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The infrastructure law is not climate legislation, but states could make it green

A man observes a stretch of Dock Street in Annapolis, Md., that flooded after the area received over three quarters of an inch of rain in 24 hours on Jan. 25, 2010.
A man observes a stretch of Dock Street in Annapolis, Md., that flooded after the area received over three quarters of an inch of rain in 24 hours on Jan. 25, 2010.
On Jan. 10, 2015, Dock Street in Annapolis, MD flooded after receiving over three quarters of an inch of rain in 24 hours. Flickr photo by Matt Roth/Chesapeake Bay Program

Though distinctly not serious about fighting climate change, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, the infrastructure law) can still help lead to some decent climate outcomes if states and metro areas make the choice to prioritize doing so with their flexible funding.

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 most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change warns us that even with the most aggressive emissions reduction strategies, global warming will more than likely exceed 1.5°C in the near term. So emissions reduction strategies that can prevent even more destructive consequences from greater global warming are urgently needed, but we also need to prepare our communities for the disastrous effects of climate change that are already hitting much of the country. 

That is why this post will focus on how the federal government and its state and local grant recipients can use money from the infrastructure law to:

  1. reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, and
  2. make our transportation infrastructure, especially in our most vulnerable communities, adaptive and resilient to the all-but-inevitable effects of global climate change.

Both of these strategies are essential to reach the Biden administration’s climate goals and save Americans from the worst of climate change.

Emissions reduction

How and where the infrastructure law money is spent will have a massive impact on whether it is able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to the bill’s separate $46+ billion dedicated toward resiliency and new climate-focused programs outlined below, states and metro areas are free to spend much of the law’s $650 billion in surface transportation money on climate-friendly projects like transit, active transportation, or repair, thanks to the broad flexibility built into the law. But it could just as well be spent on expanding roadways, inducing more demand for driving and thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions. 

It all comes down to what states choose to prioritize, and how they direct their money. Here’s what we mean, via two potential future scenarios of IIJA spending, courtesy of the Georgetown Climate Center (GCC):

pie chart graphics
Analysis and chart by the Georgetown Climate Center

In the high-emissions scenario (left), highway expansion outpaces highway repair, encouraging yet more driving and doubling down on a system where a car is required just to participate in the economy. But the low-emissions scenario (right) heavily prioritizes repair and shifts five percent of funds toward transit, providing room for communities to provide for multimodal accessibility and move away from a dependence on cars. (According to the GCC, our recent spending/priorities are somewhere in between these two scenarios.) Both scenarios are legal and valid uses of infrastructure law money, but represent two radically different spending approaches.

But only one of these scenarios will bring a net decrease in transportation emissions:

bar chart graphic element
The change in transportation emissions over the next 20 years, with zero representing the levels we were set to hit without the new infrastructure law. The vertical axis is measured in cumulative million metric tons (MMT) of CO2. Analysis and chart by the Georgetown Climate Center

When one-tenth of a degree of warming could make the difference in extreme weather events, the difference between these two scenarios is massive. Especially when the GCC’s model predicts that the high-emissions scenario would in fact substantially increase emissions above where we would be without the infrastructure law.1

Each of the largest formula grant programs (like the NHPP and STBG) and every other program with broad eligibility can and should be used to reduce emissions by enabling modes of travel other than cars. In fact, most of the infrastructure law’s funding could be marshaled toward either of the scenarios, so we will not list every specific program in this post. Check out our IIJA hub for guides on how to make sure the low-emissions scenario wins out, category by category. But three climate-focused programs are worth noting:

The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement (CMAQ) Program: This formula grant program is funded annually at about $2.6 billion (up from $2.4 billion) and can be used for a wide range of projects that reduce congestion and therefore air quality. The IIJA allows states to spend CMAQ funds for operating public transit and shared micromobility, including bike share and shared scooter systems, as well as for the purchase of medium- or heavy-duty zero emission vehicles and related charging equipment.

