crosswalks, activated sidewalks, and bollard-protected bike lanes

Because of a mistake by Congress in the 2021 infrastructure law, 40 percent of the new $1 billion-per-year Safe Streets for All program must be directed to planning rather than constructing tangible infrastructure projects. A clarification that the planning grants can support quick-build safety demonstration projects presents an enormous opportunity for cities and towns to directly tap the available $400 million and experiment with low-cost temporary street safety projects. This is the first of two blogs regarding opportunities to use this funding. To learn more, read part two here.

Overhead photo of a three-lane street in Chattanooga, TN, where a quick build demonstration project has resulted in additional crosswalks, activated sidewalks, and bollard-protected bike lanes
Photo by Kurt Martig, courtesy of the City of Chattanooga.

Cities and towns can typically make street safety improvements in one of two ways: they can spend their own local money on streets that they control, which comes with its own set of challenges, or they can engage their state DOT which controls federal formula transportation dollars and many of the most dangerous streets. The new Safe Streets for All (SS4A) program was so crucial because it created a new way for cities, towns, and counties to directly access federal funds to quickly create and execute on Vision Zero plans.

After Congress’s mistake requiring 40 percent of SS4A to go toward planning grants, USDOT wisely broadened their definition of planning to include demonstration projects. This creates an incredible opening for cities to receive funding to pilot temporary street design changes.

The program has $5 billion over the life of the infrastructure law, or about $1 billion per year. The next round of funding is expected to be made available this month, and cities of all sizes should consider applying for planning grants that can support quick-build demonstration projects.

What are quick-build demonstration projects?

Quick-builds, also known as demonstration projects or tactical urbanism projects, are temporary, low-cost improvements to test new changes to street design.

These quick, light, flexible, adaptable projects allow everyone involved—community members, transportation staff, elected leaders—to test specific designs and interventions that measurably improve safety and convenience for everyone who uses the street, all while gathering valuable feedback. They incorporate methods and designs that are proven to reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities—documented and supported by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

Even though temporary, these projects are a vital first step toward making real, tangible changes. And many demonstration projects often end up staying in place indefinitely, or (more typically) forming the basis of the design for a permanent project to come later. The process of creating and executing them builds new knowledge and partnerships—within the transportation department and even with other jurisdictions, related agencies, and advocates—that are vital for building permanent projects.

Tucson residents paint the street orange, green, blue, and white to draw attention to a bike lane in their Complete Streets demonstration project.
Photo courtesy of Living Streets Alliance staff. From Smart Growth America’s profile of Tucson’s Complete Streets policy.

Why should a community consider quick-build projects?

Doing something concrete—even temporarily—is a powerful way to improve safety for people walking, biking, rolling (and driving), and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to protecting all road users. It also shows how stemming the tide of preventable traffic deaths and injuries requires immediate action, creativity, and a willingness to test new things. Despite the urgent need to make streets safer immediately, even the most simple, common sense projects to build new crosswalks, widen sidewalks, add a new bike lane, or make other improvements for safety and convenience can take a lot of time and money.

Quick-build projects are one way to make some level of improvement nearly overnight at an incredibly low cost, while providing a venue for gathering valuable feedback, testing the impact of the changes, and surfacing potential pushback from community members who might oppose a permanent project. In some cases, quick-build projects end up staying in place until capital budgets and planners can execute a permanent project.

Smart Growth America will soon be releasing a summary of their 2023 Complete Streets Leadership Academy, where they worked with 10 cities and four state DOTs to design quick-build demonstration projects on state-owned roads. Stay tuned!

Demonstration projects can also be incredibly cheap. We’ve supported numerous successful demonstration projects over the last few years with grants as low as $5k-15k. Imagine what a city could do with $1 million to support a Vision Zero planning effort that’s paired with as many demonstration projects as they can build with several hundred thousand dollars?

Nearly $1 billion will be available for planning grants alone

The notice of funding availability (NOFO) from the US Department of Transportation is expected to be released sometime in February, so cities, towns, counties, metro areas or others interested in putting an application together should be getting their act together now. Unlike other USDOT grant programs that are oversubscribed, this one is far less competitive: Nearly every jurisdiction that applied for planning grants so far has been awarded funds.

In fact, over the first two rounds, USDOT didn’t receive anywhere close to $400 million in applications for planning grants. This means that nearly $450 million is rolling into this round and between $900 million and $1 billion is expected to be available for planning activities (and demonstration projects!) in this round alone. That’s an enormous sum.

This is only a temporary fix—in more ways than one

Congress made this mistake, and Congress will have to be the one to fix it. But a legislative fix is a long shot and changes to the makeup of Congress or the administration next January could complicate things further. This is just the second year of SS4A funding, and many cities already have Safety Action Plans created. As more planning funds are awarded, cities will need more capital grants instead of planning dollars. A million more demonstration projects would have a significant impact, but we need permanent changes on our streets, and more of the SS4A program should be devoted to making those permanent changes.

Finally, while demonstration projects are productive for all the reasons listed above, they’re still just short-term solutions to the long-term crisis of streets that are unsafe and inconvenient for people to use without a car. The best quick-build projects will make people safer today while also supporting and advancing local plans to apply for future implementation dollars, or create a foundation for other long-term solutions to address fatalities.

Final grant clears the way to restore Gulf Coast passenger rail service

Last week’s announcement of a $178 million federal grant to make track and infrastructure improvements along the Gulf Coast rail corridor represents the last major funding hurdle to restoring passenger rail service from New Orleans to Mobile, AL.

Residents of Mobile welcomed the Amtrak inspection train during a stop in February 2016. They are close to getting their wish.

It’s been a long journey.

Seven years ago in February, a special Amtrak inspection train rolled along the Gulf Coast corridor to both preview the route and build support for restoring passenger service that was wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, nearly 11 years earlier. Making brief, 10-minute stops in Gulf Coast towns along the way, it was greeted by thousands of cheering residents clamoring for passenger rail to return. I was there in 2016, and—a little overwhelmed by the level of support—I wrote about seeing “rich people, poor people, black people, white people, young people, old people — all asking their elected leaders for the same thing: We want passenger rail back on the Gulf Coast.”

The last major funding barrier has been breached. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker last week announced a $178.4 million federal grant to make a litany of infrastructure investments in the corridor, including track, sidings, signals, new platforms, and other improvements. We’re not quite at the end yet, but this grant caps off a decade of work by the Southern Rail Commission, local and state advocates, and Transportation for America.

These improvements will allow new passenger service to start up in the first quarter of 2024, hopefully in time for Mardi Gras. Once launched, there will be two trains daily between New Orleans and Mobile, with stops in: 

Bay St. Louis…

the backs of women in colorful wigs and costumes looking at amtrak train in background

Gulfport…

wide shot showing big crowd of people with parking garage behind and amtrak train at left

Biloxi…

wide shot of big crowd at railroad crossing in biloxi

and Pascagoula.

closeups of people, some with signs reading "Amtrak - welcome back to Pascagoula"

About the grant

The grant is from the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) grant program, which was created in the FAST Act (federal transportation authorization) in 2015. To secure federal funding for this specific project in a post-earmark world, T4America helped create a new national program to support it and other necessary infrastructure improvements for passenger service across the country. Washington state, California, Florida, and the District of Columbia also received CRISI grants in this batch.

The CRISI grant is the last major funding domino to fall, but everyone involved has committed resources along the way, which is perhaps the most important lesson from this story: The effort was both top-down and bottom-up. Partnerships across jurisdictions, state lines, and party lines made it possible.  At the very center of that effort is our work with the Southern Rail Commission, a Congressionally established tri-state rail compact with members appointed by the governors of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. 

Mississippi and Louisiana were out front early, committing state money to match these federal grants. Norfolk Southern, CSX, the Port of Mobile, and Amtrak also committed money to the CRISI application to complete the required match. Amtrak is training crew and preparing equipment for running the new service. This is actually not the first CRISI grant awarded to the project, and another federal grant received years ago will help cover start-up operations costs (from the Restoration and Enhancement grant program.)

What’s next for Gulf Coast rail? 

Most of this grant will go toward immediate construction on improving the right-of-way and sidings on trackage owned and used by CSX and Norfolk Southern freight railroads, improving on-time performance. Amtrak is paying for the ADA-accessible platform and siding in Mobile out of their own pocket, but if Mobile wants a proper station, they will either have to build it themselves or apply for one of the available grants for doing so. All the infrastructure work will have to be done in partnership with the freight railroads, so leaders in influential places will be leaning on them to get this vital work done as fast as possible.

These new infrastructure improvements are the last barrier standing in the way of people buying a ticket and riding the rails on the Gulf Coast once again. We expect to see trains running in spring 2024.

Win after win

The last eight years have been a tremendous success for new investments in passenger rail across the country. This effort in the Gulf Coast—and its champions like Senator Wicker—have created new opportunities and federal programs (like CRISI) that are having an impact all across the country. 

We’re looking forward to detailing the longer, full story of T4America’s decades-long quest to restore Gulf Coast passenger rail in some future posts so other regions can learn from their example. There are numerous benefits to expanding and improving passenger rail service, which is precisely why T4America (and Smart Growth America) have focused on it over the years. It’s a great way to better connect residents to opportunity, expand their economies, lower emissions and protect the climate, and provide another clean, efficient option for getting around—all things which are at the heart of our collective mission. 

All photos by Steve Davis / Transportation for America

VIDEO: How an obscure federal measure justifies the hefty price tag of destructive, divisive roadway projects

Still shot of a busy highway with the text "Value of Time" emblazoned across it on a blue banner

Our newest video, part of Divided by Design, helps explain how federal guidance known as value of time gets used every day to justify the cost of building incredibly expensive highways (or additional highway lanes) that divide our communities, produce more congestion and pollution, and ultimately make it harder to get around in nearly every way.

Our new Divided by Design report examines how the transportation models, policies, and practices we use today took root in the highway era, and they continue to inflict the most harm on people of color. Value of time is just one example of the outdated tools transportation planners and engineers use today that perpetuate harm.

When moving vehicles quickly on all roads is the number one goal for transportation agencies, agencies focus on time savings to drivers at the expense of nearly every other type of user or activity. Value of time encourages agencies to increase speeds and eliminate congestion at all costs, but its emphasis on vehicle speed alone ultimately leads to longer trip times and divided communities.

It’s time for a more equitable approach to transportation. Watch our new video, and read our report Divided by Design.

New Community Connectors grant program and resources for advocates

A new grant program from Smart Growth America will help advance locally driven projects that will reconnect communities separated or harmed by transportation infrastructure and tap available federal and state funds to support them.

Removing divisive infrastructure is largely uncharted territory in the United States, but the need to fix the damage it has caused is imperative. Transportation infrastructure like divisive highways and dangerous arterial roads often separates and harms the communities living around them. This is particularly true for Black and Brown communities, who are more likely to live near large roads and have to live with the environmental, economic, and social harms they cause.

The movement to remove divisive infrastructure has often required communities to be pioneers and the lack of a roadmap and the nature of the work often meant that there were few others to easily learn from. The Community Connectors grant program aims to change that by providing financial resources to help build local capacity and advance these projects, but also by connecting local leaders to experts and other cities attempting to accomplish similar things.

Applications are due before July 15, 2023 at 11:59 p.m.

Learn more and apply here

Who is eligible to apply for the program?

Community Connectors welcomes diverse, multi-entity project teams from small to mid-sized U.S. cities (between 50,000–500,000 in population) to apply for the program. Teams may consist of non-profit community-based organizations and advocates, government agencies (including U.S. territories), and tribes. For-profit entities may be part of the wider project team but are not eligible to receive any of the funds directly or indirectly disbursed through the grant or technical assistance.

What support will selected teams receive?

Selected teams will receive grants of up to $130,000 for capacity building and to advance their projects. In addition, the selected teams will also receive customized technical assistance and participate in a learning exchange program over the next 18-24 months, which includes an in-person convening in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2023.