The Carbon Reduction Program: States receive more money overall under the IIJA, but this new program requires them to set aside about 2.56 percent of their total apportionment toward reducing transportation emissions. There is a loophole, though: states can redirect this money into their highly flexible STBG funds if the Secretary certifies that the state has reduced transportation emissions on a per capita and per unit of economic output basis. (More about fixing this loophole under “what the administration can do” below.) Of the new carve-out, 65 percent of the program’s funds are to be allocated by population in the state, whereas the remaining 35 percent is at the discretion of states. For areas with populations over 200,000, the metropolitan planning organization (MPO) administers that 65 percent local share of program funding for eligible projects. These can include planning, designing, and building on- and off-road active transportation facilities and improvements to the roadway right-of-way to facilitate reductions in transportation emissions and congestion.

Reduction of Truck Emissions at Port Facilities Program: This new discretionary grant program, funded at $400 million over five years, will be distributed to America’s ports so they can invest in technology and operational efficiencies to reduce emissions from idling trucks. They can also use the money to electrify their operations and conduct the required workforce development and training therein.

Adaptation and resilience

Catastrophic hurricanes, heat waves, flooding, and other extreme weather events devastating American communities have become more frequent due to climate change and will happen more often as global warming worsens. So while we reduce emissions, we must also work to protect people from these events, with a focus on the disproportionate impact of climate-related disasters and public health hazards (like urban heat islands) on marginalized communities. The kinds of adaptation and resilience resources outlined below should focus first and foremost on these communities. The EPA’s action on clean water justice is a good model for environmental justice in climate resilience. 

The National Highway Performance Program (NHPP), which accounts for over half of all Highway Trust Fund formula program spending, expanded its mission to address resilience, clearing the way to use these highway dollars to upgrade or repair existing assets to make them more resilient. It is still only an option on a menu of uses, but advocates can now pressure states to use NHPP funding for this newly stated purpose: “mitigate the cost of damages from sea level rise, extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires, or other natural disasters.” 

The most direct funding mechanism for adaptation and resilience is the Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT) Program. Split between competitive and formula grants, the program is designed to help communities anticipate, prepare for, and adapt their transportation systems to natural disasters. The $7.3 billion (over five years) formula portion can be used by states and MPOs to build more resilient roads, transit, or ports, such as through the elevation or hardening of key infrastructure, as well as adjacent infrastructure like flood gates and culverts. The competitive grants, funded at $1.4 billion over the next five years, can be used for many of the same purposes, with more of a focus on access to services and evacuation routes. 

The Healthy Streets Program is a competitive grant program that dedicates $100 million a year (subject to annual appropriations) to address the urban heat island effect. Local, regional, tribal, and state governments can apply for funding to make improvements to tree canopies, porous pavement, and other cooling projects.

Many states like Rhode Island have found federal flood mapping inadequate to capture evolving risk, so the law provides the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with $492 million to develop improved flood mapping and water modeling which could inform critical areas for future resilience investment. This will improve existing resources like the Sea Level Rise Viewer (which you should check out if you have not).

Finally, USDOT will provide for the establishment of 10 regional Centers of Excellence for Resilience and Adaptation and one national Center of Excellence for Resilience and Adaptation, each receiving $5 million annual grants to research resilience and adaptation technology, support data collection, and develop new approaches to keeping our communities safe.

How else could the administration advance our climate goals?

Other than prioritizing projects that do the most to lower emissions when awarding competitive grants, the Biden administration can pull a couple other administrative levers to make sure that federal action is oriented toward a lower-emission future. 

As noted above about the Carbon Reduction Program, the Secretary of Transportation can allow states to divert CRP money to their highly flexible STBG pot, likely resulting in projects that will lead to much higher transportation emissions. So USDOT needs to codify strict guidelines for determining sufficient emissions reductions before allowing states to shift these funds—protecting against a future administration allowing states to fund projects that do not actually lower emissions.

Any efforts to address climate change should focus on those who are and will be most burdened by its effects. Some essential steps include focusing on communities with a history of underinvestment, addressing comorbidities like asthma and heart disease, and accounting for flooding vulnerabilities in marginalized communities (and conversely, climate change-induced gentrification in marginalized communities). The administration should continue to push guidance to include those strategies in formula and discretionary grant distribution.