What kinds of projects are eligible?

We encourage teams to submit proposals for projects or concepts to reconnect communities separated or harmed by transportation infrastructure through an integrated transportation, land-use, housing and economic development approach. Applications for proposals at all stages are welcome. Teams are not required to have applied for or formalized an application for U.S. Department of Transportation programs.

The Community Connectors program is led by Smart Growth America in partnership with Equitable Cities, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, and America Walks and is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Bonus: New tools for all “Community Connector” advocates

In coordination with this new grant opportunity, we have launched a brand new suite of resources to support all Community Connectors in communities of any size. These are the advocates all across the country who are working to reconnect their communities: fighting freeway expansions, advancing projects to remove old highways, making wide, dangerous arterial roads a little safer for people to cross, or just improving basic infrastructure people depend on each day.

While the new grant opportunity is limited, Transportation for America’s Community Connectors portal is for anyone, providing tools and information for advocates to decode the complex and confusing maze of programs, acronyms, and decision points that determine what gets built with federal and state transportation dollars.

Dive into the portal

Expect to hear much more about this new portal of resources. Our team will be regularly updating it with new explainers and stories over the coming months.

Want to get updates on new content? Be sure to sign up for our email list here.

Looking back on a rich day of learning at TransportationCamp 2023

Just before the start of the 102nd annual (and massive) Transportation Research Board meeting in downtown DC, more than 300 passionate and knowledgeable transportation pros and advocates gathered on the other side of the river in Virginia (with over 100 more tuning in online) for an incredible day of spontaneous learning. Here’s a few things we learned or heard.

people looking at board to the right of image where session proposals are tacked to wall

Transportation Camp is always a leap of faith—both for us on the organizing side, and for every single person who shows up early on a Saturday morning. Because the agenda is created by participants, other than a keynote speaker and a panel discussion, there’s no real guarantee there will be anything more. But year after year, an incredible group of people meet up, propose a surprising range of sessions and topics, and everyone’s faith is rewarded. This year was no different.

TransportationCamp is truly a “you had to be there!” sort of experience, but here are five things that we took away from another great event this year:

1) Power is in the people, and the level of participation is truly impressive—down to the youngest Camper

For those who have never attended, the day always begins with breakfast and a giant empty wall for session proposals. Any Camper can propose one, and the proposals truly span the range from someone presenting on complex academic research down to “I have an idea I want to discuss.” Just as impressive as this wall being quickly filled up with session proposals is the fact that somewhere in the range of 20 percent of all participants propose a session. We had somewhere in the range of 65+ sessions proposed. With 50 available slots (10 rooms and 5 periods), we combined a few similar proposals and only had to leave a few out entirely as we finalized the “big board” schedule for the day.

As a parent of three kids who bike and transit in the city, my personal highlight was a session proposal by an eight-year-old (!!) about making it safer and more convenient for kids to bike. (She was attending with her parents who run a transportation startup, itselectric, but it was her idea!) After a wide ranging discussion with the 15-20 people who showed up, she assembled the group’s final recommendations on a whiteboard:

2) This year’s hybrid format provided an expanded way to participate

Covid hasn’t just disrupted travel and commuting patterns (a session topic this year, of course!) So our hybrid format allowed people to participate who couldn’t be physically present. The keynote and the panel discussion were live streamed, allowing everyone to participate together. And then we had a handful of sessions that were virtual only—including a look at predatory microtransit (from a labor angle) and the unique challenges of making the case for active transportation in rural areas—and a few in-person sessions were repeated for the virtual-only audience during the breakout periods.

It can be nerve-wracking to submit a virtual session without cues from other Campers to help you form ideas and a plan. Even more so when you, like in-person Campers, have very limited time to put the finishing touches on a presentation! But our virtual attendees delivered, and some even took to Slack to share their reflections, notes, and presentation materials between sessions with both in-person and virtual attendees.

3) Have an appetite for something different? This is a great place to find “your people”

Students, activists, professionals, advocates, nerds, planners…for anyone who thinks our overall approach to transportation wastes our money, fails to connect people to jobs and opportunity, puts people in danger, and produces inequitable outcomes, TransportationCamp is a great place to find your crew. While we love participating in TRB during the week that follows, you never know if you’re striking up a conversation with someone who thinks the status quo is just fine. There’s always some investigation required, you know?

a smiling face on a woman talking to someone around a round table

TCamp is what it is because most participants share some core values about overhauling our approach to transportation spending and policy from the federal level down to every local street. This like-mindedness, while certainly still spanning a range of different perspectives, makes both the sessions and the endless side conversations so rich and rewarding. There’s an element of trust between participants that makes it easy to have challenging conversations and disagreements, and that’s not always easy to find.

a wide shot of a full room of people around round tables eating lunch and talking

While TRB largely requires deeply researched presentations or papers to get onto the agenda (a model which has its place), the informality and inherently collaborative environment of TCamp allows presentations on issues that don’t easily come up at other events, or which are really about just teeing up a good, open-ended discussion with engaged, interesting people.

4) Speaking of side conversations, they go on all day (and night)

It was an uphill battle trying to coax participants out of the large multipurpose room and into the first sessions of the day. After an hour or two of meeting and networking with other attendees in the large room, a huge number of people just didn’t want to stop. Keynote speaker Shabazz Stuart kicked off the day talking at length about how much of the entrepreneurship in transportation has failed because venture capital has demanded short term profits over long term sustainability. All day long after that, I periodically saw him talking to two or three people at a time who were constantly approaching him to chat.

wide shot of 12 people in room listening to someone speak up front

And thanks to our platinum sponsor Inrix, when Camp formally ended, a huge share of the attendees took the Metro eastward into the District for our first ever TCamp reception, continuing those conversations deep into the night, with occasional breaks for photos. Speaking of, meet (some of) our Smart Growth America and T4America staff!

5) Some of the longest lasting impacts are invisible—for now

What important connections were made at TCamp? Who will end up in a new job as a result of someone they met this year? Who had a germ of an idea turn into something that will be a tangible project on the ground this year or next? What research was proposed that will turn into a paper or report to fuel some good advocacy somewhere? Who had their perspective changed in a way that will impact a local issue where they live? There are always a few stories like these we hear from time to time.

a woman talking in a small group around a table

As just one example, we realized this year we were introduced to Ben Holland from the Rocky Mountain Institute at a TransportationCamp, which ultimately led to our work together to produce and release the SHIFT Calculator to quantify the impacts of induced demand from new highway expansions. Other Campers will surely have similar stories down the road.  That’s the kind of collaboration that so often springs out of Camp.

One last thank you to the army of volunteers who showed up early on Saturday to help organize things and keep the day running smoothly. We couldn’t have done it without you.

And TransportationCamp would literally not happen with the hundreds of people who show up and propose and attend sessions. We thank you for coming out and hope to see you again!

And one last time, a big thank you to our sponsors INRIX, Uber, Lyft, Hayden AI, WGI, and itselectric, as well as our partners the Parking Reform Network, Greater Greater Washington, the Coalition for Smarter Growth, and Young Professionals in Transportation, for being a part of this terrific event and making TransportationCamp possible.

The infrastructure law wasn’t perfect, but now it’s reality

Pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders navigate a busy street
Pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders navigate a busy street
Flickr photo by Oregon Department of Transportation

Focusing on whether the infrastructure law was “good” or “bad” will fail to shape how its historic cash is spent over the next five years. That’s precisely why T4America is pressing on to enable USDOT, states, metro areas, and local communities to maximize the potential of this flawed legislation.

A few weeks ago, Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns had America Walks CEO and former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on his podcast. It was a terrific journey through Mayor McGinn’s transition from local advocate to Mayor of Seattle and now to the CEO of America Walks, but they also talked at length about last year’s $1.2 trillion, five-year Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA.) Strong Towns was—like T4America—fairly critical and saw an immense amount of money being put into the same old broken way of doing things, while adding numerous small programs intended to accomplish some worthy goals. Here’s Chuck Marohn (around 36:00):

From the very beginning, when it was just a proposal from the administration, I pointed out that [the IIJA] was really just a highway bill with a bunch of other sweeteners along the way to build the coalition to get this thing approved. And because of that, I was against it.

That’s not far off. When it comes to the stated goals of improving safety or reducing emissions, you can’t just create small new programs (tear down divisive highways!) to solve problems that are still being created by enormous pots of money (build new divisive highways!) As T4America Director Beth Osborne noted when the IIJA passed, it failed to reform the federal program around our three, simple key priorities.3:

As we have stated before, the transportation portion of the infrastructure bill spends a lot of money but fails to target it to the needs of the day: building strong economic centers, providing equitable access to opportunity, addressing catastrophic climate change, improving safety, or repairing infrastructure in poor condition.

But taking a stand one way or the other on the IIJA now is also maybe a bit moot—the horse is out of the barn. What definitely matters now is how this money will be spent over the next five years—decisions already being made that desperately need to be influenced by reform-minded people. Mike McGinn’s answer to Chuck’s question around 37:45 is worth excerpting heavily:

It’s entirely dependent on how the money is spent. 70 percent of the money is flexible money that goes to states. … The pots of money for transit, for alternatives are bigger than they’ve ever been. People are saying that’s a good thing and I agree, that’s a good thing, but those pots are only 30 percent of the overall funding. We do live in a world where so much of the money comes from the feds, I think that people like us at America Walks and the others in this arena, have to continue to push them to reform how they do it.

While there are times that the whole federal transportation program, and federal involvement in general, seems counterproductive, the feds are here to stay in transportation. And the IIJA is yet more evidence of how the program continues to get support even in today’s divided political environment. So T4America is going to engage in the federal transportation project to reduce the damage it is currently doing and steer the ship in a better direction. To that end, we are focusing our work on at least two things for the next few years:

  1. Helping USDOT maximize every single dollar they have at their disposal.
  2. Shaping how states and metro areas spend this historic level of flexible cash.

On that first point, USDOT and the administration are making lofty promises about the benefits the IIJA will bring. It will finally modernize our infrastructure. It will be used to improve equity across the board. It’s going to make walking and biking safer than ever. It’s going to help reduce emissions. This is a risky strategy for the administration. Because states control the bulk of the funding, to realize these promises, the administration has to trust that state DOTs as a group will fulfill these promises for them. This is a group that also has many members with a track record of pretending induced demand doesn’t exist, spending heavily on expansion with no plan for future maintenance, and thinking that eliminating traffic congestion is a viable solution for lowering emissions and tackling climate change. 

The Biden administration seems to believe that the law’s many, good, small, new programs—like Reconnecting Communities to tear down divisive infrastructure or Safe Streets for All to directly fund local street safety interventions—were worth the law’s massive historic increase in status quo programs that will continue to create the problems these smaller programs were created to fix. While this approach amounts to trying to fill up a hole with a teaspoon that’s being dug with a giant excavator, it also means that USDOT must absolutely maximize every scoop.

Every single dime at their disposal must be spent on projects to do the most to counteract the billions that can and likely will be used to build new roads and highways that increase emissions, lead to more traffic deaths, and further divide communities. They cannot spread the money around to keep everyone happy. They cannot choose projects that fail to bring numerous benefits. Precisely because states may not rise to the occasion, USDOT must maximize every cent that they do control in some fashion, like the $200 billion in competitive grants.

On the second point, the 70 percent of the funding controlled by the states is ostensibly known as “highway” funding, but it’s also incredibly flexible. If a state wants to spend it all to prioritize repair, remove roads that cut neighborhoods in half, and build sidewalks in every community that needs them, they are free to do that. This is why T4America will be working over the next five years to equip advocates and forward-thinking transportation agencies to maximize that flexibility and do something different. Absent this effort (from hundreds of other national or local groups and millions of other engaged advocates, we should add), this historic infrastructure spending will largely go right into the same status quo of the last decade, producing more roads and highways to maintain, neglecting repair needs, designing streets for speed and creating danger, and failing to connect as many people as possible to jobs and opportunity. 

These outcomes above weren’t automatically guaranteed when the IIJA passed—the verdict will depend in part on specific decisions made over the next five years. When it comes to why we continue to work to shape the IIJA’s spending, we said it clearly last month:

The current system can’t fix the current system. We can’t outbuild our repair needs, expand our way to shorter commutes, or speed our way to safety. To solve these issues, we must be committed to addressing their root causes, which means decision makers at all levels need to rethink the traditional approach to addressing transportation issues. Our efforts now are aimed at facilitating that process and measuring the administration’s progress on their stated goals.

promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

Everyone agrees that repair is important. No one is willing to require it

comic illustration

Despite a fundamental lack of understanding by some members of Congress about the program they’re responsible for overseeing, the law sets states free to spend their federal transportation cash on eligible expenses, however they see fit. Our repair needs will never get addressed until we change this approach.

comic illustration
Illustration produced for T4America by visual artist Jean Wei. IG/@weisanboo

Please download and share our new illustration above on social media, via email, Reddit, etc. Right click to “save as” or find and share this on Twitter and Facebook with these links.

Every time that we’ve polled voters over the years, we hear that taking good care of our existing infrastructure—repair and maintenance—should be priority #1 for our transportation dollars. Ask any member of Congress and they’ll tell you it’s absolutely a top priority. 4 And every state DOT will tell you that keeping things in a state of good repair is either their top priority or second only to safety. 

Everyone seems to agree about the importance of repair, yet everyone in charge seems to recoil when anyone suggests creating hard and fast requirements that states prioritize their repair needs before building new infrastructure they will also have to maintain for decades to come.

After seeing Virginia leaders touting the infrastructure law’s $530+ million to address Virginia’s deficient bridges, Wyatt Gordon in the Virginia Mercury recently asked the obvious question: “Why did more than one in 25 bridges deteriorate into a ‘poor or worse condition’ in a state with a nearly $7 billion annual budget for its Department of Transportation?” T4America director Beth Osborne weighed in:

The more you fail in transportation—the more people die, the more expenses increase, the more bridges collapse, the louder the calls to put more money into the programs that produced that failure in the first place. There is no accountability. These senators who voted for [the IIJA] promise us results every time, but I just heard a bridge fell down in Pittsburgh. How many times do they promise the same results without changing the program that is producing these same failures?

Look, it’s worth noting that not every state performs equally when it comes to prioritizing repair with their flexibility, and some states have made sizable shifts from expansion to repair in the last few years. As the above piece notes, states like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts are already devoting the lion’s share of their budgets toward repair. They’re doing their best to ignore that second voice in the background of the comic pushing the sexy new expansion project.

But most states are not choosing to do this.

This reminds me of what Mississippi DOT commissioner Dick Hall said during a repair-focused event we held in DC in 2019, where he made a plea for Congress to step in and require repair first. “If you want us to prioritize maintenance, then you’re going to have to tell us ‘you gotta do it,” he said. Until Congress does, some states will do well and other states will just punt questions about paying for all the things they’ve built off to their grandkids to figure out.

How bad is this addiction? 

Consider the new $43 billion bridge repair formula program that Congress created in the infrastructure law. Even though this money is doled out proportionately to the states with the greatest bridge repair needs and Congress just supercharged the funding to the massive flexible programs that all states can use to build new highways, Congress still decided to allow states to use this dedicated “repair” money to build brand new bridges. USDOT’s guidance on the legislative language made it clear that the law allows “the construction of a new highway bridge on a new alignment” as an eligible project, though USDOT gently encouraged states to focus on bridges in poor or fair condition.

We’ll once again just have to hope that all states can deliver on all the repair promises. And in five years, after the IIJA’s $643 billion has been exhausted, we’ll be right back here lamenting the state of our infrastructure and wondering where all the money went, even as we renew the pleas for more funds to “repair our crumbling infrastructure.”

Rail barons return: How two freight railroads are trying to derail the infrastructure law’s historic investment in passenger rail

mosaic of mobile residents cheering on the 2016 inspection train
mosaic of mobile residents cheering on the 2016 inspection train
Mobile residents are eager to see passenger rail return. Their city council voted 6-1 in 2020 to spend $3 million in city funds on restoring the service.

Two freight railroads have been waging a bad-faith effort to kill the incredibly popular, fully funded, multi-state effort to restore long-awaited passenger rail service along the Gulf Coast, in part because the precedent could stall the infrastructure law’s historic investment in the country’s passenger rail network which would give millions more Americans access to regular rail service.

We’ll start this story with a video. Take a minute and watch this short video of a day of freight trains passing through “busy” Mobile, AL:

Freight companies Norfolk Southern (NS) and CSX are hoping that no one looks too closely or counts how many freight trains are actually passing through Mobile each day. Why? Because they are trying to convince the federal Surface Transportation Board that Amtrak adding just two passenger trains per day between New Orleans and Mobile would “unreasonably impair” their (uh, “bustling”?) freight operations here. They’re trying to make the case that adding just two passenger trains per day will require an astonishing $440 million in upgrades to their existing rail infrastructure. (That’s after previously telling local officials privately in MS and AL that they only needed $140-160 million.) 

So Amtrak pulled out of negotiations and petitioned the Surface Transportation Board to arbitrate the conflict.

At least on the surface, this fight would appear to be about the long-running effort to bring back new and improved passenger rail service along the Gulf Coast which was wiped out by Hurricane Katrina nearly 17 years ago. $66 million has already been committed by the states and the federal government to upgrade the corridor’s infrastructure and get these trains rolling. Stations are being renovated. Almost every hurdle has been cleared to give residents a valuable new connection and boost tourism and economic development along the entire corridor from Mobile to New Orleans.

Residents have been clamoring to see these trains return for nearly 17 years. Thousands turned out to see the Amtrak inspection train in 2016 all along the Gulf Coast:

But the freight railroads are standing in the way of those residents, trying to either delay the project to death, or take advantage of the federal government and taxpayers with far more public money than they should receive for the necessary upgrades. 

What’s the fight all about here? 

CSX and Norfolk Southern are fighting two meager trains per day here because they know that the precedent set by stopping this new service will make future passenger expansions elsewhere—the kind promised by the infrastructure law—more difficult.

Although freight railroads are required by federal law to share their tracks with passenger railroads—this was the deal struck to consolidate the old passenger companies, create Amtrak, and turn the trackage over to freight companies—freight railroads have to work together with Amtrak to invest in rail infrastructure and balance their operations. But CSX and NS have been negotiating in incredibly bad faith all along the way, producing wildly fluctuating numbers (from $140 million up to $2.3 billion depending on which day you ask them) about the level of investment required to add just two short passenger trains per day. Federal law says that freight railroads can only seek the infrastructure improvements required to facilitate passenger service. (Otherwise, they’d be fleecing American taxpayers, taking public money for their own private gain.)

figure showing freight RR estimates of costs

T4America chair John Robert Smith, a former Amtrak board chair and Mayor of Meridian, MS, testified before the STB this week about the level of misbehavior from the freight companies. It’s worth excerpting heavily:

I take no pleasure in telling you that throughout the effort to restore passenger rail, CSX railroad has been neither transparent nor completely honest in dealing with the SRC, Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration as you heard from the FRA earlier today. CSX withheld even the most basic information about their operations from all involved, even from the FRA. …CSX grossly inflated infrastructure costs providing no supporting documentation or transparency in the development of these costs.  As lack of facts and misrepresentation failed them, CSX has resorted to intimidation and fear to ports and shippers alike, as we have seen demonstrated today. I believe this has all been an effort by CSX to kill any additional passenger rail service along the Gulf by torturous delay. 

Death by delay must not become the order of the day, for to do so would extinguish any aspiration for expanded passenger rail connecting our country and its people. 

What’s at stake with this decision?

The Surface Transportation Board is an independent federal agency that regulates some surface transportation modes including freight rail. When private interests bump up against the public in decisions like this, the STB hears and decides the disputes, like a private arbitrator.

If the freight railroads lose this decision, which is looking increasingly likely, one reason will be the diverse coalition of public, private, and political support lining up behind the popular Gulf Coast project and making persuasive arguments to the STB.

Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) has been this project’s biggest champion from day one. He teamed up with Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) to include rail policy and funding in a long-term federal transportation law for the first time in 2015’s FAST Act. He has since appropriated money to support the Southern Rail Commission which has done the legwork to get all three states on board with matching state funds to operate the new rail line. Other political leaders from all three states have been instrumental. The local business community is ecstatic. Residents lined up by the thousands to see the inspection train roll through in 2016. Rep. Peter DeFazio, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House, also provided testimony during this week’s public hearing.

But perhaps most notably, the USDOT and Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) itself have gotten heavily involved. Their own filing urged the STB to rule against the railroads because CSX and NS are asking the STB “for an unduly restrictive interpretation…that lowers the bar for demonstrating ‘unreasonable impairment’ [of freight service] below what Congress required.” FRA Administrator Amit Bose testified this week about the importance of the STB continuing to require freight railroads to follow federal law and provide Amtrak the use of their track for passenger service.

“The outcome of this proceeding will be pivotal to the future development of inner-city passenger rail in this country. The Gulf Coast has been without passenger rail service for nearly two decades and in this case, service delayed is service denied,” said Administrator Bose.

Other than CSX and NS, the Port of Mobile has been opposed to this project, supposedly on the grounds that it would impact their operations—concerns which have been repeatedly proven false as the train won’t even enter port property. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby may think he’s only carrying the water for the unhappy Port of Mobile, but his letter to the FRA on the port’s behalf asking them to rule in favor of the freight railroads lays out what the freight railroads are truly concerned about and what’s at stake with this decision. (bold ours)

“In sum, a decision by the Board to mandate Amtrak service in this case will have significant consequences for the national rail network and supply chain, as well as set a precedent for expansion of Amtrak service. We urge you to uphold the Board’s long-standing commitment to an efficient and reliable rail network.”

A collection of monied status quo interests do not want residents of the Gulf Coast to say “Y’all Aboard!” They definitely do not want to see a precedent that would clear the way for the bipartisan plan to pump $102 billion into passenger rail service across the country. They absolutely do not want to see more groups like the Southern Rail Commission on the Gulf Coast created and encouraged to cast a vision, tap into latent demand from residents for new transportation options, and build public/private and political support for new service on other corridors across the country, which was one of the IIJA’s best provisions on passenger rail. From our explainer about the rail provisions in the infrastructure law:

It creates a new program that incentivizes up to ten interstate rail compacts—like the Southern Rail Commission at the center of Gulf Coast expansion—that are vital for developing and realizing a regional and national rail network. Interstate rail compacts are made up of contiguous states that want to establish a vision for and seek investments for intercity passenger rail in their region. …The bill allows for these ten commissions to apply for up to $1 million annually to operate their respective commissions.

What’s next?

The Surface Transportation Board is likely to reach a final decision in March or April. Stay tuned. 

Their decision will have far reaching consequences.

As Mayor John Robert Smith closed his testimony to the STB earlier this week, “send a strong message that it is time that passenger rail became an important part of America’s future. That it is time to reconnect our cities of the Gulf with passenger rail and the economic opportunities that it brings.”

The infrastructure bill’s limited state of repair funding and policies

Flickr photo of bridge resurfacing by WSDOT. https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/49921039787

There is very little new funding in the infrastructure bill specifically dedicated to repair and no new requirements on highway monies for prioritizing repair on roads and bridges. Overall the law doubled down on the practice of giving states immense flexibility with the bulk of their money and then hoping that they use that flexibility to prioritize repair. Advocates should be ready to hold states and metros accountable for making progress. 

promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

The law’s shortcomings

I-35W in Minneapolis. I-5 over the Skagit River in the Pacific Northwest. Miami’s pedestrian bridge at Florida Atlantic University. The 295 pedestrian bridge in Washington, DC. Last week’s bridge collapse in Pittsburgh, PA.