USDOT should require clearer and more robust data for the public on transportation emissions. For one, induced demand should be included in transportation growth modeling. Also, USDOT should track transportation emissions per capita by state and publish results and trends online. They should include emissions reduction from the system, not just vehicles.

So what?

Many of the Biden administration’s most serious emissions reduction policies were in the (stalled) Build Back Better Act, but the future of that bill is uncertain and advocates should continue to push for emissions-slashing transportation policies not only at the federal level, but state, regional, and local level. 

The infrastructure law largely gives states the flexibility to do what they like with climate-related money. So now, the onus of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and making our communities more resilient falls to states and localities. Whether you are a planner, a legislator, an advocate, or a concerned citizen, now is the time to raise the alarm and make sure infrastructure money is spent in a way that minimizes the impact of climate change on American communities.

Transit adaptability during the COVID-19 pandemic

Blue Pittsburgh bus

Transit agencies across the United States have struggled with decreased ridership, safety hazards, and low morale as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet some have responded by changing their approach to better serve everyday riders, make transit free or more affordable, and rethink what the future of transit should look like to reduce emissions and provide access for those who need it most.

Blue Pittsburgh bus
Port Authority of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) buses. Flickr photo by Can Pac Swire.

This post was written by Devin Willis, program associate at Smart Growth America. It is the fourth of a series of posts on this topic—find the full set here. Some of the agencies profiled in this piece were interviewed with support from the Kresge Foundation. 

This series has explored how public transit is an essential part of mitigating climate change by reducing emissions. Connecting more people to their everyday destinations via public transit offers a way to cut back on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and transportation emissions. 

We’ve been writing this series against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has presented unprecedented challenges for transit agencies and the millions of riders they serve. Transit providers all over the country are struggling with revenue loss due to the massive ridership drop in 2020, service cuts, driver shortages and illness, vaccine skepticism, and low morale. Although the funds for transit in the 2021 infrastructure bill will help, those funds can’t help fund operations for most transit agencies or undo the damage caused by the pandemic. (The American Rescue Plan, passed during the pandemic, does specifically provide emergency operations support for transit agencies.) 

This is a slight detour from our series about the potential of reducing emissions with more transit, but we wanted to profile a few transit agencies that shifted their approach during this historic pandemic to provide better access for their riders and rethink the future of transit in their communities—both of which are stepping stones to more significant improvements that can help reduce emissions.

Richmond, VA preserved ridership levels with fare-free transit and a past network redesign

Sheltered Richmond bus stop by a bus only lane
GRTC bus rapid transit. Flickr photo by BeyondDC.

Unlike many transit agencies nationwide, Richmond’s public transit only suffered a relatively modest drop in ridership, and has already recovered local bus ridership to pre-pandemic levels. This is likely due in part to a handful of bold actions on the part of the city government and the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC). GRTC CEO Julie Timm, hired just six months before the pandemic, attributes their success to three main steps taken:

1) The strength of the 2018 network redesign connecting essential workers to jobs; 2) the extensive COVID protective measures enacted early and throughout the pandemic to protect staff and riders; and 3) the ongoing commitment to Zero Fare operations to protect the health and financial stability of our riders. GRTC’s focus on connecting people to essential resources resulted in higher sustained ridership.

As Timm notes, before the pandemic in 2018, GRTC implemented a significant redesign of its bus routes to improve access and produce faster, more consistent service. Their redesign includes new route names and numbers (routes are now named after major roads that are well known to locals like Hull Street), increased bus frequency, and easier connections. This service redesign successfully produced an increase in ridership every month between June 2018 and February 2020, reaching a full 29 percent increase over that time period and providing a solid foundation to build upon during the difficulties of the pandemic.

The most notable change that GRTC made during the pandemic was the decision by the GRTC and Mayor Levar Stoney in March of 2020 to suspend all fare collection from bus riders. In Richmond, the majority of the bus service ridership and revenue comes from the often economically distressed households of essential and low-income riders. This shift to 100 percent free transit spared many families and workers from having to choose between their bus fare and other needs like food, medicine, and employment access.