I-35W

Those are just a few high profile US bridge collapses over the last decade. Many smaller ones have escaped national scrutiny. And of course, who knows how many potential collapses were avoided (good!) through weight restrictions, lane closures, or outright closures that resulted in lengthy detours (bad!).

These collapses all happened for a plethora of overlapping reasons related to engineering, age of infrastructure, design flaws, ineffective inspection systems, and others, but they are also the by-product of our overall reactive vs. proactive approach to repair and our failure to require repair ahead of building new. The House’s five-year INVEST Act would have instituted a fix-it-first requirement, but the Senate and the administration discarded INVEST and ultimately struck a deal to continue the status quo on repair: giving states money and freedom, and hoping they use their discretion to maintain the system.

What’s in the law?

While states are given wide latitude on how to spend their money, they unquestionably will have more money at their disposal for the next five years because nearly all of the core programs that are typically used on repair needs increased in size. There are two major programs worth highlighting:

1) The National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) is one of the two largest sources of funding used for repair—about 53 percent of all states’ base highway formula apportionment (~$147 billion in the new infrastructure law). NHPP funds are intended to be spent on the National Highway System’s roads and bridges, as well as transit or for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in an NHS corridor. The easiest way to understand the NHS is that it consists of a spectrum from nearly all multi-lane arterial roads up to interstates, as well as a lot of two-lane rural state highways. Funding for the NHPP went up by 26 percent over the FAST Act, which means more money theoretically available for repair projects if states choose to spend it that way. The infrastructure law did open up NHPP to fund more climate mitigation projects classified as “protective features,” including raising roadways, replacing culverts and drainage, and “natural infrastructure.” Advocates and local leaders—especially in coastal areas—should work hard to make their state or metro area aware that these types of projects are now eligible for NHPP funding. (Relying on the past precedent of emergency aid for repairs after disasters will be risky as climate emergencies become more frequent but funding stays the same.)

2) The Surface Transportation Block Grant Program is exactly what it says: a block grant given to states for all surface transportation needs. This second biggest pot of money states can use on repair is also the most flexible. Not only can these funds be used on repair projects, but they can also go toward transit, biking, walking, and nearly other possible mode of surface travel—though many states do not take advantage of that flexibility. This program represents 23 percent of all highway formula dollars, and was increased by 35 percent from the FAST Act, up to $79 billion in the new infrastructure law.

There is also a separate new program for repairing bridges that’s already been in the news after FHWA released the first batch of funding to states.

The $43 billion bridge formula program is “designed” to repair bridges, whether on the National Highway System or what are known as “off-system” bridges owned by counties, cities, or other localities. While states still have to come up with 20 percent of the cost for repairing the bigger NHS and other state-owned bridges, this program can cover 100 percent of the cost of repairing or rehabilitating these locally owned off-system bridges, to try and incentivize more funding toward these vital but smaller bridges—like the Fern Hollow bridge in Pittsburgh that just collapsed—which many states ignore.

Note: Thanks to the Washington Post’s Ian Duncan for noting that states can in fact use this repair program for expansion and building new bridges, according to FHWA’s guidance on the program:

The construction of a new highway bridge on a new alignment is an eligible project under the BFP, but FHWA encourages States to first focus their BFP funding on projects that improve the condition of in-service highway bridges classified in poor condition and that preserve or improve the condition of in-service highway bridges classified in fair condition. Note that the FHWA considers the construction of a new highway bridge in a new location, in connection with replacement of an existing highway bridge in poor condition, to be improving the condition of an in-service highway bridge.

While states are free to neglect repair needs on their roads, bridges, and highways, the new infrastructure law does uphold the much stricter existing State of Good Repair programs and requirements for public transit. (Yes, we require state of repair on transit, but not on roads and bridges.) The funding for both transit and rail repair grants was also increased dramatically.

  • Transit: $3.5 billion for state of good repair grants represents a $1 billion increase over the FAST Act. These formula grants provide funding to repair or replace a wide variety of rail infrastructure (rail itself, signals, stations, navigational systems, etc.) The infrastructure law also created a new $300 million rail vehicle replacement competitive grant program that can be used to replace any rolling rail stock. Larger, legacy rail systems with especially old infrastructure will fare better in the grant process for this new program.
  • Passenger rail: $53.5 billion for state of good repair grants (up from $6 billion in the FAST Act) within two different programs to improve the state of good repair, improve performance, or expand or establish new intercity passenger rail service, including privately operated intercity passenger rail service if an eligible applicant is involved. Notably, these repair funds (from the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail, formerly the Federal-State Partnership for State of Good Repair) are closely tied up with the money being used to expand interstate rail service, so regions will need to coordinate their grant applications between connectivity/expansion and their repair needs in order to best utilize these funds. Funds from the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvement (CRISI) program are more broadly directed toward repair and safety improvement projects.

How could the administration improve these repair provisions?

Unfortunately, the deal the administration struck with Congress limits the extent of their own authority. States control the bulk of the money, with no fix-it-first requirements. Yes, USDOT has urged states to prioritize repair (and climate, equity, etc.) with their huge formula programs. Some governors and AASHTO already responded to that modest request with shock at the suggestion, even though they know they retain the freedom to continue ignoring those needs.

But there are still things the administration can do. They can choose to prioritize repair and modernization (and climate resilience) within their large range of competitive or discretionary grant programs, and prioritize repairing transit/rail infrastructure in communities that need it most or have been historically underserved to serve their equity goals. USDOT could issue guidance or scoping requirements to include identifying climate threats (extreme weather, extreme temperatures) and the frequency the asset will need repair/maintenance based on the design. And they could require this for any project that undergoes a NEPA environmental review.

How can this advance our goals? How can advocates improve outcomes on repair?

When it comes to advocates and local leaders, the greatest potential is with increasing awareness, reporting, and accountability. For example, even though climate-related projects are now eligible for NHPP funds, governors, legislators or the DOT leadership may not realize it or may have zero interest in pursuing those projects. Further, there are very few states that have a pipeline of resilience projects ready to tee up. Advocates should fill that information gap to make the most of the new climate mitigation eligibility within this huge pot of cash, and focus on the projects that would protect and serve the most climate-vulnerable neighborhoods and people.

When it comes to passenger rail, as states (hopefully) create new interstate passenger rail compacts, some of the repair money for rail will be essential for getting them and subsequent new service off the ground. This would mean coordination across multiple regions and states to make those big projects a reality, as with the ongoing Gulf Coast rail project.

And lastly, you should be reaching out to every reporter on a transportation beat in your state to remind them of the promises that transportation agencies are making on repair.

When we go in-depth with a reporter who is new (or sometimes even a vet!) on the federal transportation beat, they are often shocked to learn there are no requirements for states to repair things first. Help bring your media along and give them actionable information to hold your decision makers accountable. They have just been given a nearly unprecedented windfall of federal cash for the next five years and have the complete freedom to spend it all on repair projects. If your state makes slow or no progress on repair (or does better in some parts of the state than others) that is due to spending priorities set by the governor, legislature and/or DOT. 

Advocates and the media should be holding anyone who fails to move the needle in the right direction publicly accountable.

So what?

As one of our three core priorities, repair was one of our biggest disappointments in the infrastructure law. The last decade has shown us repeatedly that too often states use their flexibility to build new things they can’t afford to maintain while neglecting to properly address their repair needs. This is one of the most fiscally irresponsible things we do with transportation policy. Every dollar spent on a roadway expansion project is both a dollar that was not spent on repair, and a dollar that created decades of future repair costs. When Sen. Manchin talks about being concerned about costs passed to our grandkids, our current approach to repair should be exhibit A. 

The administration should use every tool in their arsenal to ensure that the funds they control prioritize repair, while using their regulatory toolbox to nudge states and metros toward the same goal. Advocates can have some of the greatest impact by working to both publicize repair needs (including climate related projects) and hold their decision makers accountable for making progress. 

With a massive increase in guaranteed federal funding coming their way, they have no excuses left.

Our solutions for congestion are worse than the problem

For decades, transportation agencies have been trying to “solve” congestion by increasing road capacity, even when doing so can obliterate or divide communities, harm local businesses, and make streets more dangerous. Our latest cartoon shows how our “cures” for congestion are often worse than the problem.

While every transportation agency (including USDOT in their new road safety strategy) will tell you that safety is always the biggest priority, you can see what the real priority is by following the money. It’s usually the same goal: reducing congestion. Our latest cartoon in our ongoing series shows just how shortsighted and bankrupt our current approach to congestion is:

Illustration produced for T4America by visual artist Jean Wei. IG/@weisanboo

Follow the money or tear at the seams a bit on many supposed “safety” projects and you’ll quickly find that reducing congestion is often the real consideration.

While the Texas Department of Transportation is certainly on one particular end of the spectrum, this story from last week highlights just how deeply they consider reducing congestion their most important charge. In this case, TxDOT transferred a city street from state control to the City of San Antonio years ago, which is now deep underway on a project (supported by 70 percent of voters!) to increase the value of the corridor and make the street safer by slowing traffic and reducing the number of travel lanes. The project will “allow for protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks for pedestrians, and the planting of shade trees,” according to the San Antonio Report.

So how did TxDOT respond to those plans, after a questionable legal move this week to seize control of the street and put it back under state control? (Bold and italics ours.)

This action is needed as a result of local proposals to convert the existing three lanes to two lanes in each direction and remove turn lanes along SL 368. These local proposals would result in a significant increase in congestion. TxDOT remains focused on strategies to decrease congestion and will work with the City and other local stakeholders to develop solutions for SL 368 that serve to maintain the existing three lanes in each direction while addressing the mobility and safety needs of all users.

Safety is still important, you see. TxDOT is still committed to addressing the “mobility and safety needs of all users,” as long as it doesn’t interfere with having as many vehicle lanes as possible. Safety is ok, so long as it is additive. But if it interferes with their ability to address congestion, safety takes a back seat, every time. And so they are attempting to halt the city’s plans by seizing this road to keep the local government from following through on voters and taxpayer wishes by prioritizing safety and creating a productive, valuable place instead.

Residents and leaders of struggling cities or neighborhoods will also tell you that the only thing worse than congestion is no congestion. Denuded, downtown and near-downtown streets in these kinds of places are exhibit A. They are wide, mostly empty, easy to speed on, terrible to walk on, and lack productive economic activity along many of them. What mayors of those places wouldn’t give for some congestion—a sign that a lot of people want to be there. Congestion is both a sign of economic productivity and perhaps counterintuitively one of the few things keeping more people from dying on streets that are designed for much higher speeds:

And as we’ve chronicled heavily in The Congestion Con and our work on induced travel demand, attempts to solve congestion with more lanes and more capacity are both immensely expensive and never bring the promised results. But worse, congestion reduction is sold as a way to benefit the economy, yet congestion is too often solved by obliterating the local economy.

Do you have a story like this one from Texas to share? We’d love to hear your stories about attempts to “solve” congestion that decimated a place, made a corridor even less safe, or went completely against local wishes.

Please share this cartoon on social media! Download it to your phone or computer (“right click, save as…”)  from this link and upload to Facebook, Twitter or the channel of your choosing. You can link back to this post with it if you like: https://t4america.org/2022/01/31/our-solutions-for-congestion-are-worse/

The infrastructure bill is finished—what you need to know

Infrastructure will be built, but what kind?

The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill is notable both for including Congress’ most significant effort to address climate change, and its general failure to make fundamental changes to a transportation program that’s responsible for massive increases in transportation emissions, worsening state of repair, unequal access to jobs, and increasing numbers of people killed on our roadways.

promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

First, you can read our short statement about the deal’s passage (signed by President Biden on Monday, November 15!) In a sea of media coverage and complicated explainers, we wanted to drill into just a few basic things you should know and remember about this new bill:

1) Transportation policy and funding is now wrapped up until 2026

Did you catch this one?

The way this deal was repeatedly referred to in the media as a standalone infrastructure bill created a lot of confusion, so it’s worth being clear on this count: Congress just wrapped up the every-five-years process of transportation reauthorization because the Senate’s five-year transportation policy proposals passed earlier this summer were the foundation of this larger infrastructure deal. There’s a lot of additional money that will go into various forms of infrastructure, but of the $645 billion total for transportation, about $300 billion is for a new five-year reauthorization to replace the expiring FAST Act. The additional ~$345 billion consists of annual appropriations of various kinds which are not guaranteed or sourced from gas taxes via the highway trust fund (see #4 below for more on that.)

So other than the annual appropriations process where Congress decides funding levels for some discretionary programs like the transit capital construction program or BUILD grants, funding and policy decisions are now finished for five years, and the focus now moves to implementation, i.e., how this money gets spent and where. 

2) So what was in the five-year reauthorization included in the deal?

We took a long look at the good, the bad, and the ugly when the deal passed the full Senate back in August, and almost nothing has changed since:

[It] includes a lot of new spending, but that spending isn’t directed toward outcomes, much less the priorities that the President articulated in The American Jobs Plan. Though this bill mentions safety, climate, and equity often, as it stands, it will fail to produce meaningful shifts. “The White House will soon discover that they’ve dealt themselves a challenging hand in their long-term effort to address climate change and persistent inequities, while kicking the can down a crumbling road that’s likely to stay that way,” T4America director Beth Osborne said in our full statement after Tuesday’s final vote.

There is some good news, though. When it comes to the next five years of policy and spending, passenger rail was the biggest winner, making the expansion of reliable, frequent rail service to more Americans a cornerstone of the deal’s approach. The rail portion ​​will “1) expand, increase, and improve service, 2) focus on the entire national network (rather than just the northeast corridor), 3) encourage more local, ground-up coalitions of local-state partnerships for improving or adding new service, and 4) make it easier to finance projects and expand that authority to transit-oriented development projects.” We explained these provisions in-depth in this post.

3) More money for transit but with policy crafted in 2015 (and before!)

The transit portion of reauthorization was never produced by the Senate Banking Committee, which means that this deal basically carried forward the status quo approach to transit policy from the now-replaced FAST Act, but with a historic amount of transit funding (along with a historic amount of highway funding.) The House’s discarded five-year INVEST Act proposal contained some vital improvements to transit policy, but it was ignored by the Senate when assembling the larger infrastructure deal.

We’ll have much more about the modest changes to the transit program in a later post—including what’s next.

4) What else was included in the non-reauthorization portions of the bill’s $1.2 trillion price tag?

This great chart from the National Association of Counties shows where the additional transportation money— outside of the ~$300 billion, five-year authorization—is going:

For more on the non-transportation inclusions in the bill, you can read this post from Smart Growth America with a broader look at the package and what was included on climate resilience, broadband, and other areas. 

5) Time to hold the administration and Congress accountable for accomplishing their ambitious promises

The Biden administration has made significant promises to taxpayers about what they are going to accomplish with this historic investment when it comes to repair, climate change, safety, equity, and an equitable economic recovery from the past year and a half. They’ve assembled a tremendous team of superstar smart people at USDOT to make it happen. They’ve shown their willingness to use their administrative authority to at least temporarily halt damaging highway projects. They’ve created a litany of helpful new competitive grant programs they now need to write the rules for awarding. 

But watching the president sign the bill isn’t just a celebration, it’s a cue for them to get to work with some major urgency: the first year of this money is flowing out the door already, so states are already pouring this money into projects already underway. 

It will require a herculean effort from them to make sure this bill accomplishes what they believe it will. As we said when the deal was first approved by Congress on November 5, “The administration is confident they can make substantial progress on all of these goals despite those deficiencies. Most states are promising to use the flexibility they fought for to make marked improvements across these priorities. To make that happen, both the administration and the states will need to make major changes to how they approach transportation, but we know they can do it.” 

Because they missed the chance to codify a wholly different approach to transportation into law, they only have the option of making changes that are administrative or imposed by the executive branch—changes which can all be undone by a future administration.

Now is the time for us, the media, advocates and local leaders of all stripes to hold them accountable for what they have promised to accomplish with this historically massive infrastructure bill. 

Step one for repairing a problem: Stop making it worse

An excavator digs a massive hole titled "Dangerous Roads $$$". On the other side of the hole, a man tries to fill the hole with a small pile of dirt (labeled "Safety Improvements $." The comic is labeled "U.S. Approach to Road Safety."

Swap in any pressing issue—climate change, repair, safety—and this new illustration by Jean Wei describes the approach to solving it within the much-debated infrastructure bill, which passed on its own late last Friday. You’ll be hearing a lot of unfettered praise for it today, but we’re far more circumspect.

An excavator digs a massive hole titled "Dangerous Roads $$$". On the other side of the hole, a man tries to fill the hole with a small pile of dirt (labeled "Safety Improvements $." The comic is labeled "U.S. Approach to Road Safety."
This new illustration was produced for T4America by visual artist Jean Wei. IG/@weisanboo

As T4America director Beth Osborne said today,

“[The deal] spends a lot of money but fails to target it to the needs of the day: building strong economic centers, providing equitable access to opportunity, addressing catastrophic climate change, improving safety, or repairing infrastructure in poor condition.”

The bill has a lot of exciting wheelbarrows of new money, but unfortunately it also includes a lot of excavators for the status quo:

This Politico story from Tanya Snyder captures how the bill will fail to move the needle on reducing emissions and addressing climate change, among other issues:

“Congress has cleared a multibillion-dollar infrastructure package that could improve Americans’ commutes and quality of life, but which fails to meet President Joe Biden’s ambitious pledge to cut emissions off at their root: the transportation sector. …Beth Osborne [and T4America]… accused Congress of ‘doubling down on a dinosaur of a federal transportation program’ that she said has produced a dangerous, inequitable and unsustainable transportation network.”

We had a good chance to do something better with the House’s five-year INVEST Act proposal, but the Senate tossed that one aside in favor of making their own inferior five-year proposal the foundation of the larger infrastructure deal.

As Politico notes, this infrastructure bill is completely missing “any requirement that would prioritize repairing things before building new,” which would ensure we actually make progress on repair instead of just spending billions to build new things we can’t afford to maintain. The discarded House bill also would have taken the modest but vital step of requiring states to “measure and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.”

What’s next?

With the infrastructure deal completed, the Build Back Better budget reconciliation act is still awaiting action. That package does include some important provisions for improving access to transit, grants for reducing emissions, and more. But it’s tough to swallow knowing that the infrastructure deal is likely to make many of these same issues worse, something we wrote about last week:

“We are encouraged to know that Congress is taking seriously the need to address climate change, equity, and economic recovery. But the $40 billion included here unfortunately won’t be enough to redeem the $645 billion-plus infrastructure bill that will continue to make many of those same problems worse. As we’ve said throughout the second half of this year, the administration has a difficult task ahead to advance their stated goals of repair, safety, climate, equity, and access to jobs and services through these small improvements, while spending historic amounts on unchanged programs that have historically made those issues worse.”

Read that post here (updated with info about the approved infrastructure deal) and share our new cartoon above on social media.

We’ve got a lot to say about this new legislation. We’ll be back soon with a detailed rundown of what’s in the infrastructure deal, a look at the highlights, and how we can make the best things possible happen with funding that will soon touch every city and community.

T4America statement on the passage of the 2021 infrastructure deal

press release

After Congress’ final passage of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, aka “the infrastructure deal” on Friday, November 5, Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne offered this statement:

“As we have stated before, the transportation portion of the infrastructure bill spends a lot of money but fails to target it to the needs of the day: building strong economic centers, providing equitable access to opportunity, addressing catastrophic climate change, improving safety, or repairing infrastructure in poor condition.

“The administration is confident they can make substantial progress on all of these goals despite those deficiencies. Most states are promising to use the flexibility they fought for to make marked improvements across these priorities. To make that happen, both the administration and the states will need to make major changes to how they approach transportation, but we know they can do it.

“We stand ready to support this important and challenging work. We also encourage everyone— elected leaders, businesses, taxpayers, advocates and the press—to follow their results and hold them to their promises.”

More highways, more driving, more emissions: Explaining “induced demand”

Even if we hit the most ambitious targets for changing our cars and trucks over to electric vehicles, we will fail to meaningfully reduce emissions from transportation without confronting this simple fact: new roads always produce new driving. This costly feedback loop referred to as “induced demand” is the invisible force short-circuiting the neverending attempts to eliminate congestion by building or expanding roads.

This gif explaining induced demand is from Driving Down Emissions

Today, Transportation for America is partnering with RMI and the Natural Resources Defense Council to release a new calculator that shows how highway expansion repeatedly fails to reduce congestion and instead increases traffic and pollution. The SHIFT Calculator provides transparency about new traffic created by highway widening and expansion so transportation agencies can make smarter, more sustainable transportation investments. Read the press release.

Check out the calculator here

Imagine a guy who, struck with a wild but charitable fever of generosity, decided to give away 100 gallons of tasty, free coffee every morning at a small downtown stand. During that entire first week, he struggled to give it all away before lunchtime and went home with quite a few gallons of leftover lukewarm coffee. In week #2, he started seeing familiar faces each day from the nearby buildings, because people walking by know a good deal when they see one (the low price of free!) Many of them returned each day and the coffee was gone by 11 a.m. By the third week, the word was out across downtown about the “crazy free coffee guy” and he started running out earlier each day. By the start of week four, people were coming from all over downtown and he had a line queued up waiting for him at 7 a.m. to ensure they got their free cup before work, and it was all gone before 9 a.m. 

Say hello to “induced demand.”

Giving something away for free shapes the behavior of those who want it

It’s a fundamental principle of economics: Provide a tangible good at no cost that people value and the demand will outstrip supply.

Yet political leaders and transportation agencies refuse to believe that this same basic principle will apply when they spend billions to widen or expand highways in the name of “solving” traffic congestion in urban regions, and then give away all of that newly created space for free. They refuse to believe that anyone will take new trips on the newly freed-up highway space, that people will shift existing off-peaks trips to rush hour, that someone on transit might decide to return to driving (like thousands of people did during the pandemic), or that developers might take advantage of the new capacity to build yet more houses or retail on land that’s now more easily accessible.

They refuse to believe that this is possible, even when all of that expensive new highway space fills right up in a short period of time, wiping out any benefits and failing to deliver on all those promises of speedy commutes, improved travel times, and money in our pockets from all the “time savings.”

Attempting to “solve” congestion by building new roads or expanding existing ones has been the animating purpose behind billions of dollars of federal and state transportation investment for decades now. 

Armed with this single-minded purpose and billions in no-strings money from the federal government, states have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to widen or build new highways. We built enough new roads and lanes from just 2009-2017 to build a brand new road back and forth across our enormous country 83 times. State transportation departments have added 5,325 new lane-miles just since 2015.

All the lanes we’ve built have led to a predictable increase in driving. From 1980-2017, per capita vehicle miles traveled (VMT) increased by 46 percent. In 1993, on average, each person accounted for 21 miles of driving per day in those 100 urbanized areas. By 2017, that number had jumped to 25 miles per day. Every year, Americans are having to drive farther just to accomplish the same things we did back in 1993 every day.

The problem isn’t too few roads

Delay skyrocketed in our 100 largest urbanized areas from 1993-2017, rising by 144 percent. Yet we expanded our freeway system in those areas by 42 percent, while the population only increased by 32% during that time. We built roads like crazy, yet delay just got worse.