While Richmond was not the only city to introduce fare-free policies during the pandemic, GRTC is among the more successful cities to do so, effectively preserving the city’s bus ridership and maintaining the zero fare policy longer term. And two years later, GRTC is continuing to offer fare-free transit while most other cities that did so have since returned to their previous fare policies. The GRTC was awarded $8 million in state grant funding from the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation to continue experimenting with the effects of zero fare policy over the next three years through June of 2025. The City of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University have agreed to match this funding in support of the zero fare policy and its positive effect on bus riders.

Atlanta, GA looks to restructure service to respond to changing needs

MARTA buses in Atlanta. Flickr photo by James Williamor.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Agency (MARTA) had approximately 110 bus routes with over four million passengers per month. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic MARTA, like many other US transit agencies, watched ridership crater. And in the intervening two years of the pandemic, they have struggled to bring their ridership back to pre-pandemic levels. At present, MARTA’s ridership is approximately 65 percent of pre-pandemic levels. 

Similar to Richmond’s 2018 redesign but taking place during the pandemic, MARTA launched a major initiative to restructure bus service as a response to the pandemic and to better address the needs of residents. MARTA is currently leading a major online and in-person community engagement effort, soliciting feedback and ideas regarding new potential bus routes and service types. MARTA is posing key questions to its riders directly about the tradeoffs between service frequency and breadth of coverage directly: do riders want to see fewer routes with more reliable, frequent service between highly-trafficked areas (similar to the changes Richmond made, as well as Columbus and Houston) or more routes in more neighborhoods but less convenient service on those routes? Following the engagement, the proposed redesign concept will be released in the spring of 2022.

In addition to the bus network redesign, MARTA has also begun to experiment with mobile ticketing and fare collection to ensure the wellbeing of transit operators and riders. The agency added a mobile ticketing system in order to make transit use more contactless and limit the spread of coronavirus. MARTA hopes to make these changes permanent.

Pittsburgh, PA reroutes buses to better serve low-income riders

Pittsburgh’s Port Authority of Allegheny County lost 80 percent of its ridership during the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, the Port Authority’s transit network was historically focused on connecting suburban commuters to downtown Pittsburgh from residential and suburban areas in the surrounding region. When the pandemic hit and many of those office jobs switched temporarily or permanently to remote work, this type of commuter ridership dried up almost completely. 

Like many other transit agencies, the pandemic spurred the Port Authority to reconsider how best to serve its lower-income passengers who rely on public transportation and may not have other options. Pittsburgh increased bus and rail frequency for 37 percent of the neighborhoods within its service area. This is part of a larger shift away from commuter routes and toward providing more service in low-income neighborhoods. Pittsburgh’s transit agency has also added more off-peak and weekend hours to accommodate riders who do not work on a 9-to-5 schedule. 

The Port Authority also implemented changes in the fare system to encourage different types of riders to use the bus system. They recently introduced a modest fare proposal that would restructure the bus fare pass from a calendar-based weekly and monthly pass system to a more flexible 7- and 31-day pass system. This move is a good first step as it removes the bus pass from the commuter-centric five-day week and allows the bus system to better serve non-commuters such as persons traveling on the weekend or outside of rush hours. Locals have pushed for even more significant changes, including fare-free service or a similar policy. One proposal recommends that fares be limited for low-income passengers who are SNAP/EBT beneficiaries.

What’s next

The steps these agencies have taken are examples of what other agencies can do to increase ridership and safety in the pandemic. While the challenges faced by transit agencies during the COVID-19 crisis are very real and there are not easy solutions, the agencies profiled here were able to respond to the changing needs that they observed, focusing on providing access for those who need it most, potentially reducing emissions in the process by improving access and ridership. This type of responsive, nimble approach to transportation infrastructure will help make transit a viable alternative to driving and will help us reach our climate goals.

Pro-tip: Invest in the solution, not in the problem

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Congress and states love to create small, discrete programs to solve big transportation problems. They don’t like to stop the types of investments that are causing the problems, even when far more money is perpetuating the issues those new programs are meant to solve. With historic amounts of infrastructure funding headed into states’ hands even as streets are growing more dangerous and we urgently need environmental solutions, it’s time to change that strategy.

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

Our transportation system has a problem. Every time Congress tries to solve a big transportation challenge, they’re only willing to invest in a small solution.

Take the new infrastructure law (the IIJA). To help fix today’s issues related to climate, safety, equity, and repair, Congress set aside small pots of cash. Then they dumped the rest of their cash into a whole lot more of the same.

Congress doesn’t seem to realize that they’re just feeding the beast, as seen in our latest illustration by visual artist Jean Wei. Flexible formula funds, their favorite one-size-fits-all solution to infrastructure woes, are making our climate, safety, equity, and repair needs 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."
Illustration produced for T4America by Jean Wei

It’s true that states don’t have to use these flexible dollars this way. In fact, they can easily use these funds to address the problems that they claim are priorities. But that’s not what they’ve historically done. Instead, they’ve used formula funds to build more and more dangerous roads. And they’re willing to go to bat over their right to use these funds to make their problems worse. At a recent Senate committee hearing, Senator Capito made this cyclical argument:

This is a bipartisan bill that we passed. There is a climate title in there. There is an emphasis on funding resiliency, greenhouse gas mitigation, carbon emissions, healthy streets. This is an area that we are deeply committed to. But these are grant programs, these are not the formula dollars that go out. So I want to make the distinction and, would you agree, these are two separate programs, or pots of money so to speak? So the discussion that I’m having with you on this guide, doesn’t really apply to the climate title parts of the bill.

She’s saying that all of the new, little grant programs they created in the IIJA are designed to solve those (enormous!) problems. But the enormous piles of formula dollars are sacrosanct and they are for roads, bridges, or whatever each state decides is most important—not those other issues.

It’s clear that the small climate title alone isn’t going to be able to do the heavy lifting to reduce emissions and improve resiliency. The same is true for money set aside for safety, repair, and equity. To address these priorities, states can and should use their flexibility and dip into the historic levels of formula funds that are readily at their disposal. The longer they continue to pretend that these smaller programs are enough, all while going all-in on building more dangerous roads, the larger the beast will grow.

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VIDEO: Beth Osborne explains our broken approach to setting speed limits with WSJ

Cars going at different speeds on a road with a 35 mph speed limit

T4America director Beth Osborne joined Wall Street Journal correspondent George Downs to explain why one controversial method for setting speed limits results in higher and higher speeds.

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about the increasing danger of U.S. roadways, and recently, USDOT released their road safety strategy, which included advice for updated guidance on setting safe speeds and the 85th percentile rule. To explain why this outdated rule for setting speed limits actually leads to higher speeds, Beth Osborne sat down with George Downs. The visuals really nail it!

“A lot of people believe we say, ‘Let’s set the speed limit there and design the road around it.’ We actually do the exact reverse.”

Watch the full video below.

Read the transcript.

The infrastructure law and boosting access to jobs and services

a farmers market filled with pedestrians
a farmers market filled with pedestrians
Image from Pxfuel

The ultimate point of transportation spending should be to connect people to jobs and services. But that’s not what we primarily use as a measure of success and the new infrastructure law maintains the status quo of focusing on moving vehicles quickly as a (poor) proxy for access. This means that, absent some changes that USDOT can still make, states and communities will need to make the most of the flexibilities within the infrastructure law to advance multimodal access to jobs and services.

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.

For decades, America has failed to accomplish the most foundational transportation policy goal: moving people (and goods) from one place to another. As it stands today, too many people are driving too far to reach jobs and essential services like schools or fresh food because we fail to measure access and all of our policies and measures incentivize speed of travel. American cities largely build infrastructure to move vehicles as far as possible, as fast as possible. Instead, we ought to measure success as “access.”2 At a base level, this just involves finding ways to measure the jobs and services people can access within a certain distance by any mode. And just as crucially, this approach isn’t just limited to measuring vehicles and considers all of the members of a community, regardless of how they get around or any limits to their mobility.

Prioritizing access to destinations in transportation planning will help reduce emissions, make our roads safer, promote public health through more walking, biking or rolling, connect more people to opportunity, and get more for our infrastructure dollars. However, despite the influx of cash and promises of innovation brought on by the 2021 infrastructure law, its programs remain painfully status-quo in their focus on vehicular movement and their lack of accountability. But even with that said, the law’s broad flexibility still allows state and local agencies that want to prioritize access to do so through the range of programs at their disposal.