Delay increased because new highways, roads, and lanes are proven to induce more driving, which leads to more emissions and ultimately more congestion. The evidence for induced demand is overwhelming. In a landmark study, Kent Hymel at Cal State Northridge suggests the relationship is perfectly correlated—a 10 percent increase in lane miles leads to a 10 percent increase in driving.

If you’re celebrating the notable but small climate and transit provisions in the current enormous infrastructure deal, you should know that this shortsighted 1950s-style deal will provide states with historic levels of virtually no-strings highway funding that they can continue to blow on the same old bankrupt strategy for congestion without even any basic requirements to repair things first.

Profligate spending on highways also undermines the relatively limited investments being made in other lower emission transportation options like biking, walking, and transit.

Why do transportation agencies deny this reality?

The unreliable models that agencies depend upon have a poor track record of success, but they never look backward to consider their accuracy or how they can be improved.  When is a state DOT ever held to account for repeatedly making predictions about traffic that fails to materialize? Who even remembers what they predict? This great thread from Kevin DeGood about Texas DOT’s repeated failure to make accurate predictions shows just how rarely anyone looks backward:

19 years ago, the Texas DOT predicted that average daily traffic (ADT) on I-35 through downtown Austin would be 330,000 daily vehicles by last year. The reality wasn’t even close: Actual totals in 2019 were only 201,000 daily trips. As Kevin notes, in 2016, with the state totally ignoring how wildly inaccurate their current projections were turning out to be, they projected “that total VMT on I-35 in the Austin area would increase by 50% by 2040.”

Rinse and repeat. 

TxDOT is certainly doing their best to make those 2040 projections come true. All it’s going to cost taxpayers is $5 billion to widen I-35 right through downtown.

If the state follows through on this staggeringly expensive project, they’d be creating millions of new trips and increasing pollution, all while failing to make a dent in congestion over the long term and wiping out hundreds of acres of some of the most valuable land in the entire state.

Screenshot of SHIFT calculator's results on Austin, TX I-35 widening project
This data comes from the new SHIFT Calculator’s estimates for the I-35 widening project which would add 42 lane-miles to the interstate through downtown Austin

The cynical answer to “why” is that if state DOTs around the country finally admitted that expansions fail to actually solve congestion, they would lose their #1 strategy of continued expansions that allow everyone other than the taxpayer to make more money. They’d be admitting that they’ve placed all of their bets on a losing horse, and they’ve been doing so for years. On top of that, they’d then have to do far more sophisticated work to better understand the complicated reality of our travel needs and rebuild their models from the ground up to focus on moving people rather than just “make cars go fast.” 

Even the most progressive states with ambitious agendas to lower transportation emissions aren’t fully willing to acknowledge this reality. 

Advocates and residents and local leaders need to start holding them to account. How?

We can’t put our heads in the sand anymore

This new, rigorously vetted calculator produced by RMI, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Transportation for America provides more accurate and transparent data about increases in driving and pollution, as well as the other impacts of highway expansions. 

Our hope is that advocates, local governments, and anyone who cares about finally getting more accurate and transparent data about increases in driving and pollution will use this new tool to hold their transportation agencies to account. And we want transportation agencies to use it to bring a fuller picture to their current transportation modeling that leads them to “solutions” that fail to address congestion, divide neighborhoods, increase pollution, devastate nearby communities, and fail to meaningfully improve our access to jobs and services.

Find a proposed project in your metro area and run it through the calculator.

Some parts of the above post were adapted from Driving Down Emissions, a report from Smart Growth America and Transportation for America which explores how changing transportation policy and land-use patterns are key to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

Amendments we’re tracking to the House INVEST Act

The INVEST Act, which hits all three of Transportation for America’s three principles, is being considered this week on the House floor ahead of a final vote. There are a few key amendments being offered that could jeopardize these improvements, or further improve the already strong bill in support of our principles.

UPDATE (6/31): The INVEST Act was approved by House of Representatives! Read our full statement here. The amendments we were tracking have also all been voted upon. Jump straight to the tracker.

We heartily support the INVEST Act and encourage all representatives to vote for its passage, but well over 250 amendments were submitted to the INVEST Act to be considered before that final vote. We will be tracking the most notable amendments in a table below, but we want to draw your attention specifically to the seven amendments we will be paying careful attention to. 

Transportation for America strongly supports five amendments to be included in the final bill:

  • Amendment #15 (Moulton): this amendment  increases the PRIME passenger rail program funding by $5 billion total, to modernize and develop passenger rail service (especially critical and affordable interstate travel options) while also expanding existing rail corridors throughout the country.
  • Amendment #86 (Garcia (IL)): This amendment ensures that the street design manual used by all traffic engineers (the MUTCD) equitably accounts for all transportation users, especially cyclists and pedestrians. It furthermore directs the Secretary to update guidance on updating the MUTCD, targeting a four-year update cycle to ensure it stays  current with evolving transportation needs.

The three following amendments from Rep. Hank Johnson would make changes to new and existing programs in the INVEST Act to help transit agencies run more buses and trains to serve more people. Rep. Johnson was proposing an amendment that would have created an entirely new program to fund transit operations, but it became clear that leadership is not allowing amendments to create entirely new programs at this point for the INVEST Act.

  • Amendment #133 (Johnson (GA)): This amendment increases the eligible funding for transit operating expenses from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Program up to 20 percent, allowing states to use these funds to make transit service more frequent and reliable—which has a notable impact on carbon reduction.
  • Amendment #139 (Johnson (GA)): This amendment prioritizes transit operations expenses in the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program by removing construction of maintenance facilities as an eligible expense. Maintenance facilities projects could swamp this small program and are eligible for funding elsewhere, while transit operations are harder to fund.
  • Amendment #148 (Johnson (GA)): This amendment makes expanding transit service hours and/or days an eligible expense for the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program. The underlying program only focuses on improving frequencies, but extending service hours is just as important for reaching more riders who need transit the most.

Transportation for America also strongly opposes two amendments and urges all reps to vote against these short-sighted proposals:

  • Amendment #144 (Perry (PA)): This amendment prohibits the use of funds to expand the Amtrak passenger rail network. At a time when communities across the country are clamoring for more connections and more options of all kinds—especially in places not well connected to airports or other interstates—this amendment is especially out of touch with the needs of Americans, both urban and rural alike.
  • Amendment #247 (Gibbs (OH)): This amendment allows state DOTs—such as the Ohio DOT in Rep. Gibbs’ home state, which spends next to nothing on transit service statewide—to seize transit funding and spend that money on highways, overriding local control and eliminating funds from documented local multimodal needs. It also prohibits using transit funds for art, non-functional landscaping, and sculptures—or for paying the cost of including an artist on the design team. This might seem pennywise but it’s incredibly pound foolish. Allowing a small amount of transit funding to support artists’ involvement leads to projects that are more responsive to their surrounding communities’ needs, better incorporate the desires of riders, and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Additionally, these funds support local artists’ small businesses, further benefiting the communities adjacent to transit projects.

Full table of amendments

Amendment NumberSponsor(s)DescriptionThemeOur PositionVote FormatOutcome
1Langevin (RI), Titus (NV)Requires the Department of Justice, in addition to the Secretary, to adopt the U.S. Access Board's Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines as enforceable standards. This will strongly influence the built environment to be designed and built to be more accessible and inclusive for persons with disabilities.Equity / AccessibilitySupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
3Espaillat (NY), Nadler (NY), DeSaulnier (CA)Allows local transportation agencies, in addition to MPOs, to be direct aid recipients of Metropolitan Performance Program funding. This allows direct, local and regional deployment of federal funds towards transportation needs.Local ControlSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
10Norcross (NJ)Requires all Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) projects funded directly through the Federal Government to be performed by qualified electricians with Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program certification.Electric VehiclesSupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
15Moulton (MA), Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Costa (CA), DelBene (WA), Strickland (WA), Espaillat (NY), Morelle (NY), Blumenauer (OR), Maloney, Carolyn (NY), Cleaver (MO), Titus (NV)Increases the Passenger Rail Improvement, Modernization, and Enhancement (PRIME) program funding by $5 billion over the life of the bill, helping to modernize and develop passenger rail service (especially critical and affordable interstate travel options) while also expanding existing rail corridors.Passenger RailSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
18Velázquez (NY)Revises the Climate Resilient Transportation Infrastructure Study to guarantee that residents of public housing and of other HUD-designated affordable housing programs are considered and benefit from resilient infrastructure investments. Further revises the study to consider the needs of and create opportunities for individuals registered with a one-stop career center in the climate resilient workforce.Equity / ResiliencySupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
28Ocasio-Cortez (NY)Revises SEC. 1309(g) of the Active Connected Transportation grant program to direct the Secretary of Transportation to consider the extent to which a project would serve low income residents of economically disadvantaged communities when making grants.Equity / Active TransportationSupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
30Nehls (TX)Strikes Division D of the bill (rail title). This would in essense, defund all rail infrastructure investment.Passenger RailOpposeStandaloneNot offered
33Auchincloss (MA), Huffman (CA), Moulton (MA)Provides municipalities with the ability to create and expand new mobility options, including on-demand public transportation projects.Local ControlSupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
46Perry (PA)Strikes section 1303, which establishes a clean corridors program to provide formula funding for EV charging and hydrogen fueling infrastructure. This would in essence, would keep us running a status quo on transportation energy sources that focuses exclusively on fossil fuels.Electric VehiclesOpposeEn Bloc 3Failed
55Titus (NV), Moulton (MA)Amends the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program to add rail carriers engaged in high-speed rail activities under the eligible entities for credit risk premium subsidy payments. Much like buying a home with little money down, there is a mortgage insurance premium paid; this amendment helps to provide financing to offset that insurance cost to finance passenger rail infrastructure projects.Passenger RailSupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
84Levin, Andy (MI), Ocasio-Cortez (NY)Amends eligible project considerations under Sec. 1303 Clean Corridors Program to include considerations for promoting efficient dwell times and amends Sec. 1303 Clean Corridors Program to include requirements for the provision of information on charging station placement through mapping applications. In essence, this amendment looks to ensure that charger turnover needs are considered in the design and placement, while also publicizing location information through consumer mapping tools.Electric VehiclesSupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
86Garcia, Jesús (IL)This amendment ensures that the street design manual used by all traffic engineers (the MUTCD) equitably accounts for all transportation users, especially cyclists and pedestrians. It furthermore directs the Secretary to update guidance on updating the MUTCD, targeting a four-year update cycle to ensure it stays current with evolving transportation needs.Safety / Equity / StandardsSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
87Castor (FL)Expands the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement (CMAQ) program to allow funding to be used to offset the incremental cost of zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, related zero-emission operations equipment, battery electric charging or fuel cell electric refueling infrastructure, and related infrastructure investments.Electric VehiclesSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
103Torres, Norma (CA)Raises authorization level of the Transportation Equity Research Program to $8,000,000 and gives DOT flexibility to conduct research. This will fund needed research to better understand and develop best practices on incorporating equity and inclusion into the transportation program.EquitySupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
113Torres, Ritchie (NY), Williams (GA), Omar (MN), Escobar (TX), Peters (CA)Clarifies that projects to deck over a limited-access highway are eligible for funding under the Reconnecting Neighborhoods Program, a program focused on remediating economically-disadvantaged and historically excluded communities and emphasizes projects that provide for inclusive economic development. Equity / ConnectivitySupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
118Crow (CO), Torres, Ritchie (NY), Moore (WI)Ensures historically excluded communities are considered in the expansion of electric vehicle charging infrastructure deployment.Equity / Electric VehiclesSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
133Johnson, Hank (GA)This amendment increases the eligible funding for transit operating expenses from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Program up to 20 percent, allowing states to use these funds to make transit service more frequent and reliable—which has a notable impact on carbon reduction.Public TransitSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
139Johnson, Hank (GA)This amendment prioritizes transit operations expenses in the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program by removing construction of maintenance facilities as an eligible expense. Maintenance facilities projects could swamp this small program and are eligible for funding elsewhere, while transit operations are harder to fund.Public TransitSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
144Perry (PA)This amendment prohibits the use of funds to expand the Amtrak passenger rail network. At a time when communities across the country are clamoring for more connections and more options of all kinds—especially in places not well connected to airports or other interstates—this amendment is especially out of touch with the needs of Americans, both urban and rural alike.Passenger RailOpposeEn Bloc 3Failed
148Johnson, Hank (GA)This amendment makes expanding transit service hours and/or days an eligible expense for the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program. The underlying program only focuses on improving frequencies, but extending service hours is just as important for reaching more riders who need transit the most.Public TransitSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
151Perry (PA)This amendment would strike the FTA Capital Investment Grant Program, which is used to provide funding for fixed guideway
investments such as new and expanded rapid rail, commuter rail, light rail, streetcars, bus rapid transit, and ferries, as well as corridor-based bus rapid transit investments that emulate the features of rail. This would starve public transit system of much needed capital funding to replace their assets and expand their transit network.		Passenger RailOpposeEn Bloc 3Failed
157Moore (WI)Increases the percent set-aside for Low and Moderate Community Grant program within the Zero Emission Bus Grant Program from 10 percent to 15 percent. This will help communities tight on resources to be able to afford to purchase zero emission buses and charging infrastructure with additional federal support.Equity / Electric VehiclesSupportEn Bloc 1PASSED
166Rush (IL), Dingell (MI), Clarke, Yvette (NY), Tonko (NY), Adams (NC)Promotes the domestic manufacture and use of advanced, fuel-efficient vehicles and zero-emission vehicles, and encourages electrification of the transportation sector. This will help promote electric vehicle technology as an augmentation of the existing vehicle experience (and getting people to touch, feel, and experience electric vehicles), while bolstering a growing domestic manufacturing industry.Electric VehiclesSupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
226Crawford (AR), Cheney (WY), Graves, Garret (LA), Rouzer (NC)Strikes Section 1201's requirements that states prioritize state of good repair needs over constructing new highway capacity. Outright bad policy to keep on building new roads while the existing roads continue to fall apart. Talk about a huge safety risk and a hit on our wallet with congestion and accelerated vehicle damage. A new road in a sea of crumbling infrastructure, it won't get you far.MaintenanceOpposeEn Bloc 3Failed
237Jackson Lee (TX), Espaillat (NY)Provides local governments more control over where the funds for the new "Safe Streets" program are spent, by requiring state Departments of Transportation to consult with the local governments before carrying out these complete streets’ projects. The “Safe Streets” program uses sets aside safety funds to reduce fatalities and serious injuries on public roads, with a focus on vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters users, and motorcyclist. Very often, funding is steered by State DOTs without recognizing or consulting the on-the-ground local experience. This amendment looks to get local governments at the table as to where this funding is spent towards complete streets.Local Control / SafetySupportEn Bloc 4PASSED
247Gibbs (OH)This amendment allows state DOTs—such as the Ohio DOT in Rep. Gibbs’ home state, which spends next to nothing on transit service statewide—to seize transit funding and spend that money on highways, overriding local control and eliminating funds from documented local multimodal needs. It also prohibits using transit funds for art, non-functional landscaping, and sculptures—or for paying the cost of including an artist on the design team. This might seem pennywise but it’s incredibly pound foolish. Allowing a small amount of transit funding to support artists' involvement leads to projects that are more responsive to their surrounding communities' needs, better incorporate the desires of riders, and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Additionally, these funds support local artists' small businesses, further benefiting the communities adjacent to transit projects. Placemaking / Local ControlOpposeEn Bloc 3Failed
251Brady (TX)Revises the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program to add new conditions of assistance for loans and loan guarantees issued through the program. This only will add burdensome hurdles and complicate a critical program aimed to help finance rail infrastructure.Passenger RailOpposeEn Bloc 3Failed
261Tiffany, Thomas (WI)Stipulates that no funds made available from the Highway Trust Fund may be expended for any purpose other than road and bridge construction. This short-sighted amendment would starve off funding from a significant portion of our transportation system, including our rail network, public transportation, active transportation infrastructure. Additionally, this amendment would starve off funding from critical research and education programs that advance transportation efficiency and safety.Maintenance / Public Transit / EquityOpposeEn Bloc 3Failed

Senate Commerce Committee proves that bipartisanship doesn’t have to equal terrible transportation policy

The Senate committee tasked with handling the rail portions of the larger transportation bill managed to produce a bipartisan bill that also makes the expansion of reliable, frequent rail service to more Americans a cornerstone of its approach. 

Residents of Pascagoula, MS outside the train station during the Gulf Coast Inspection Train several years ago

While the House writes their five-year transportation proposal all at once in one committee, the Senate breaks up the policy work between three committees. The Senators on the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee focused on bipartisanship at the expense of good outcomes for spending transportation dollars, but the Commerce Committee Senators, charged with passenger rail, safety, and a few other related issues, managed to be both bipartisan and set policy that will create a better, more effective transportation system.

Here’s a look at the good and the bad in the Surface Transportation Investment Act of 2021 before the committee considers it in full and likely votes on it this Wednesday, June 16.

The good: A national network of robust, passenger rail service is vital for the country’s future.

These Senators are proposing substantial steps to 1) expand, increase, and improve service, 2) focus on the entire national network (rather than just the northeast corridor), 3) encourage more local, ground-up coalitions of local-state partnerships for improving or adding new service, and 4) make it easier to finance projects and expand that authority to transit-oriented development projects. They also propose some important changes to the data we gather on safety across the entire transportation system, including our streets and roads.

Funding to expand/improve passenger rail service
When it comes to providing more funding overall for passenger rail, they propose $5 billion for the same program (Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements) which provided $33 million for restoring Gulf Coast passenger rail, allowing many more communities to benefit from this program. (Current funding is about $350 million a year, or ~$1.75b over the life of the current law..)

They also provide $300 million for the Restoration and Enhancements grants that provide critical start-up operating support for new or expanded passenger service, and allow those funds to be used over six years instead of just three—recognizing that establishing new ridership on a line can take a few years. 

A lot of the country’s rail infrastructure is also badly in need of updates, and the bill proposes $1.5 billion to make long overdue repairs through what they call the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail Grants for state of repair.

Amtrak
For the country’s passenger rail operator, they propose a small but vital shift in mission and goals to emphasize Amtrak’s role in providing service both to rural communities and in long-distance routes and a national network. To help make this happen, they will require representation on the Amtrak Board from the Northeast Corridor, state-supported routes and long distance routes. They’ll require Amtrak to post station agents at stations with at least 40 passengers a day (and require them to be able to sell tickets), making it easier for people to use and navigate the service in smaller towns. And lastly, they’ll prohibit Amtrak from discontinuing, reducing the frequency of, suspending, or substantially altering the route of any long-distance route if Amtrak receives adequate funding for that route. 

Duplicate the success of the Southern Rail Commission
A new grant program will authorize up to ten interstate rail compacts, including the Southern Rail Commission, which has been key to restoring passenger rail service on the Gulf Coast, and provide up to $1 million annually for each one. (This is double what the House provided for these commissions.)  Up to $1 million—which has to be matched 50/50 with local or state dollars—isn’t a huge sum but it would be hard to overstate the potential impact of creating nine more entities like the SRC to lay the groundwork and build the coalitions required to create or improve rail service in scores of other regions. (Read more about a similar House bill and the importance of these rail compacts here.)

Improving access to financing for rehab and improvement projects
A major challenge with rail rehabilitation and improvement (RRIF) projects has been not only securing financing, but incorporating the project’s credit risk (the cost of creating the loan). This bill proposes $50 million to help offset some of these credit risk insurance premiums on financing RRIF projects. 

Making it easier to finance transit-oriented development projects

More homes, offices, and retail near transit are in high demand, but because these big, complex projects are more difficult to finance than other types of conventional suburban development. The bill makes these projects (not just their rail components) permanently eligible for financing from the above RRIF program—something we’ve been working on for more than six years.  “The areas around our country’s passenger rail stations are often economic sleeping giants,” as T4America co-chair John Robert Smith said in this 2015 T4America story about a previous iteration of this idea. “Finding ways to finance and catalyze smart development in and around them is a proven strategy to boost local economies.”

Extra: Safety provisions
While most of the road and transit policy gets written by other Senate committees, the Commerce Committee also has jurisdiction over safety data and reporting, and they propose some notable changes. 

As chronicled in Dangerous by Design, federal data on who is being killed while using the transportation system—especially people who aren’t in a car—are incredibly limited. We don’t even know how many people are killed while trying to navigate unsafe streets in wheelchairs, for example, so the committee calls for new crash data systems to be able to distinguish bicycles, electric scooters, and wheelchairs. They propose a $200 million a year grant program for local governments to develop and carry out Vision Zero safety plans to prevent death and injury on our roads and streets. Perhaps most interestingly, they require the Secretary of Transportation to finally examine updating hood and bumper safety standards for cars and trucks with a focus on how they are affecting the injuries and deaths of pedestrians, bicyclists, or other vulnerable road users. While more needs to be done on this count (and it needs to be done far faster than the bill specifies), it’s a big deal to see a bipartisan bill finally start to call out this issue in legislation.

The bad, or opportunities missed

While the bill has a ton to praise, there are just a few missed opportunities worth noting and a few places where it falls short of what was in the INVEST Act in the House.

The bill doesn’t include two exciting rail investment programs proposed by the House.
The bill lacks any funding for the PRIME program, which is devoted to expanding and improving intercity passenger rail. The Senate proposal also lacks the Bridge, Tunnels and Safety grants which would fund major capital projects, rail bridges, stations, and tunnels that are publicly owned or owned by Amtrak. The House proposed $25 billion for each of these programs.

Just because projects are big or expensive doesn’t mean they are wise investments.
A new National Infrastructure Project Assistance program is designed to help fund projects of national significance that cost over $500 million or a large portion of small states’ transportation budgets. But while these projects are indeed hard to fund, this program is far too focused on costs and price tags, and only barely mentions any measurable things we want to accomplish. Just because projects are big doesn’t mean they are smart, and we should think about what they might do before providing money for them.

A new multimodal grant program like TIGER needs to provide more money for the best local projects.
A new program called Local and Regional Project Assistance is basically like a new $1.5 billion TIGER/BUILD/RAISE program for locals, but the $25 million cap is too low and should be raised to at least $75 million so that it doesn’t keep larger but worthwhile projects with good outcomes from applying. The program’s size is sufficiently large to both advance a few larger projects while also giving out a large number of grants to the best projects. As an example, in the first round of TIGER, there was $1.5 billion available with no cap, yet USDOT made 3 grants of around $100 million while still advancing 55 total projects.

A multimodal freight program should not presume that half of the country’s best freight projects are road projects.
The bill provides $1.2 billion for Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight Projects, but for some inexplicable reason, this bill caps the funding for truly multimodal projects at only 50 percent of the program—basically earmarking 50 percent for highway projects, before they’ve ever seen a proposal or spent a dime. 

Why in the world is the committee with multimodal jurisdiction—rail, ports, and pipelines— and no jurisdiction over the highway part of the bill so intent on giving money to highway projects? And these are not gas tax dollars subject to the trust fund—this is a discretionary program using general tax dollars. Lose the cap entirely on multimodal projects and just select whatever projects will accomplish the most with the money.

Build transit back better with more trains, more buses, more frequency

As more Americans begin returning to work and daily life, we need transit to be there, running reliably and frequently, getting us where we need to go. There’s an exciting new proposal to fund increased transit service across the country, but time is short to build support for this important legislation.

Photo by T4 supporter Richard Rabinowitz.

While the INVEST 2.0 awaits a vote by the full House later this month, there are ongoing efforts to make further improvements to that already strong bill. Rep. Hank Johnson’s (GA) Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act is a must-have bill that would produce higher quality transit in communities of all sizes across the country. This vital piece of legislation would create a new program to fund transit operations costs, available to all transit agencies, rural and urban, in order to:

  • Increase service frequency so that people don’t have to wait so long for the bus; 
  • provide additional hours of service so that those who don’t work white-collar hours can still get to their jobs; and
  • add new, frequent service to underserved communities in the region. 

We have a tremendous chance to build an engine for equitable economic growth across the country through more robust transit service and systems. The more support this bill gets, the more likely that House leadership will include it in whatever final transportation and infrastructure product they consider later this month. 

Why we need more funding for operating transit

For decades, not only has transit gotten only 20 percent of federal transportation funding, but that funding has been limited by Congress to only maintenance and capital needs—not the day-to-day costs of running trains and buses. This moratorium was lifted for rural transit agencies in 1998, though it’s not a big benefit to rural transit agencies to make them choose whether to fund existing service or develop additional service with their limited funds. They don’t need flexibility: they need more robust funding. Beyond these rural agencies, large and mid-sized agencies still do not receive any operating funds, which make up two-thirds of public transportation’s costs.

This has to change in order to create the equitable and sustainable transportation system necessary to connect everyone to opportunities.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government matched as much as $1 of operating assistance to transit agencies for every $2.25 provided by local and state governments, as we wrote with partners in this report. The current federal focus on only capital needs instead of providing quality service, leads many transit agencies towards spending “large quantities of federal funds upgrading or extending a handful of routes while neglecting the broader network of service,” and as a result, “ridership stagnates or shrinks.” In fact, following the stimulus bill in 2009, numerous transit agencies received money to buy new buses or railcars at the same time they were cutting service and laying off employees because of the Great Recession, putting many agencies in the ludicrous position of having tons of money to buy vehicles they could not afford to operate.

All Americans—no matter where they live—deserve transportation options that are convenient, affordable, sustainable and safe. But this arcane policy makes it an uphill climb for transit agencies to deliver that kind of service. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of Americans live within walking distance of transit that runs every 15 minutes or less, TransitCenter found.

The lack of operating support for public transit—and the severe underfunding of transit in general—also doesn’t impact everyone equally. People of color make up 60 percent of transit riders. Of that, 24 percent are Black Americans. In addition, 19 percent of Black households have no access to a vehicle, compared to 9 percent of households nationally with no vehicle access. 

“A transit system that truly works has to be frequent and reliable,” said former Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater in a recent op-ed. “People should be able to depend on a bus coming every 10 minutes, no matter where in the country they live.” 

Imagine a United States where every community has convenient, reliable, frequent transit service that can safely and conveniently get you to work, school, shopping, church or anywhere else you need to go; where you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars per year owning and operating a car if you don’t want to or can’t afford to. Putting millions more Americans within reach of frequent transit service is possible, and Rep. Johnson’s bill is our best opportunity to start to realize that vision.

Use the form above to tell your representative to support this bill.

Ed. note: the second half of this post was adapted from this related post we wrote back in May.

Nine ways the House’s transportation proposal starts to make a “paradigm shift”

With the House’s INVEST in America Act being considered in committee on Wednesday, it’s a good time to look at what else beyond our core three principles in the bill are worth praising and potentially even improving.

Photo of Metroway (bus rapid transit in Northern Virginia) by BeyondDC on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Most of the time, when we evaluate long-term transportation policy proposals or infrastructure bills from Congress, we start with a “good, bad, and ugly” post, but this House bill doesn’t fit well into that rubric. There’s a lot of great, some good, a few things that could use further refinement, and a couple of missed opportunities; but nothing that falls into the category of “bad,” much less “ugly.” It also has a lot of the same language in the INVEST Act introduced in the last Congress which stalled before a Senate vote, which also went 3 for 3 (after some modifications) on our scorecard.

With that in mind, here are nine specific things in the House bill (INVEST 2.0 for shorthand) that we wanted to highlight. Bear with us, this is a longer post!

1) Avoids the Senate’s cardinal sin of creating small, new programs to fix mistakes actively being perpetuated by the larger, unchanged, status quo transportation program

The overall approach of the last 30 years has been to create small, exciting new programs to fix established problems (safety, pollution, etc) while allowing the much larger core program to exacerbate and further those same problems.  This was our biggest complaint about the Senate’s bill from a few weeks ago. 

If you want to create a program to fix the issues created by running interstates through neighborhoods, you should also stop actively running interstates through neighborhoods. Or consider the issues of repair and maintenance. As we noted in our scorecard post, this bill doesn’t just create some new repair programs, it requires states to produce a plan to maintain any proposed new capacity while making progress toward their state of repair goals anytime they spend money from the biggest pot of highway funding. That’s the kind of new approach that the Senate completely missed, but the House is proposing to implement for key issues like repair, climate change, and others.

2) It recognizes that transportation is primarily about people and connecting them to what they need

The current federal transportation program does not require that states actively improve access to jobs and services for the real people who use the system every day. Say what? This is why the bulk of current transportation funding goes toward increasing vehicle speed, a “goal” that focuses on concrete and steel instead of the needs of actual people and where they need to go. This House bill kickstarts a huge shift toward focusing on people instead of vehicles by instituting a new performance measure that requires project sponsors to improve access to jobs and services by all modes. 

Under the House bill, state departments of transportation and regional planning organizations would have to measure whether all people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care, and other necessities. Further, states and MPOs would have to project the impact their projects would have on access and USDOT will review and publicly report their targets and progress. USDOT also has to collect that data and make it available to help with the measurement of multimodal access, and there are requirements to analyze the accuracy of the models and update direction to states and MPOs on how to improve access. 

While seemingly minor and perhaps a little wonky, this would mark a big shift in how transportation projects are evaluated. Measuring access—not vehicle speed—is a people-first way to consider the impact of the billions we spend on transportation each year. With this, we can create more equitable access to economic opportunity, lower transportation costs, and reduce emissions and the damaging climate and health impacts of them.

3) Nails all three of T4America’s core principles

Click to read our scorecard post

As we’ve done with every infrastructure proposal or long-term policy proposal for the last few years, we’ve produced a scorecard to evaluate how it starts to redirect transportation policy toward T4America’s three core principles of 1) maintaining the current system, 2) protecting the safety of people on the roads, and 3) getting people to jobs, schools, groceries and health care.  This bill nails all three of these principles  Read more about how the House bill advances these three simple priorities in this post with the scorecard.

4) Advances our proposal to start tearing down divisive infrastructure and repairing the damage

Since 2020, with help from Third Way, T4America has been advancing a policy to undo the damage of “urban renewal” projects that have displaced more than a million Americans since construction of the Interstate Highway System and that continue to harm communities of color today.  Our plan focuses heavily on creating a competitive grant program to redesign or deconstruct things like divisive highways, and creating strategies to prevent displacement so that this work generates wealth for the communities that suffered most, in addition to a few other strategies.

What the sunken, divisive Rochester Inner Loop used to look like, before being filled in and replaced with a surface boulevard. The House bill would kickstart efforts like this across the country. Flickr photo by Friscocali

The House runs with our proposal through a $3 billion ($600 million a year) Reconnecting Neighborhoods program, which is six times larger than a similar proposal in the Senate bill. This program will analyze neighborhood barriers (like interstates) and identify candidates for remediation, repurposing, or removal. In addition, part of that money can also be used to establish a community advisory board or a land trust to preserve the new wealth for those most affected by the divisive infrastructure. There are some details we’d like to enhance, but this idea has gained incredible traction over the last year and we are excited about the possibilities for the future.

5) Recognizes that you must address climate change within the entire transportation program

Download our report on lowering emissions through better land use and transportation

Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States, and the majority of them come from driving. The bill addresses the entirety of the transportation program by establishing a new greenhouse gas performance measure and requiring states to set positive targets to reduce emissions. It gives states the latitude to figure out their own preferred path to hitting those targets, but we know that infrastructure investments that give people more options than hopping in the car are key to reducing these emissions. INVEST 2.0 creates programs to fund these projects at both the state and city levels.

While making it easier to drive less overall should be central to our short-term climate and transportation strategy, we do need to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles as well. This is why we’re part of a unique coalition called CHARGE—the only “electric vehicle” coalition where improving and expanding public transit is the first priority. This bill creates a new program to build electric vehicle charging stations along corridors and sets standards to require them to be open to the public and work with all kinds of electric vehicles.

There are also some good provisions targeted at making the transportation system more resilient to climate change and making resilience an eligible use in the largest highway programs. One place where the bill could be improved is to require resilience to be built into the design of all projects. 

6) Measuring access to jobs and services is one of the best ways to address equity, but this bill includes others

As noted above, requiring agencies to measure and improve access to jobs and services for all people is perhaps the single greatest change to remake transportation policy in a more equitable way. But INVEST 2.0 would also improve equity in other ways—something we wrote about at length last summer in the context of the House’s very similar 2020 proposal. Prioritizing access, investing in more and better transit, building safer streets for people, and investing in what we have would all have an impact on equity. Considering the similarities between that bill and this year’s INVEST in America Act, that evaluation still stands.

7) Support for expanded national passenger rail

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) addresses an enormous crowd in Gulfport during a rally for restoring Gulf Coast passenger service. Photo by Steve Davis / T4America

Expanding and improving our nation’s passenger rail network to bring better, more reliable passenger rail service to more people is one of the best ways to improve access for millions of Americans in big urban areas and small rural ones alike. This bill creates a new $5 billion a year program for high speed and intercity rail investments, triples the funding for the existing program for improved safety and efficiency in passenger and freight rail service, and funds Amtrak at $32 billion over the life of the bill.

The House incorporated several of our other recommendations, including updating the Amtrak Board to have better representation from riders and the national network as well as the Northeast Corridor. More importantly, it allows for the formation of more multi-state rail commissions like our partners the Southern Rail Commission, which has been the key to (almost!) restoring passenger service along the Gulf Coast, and provides funding for them to operate. 

There is some opportunity to strengthen the authorities for the Federal Railroad Administration and the Surface Transportation Board to prevent the freight railroads from obstructing or interfering with that service.

8) A strong commitment to transit…

INVEST 2.0 provides over $21 billion for transit, a sizable increase over the current $13 billion program, and it also includes some funding for operations—a major win, as operations funding has typically been a no-go with federal funds. Funds from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program and even the core Surface Transportation program can be used for transit operations. There’s also a new one-time competitive grant program to support capital and operations costs associated with addressing transit deserts through better, more frequent transit service.  

Improving service frequency is a big focus of the bill. There is a new $100 million competitive grant program for transit agencies collaborating with state or local governments to increase bus frequency and ridership by redesigning urban streets to better move transit (and more people) in congested areas. There is also a change to the funding formula that prioritizes frequency.

9) But with opportunities for greater improvements on transit

While the bill makes some important changes and does slightly increase its share compared to highways, the bill does not hit T4America’s priorities of equalizing transit funding with highway funding, nor does it create long term support for keeping transit running. We will be once again turning to leaders on Capitol Hill to move these efforts forward. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia of Illinois has led the effort to invest in transit as strongly as we do highways, and we hope he uses this bill as an opportunity to push that effort forward.

READ: Letter of support for Rep. Johnson bill, signed by ~100 organizations (June 9, 2021)Download

On the operations side, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia is leading an effort to create a federal program for transit operating support. The Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act would create a new grant program available to all transit agencies, rural and urban, to increase service frequency so that people don’t have to wait so long for the bus; to provide additional hours of service so that those who don’t work regular hours can still get to their jobs; and to add new, frequent service in the region. We are proud supporters of that bill and we encourage you to tell your House rep to join Rep. Johnson as a sponsor. 

Tell your representative to support a bill to increase funding for transit operations