What’s in the law?

Within the infrastructure law, there’s one dedicated program that directly addresses access to jobs and services in a significant way: USDOT will use the Transportation Access Pilot Program to work with a select number of states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to measure the potential changes in accessibility to jobs and services for a wide spectrum of people and goods from transportation investments.3 This is a good starting point, and T4America strongly encourages USDOT to maximize the opportunities from this program to create a cultural shift in transportation planning and decision-making toward focusing on access. 

But this point should be made very clearly: Special programs or funds are NOT required to start prioritizing and improving access.

Nearly every single other large flexible formula program permits states, MPOs and localities to shift their emphasis toward improving access and make the best use of the available funding toward this end. If your state or agency plans to make this a priority, then all of your very flexible funding should be used to support that priority.4

The Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP) sets aside 10 percent of a state’s second biggest pot of funding (The Surface Transportation Block Grant Program) for projects that enable accessibility through modes other than driving. The Safe Routes to School program is designed to boost access to public primary and secondary schools (and can be funded through the flexibility provided in the core highway formula programs like NHPP, STBG, HSIP, CRP, CMAQ). The Reconnecting Communities Pilot and Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment competitive grant programs are both valuable resources that can be used to bring multimodal accessibility to areas fractured by divisive or vehicle-dependent infrastructure.

Since the formula-based programs below are not competitive, they are perhaps the best opportunities for states, MPOs and local governments to prioritize accessibility. Until USDOT makes some fundamental shifts away from the counterproductive measures that they currently use to measure success on specific projects, the onus will be on these state and local agencies to maximize these programs to improve access.

Formula programs

ProgramAuthorized fundingCan be used for:Should be used to:
Complete Streets set-asideMinimum 2.5% of state and MPO apportionmentsMultimodal streets and designated networks for active transportation (walking, cycling).Directly and comprehensively connect people with jobs, schools, housing, healthcare, childcare and community centers.
Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP)$7.2 billion over five years. (10% of each state’s Surface Transportation Block Grant program funds)Recreational trails, bike/ped projects, micromobility, and other types of transportation alternatives.Expand and make accessible active transportation and micromobility networks centered around essential and popular destinations and integrate them with public transit.
Safe Routes to SchoolMinimum $1 million apportionment to states (subject to appropriations), funding based on enrollment numbers for primary and secondary schools. States can leverage core highway formula funds to fund the program.Projects that enhance students’ ability to walk and bike to school.Connect schools with residential areas and community centers with active transportation networks.
Carbon Reduction Program$6.4 billionPlanning, designing, and building on- and off-road active transportation facilities; roadway right-of-way improvements.Fund complete street designs that allow communities to access essential and popular destinations and integrate into public transit.
Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT)$7.3 billion (formula grant portion)Extreme weather resilience and emergency response infrastructure.Provide evacuation and recovery mobility to all road users. Build biking, walking, and rolling infrastructure into all resiliency plans and evacuation routes.
Bridge Formula Program$26.5 billionReplacing, rehabilitating, preserving, protecting, and construction highway and off-network bridges.Make sure that every bridge repaired under this program includes active transportation infrastructure, not just to check a box, but to connect to adjacent active transportation networks.

Competitive grant programs

The following programs are competitively funded (discretionary). Winning these grants is tied to strong local matching funds (at 20–50 percent of the project cost).

ProgramAuthorized fundingCan be used for:Should be used to:
Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program$200 million annuallyPlanning and construction grants to reconnect communities divided by viaducts, highways or other principal arterials. (Highway teardowns, and other types of projects.)Make improving access the primary consideration as connections are rebuilt between communities, improve active transportation and transit access.
Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program$200 million annually, subject to appropriationsActive transportation projects and planning grants that build upon a local/regional/state network.Focus networks around essential and popular community destinations and integrate them with transit facilities.
Transportation Access Pilot ProgramNo specified amount, funded by USDOT’s operating budgetDeveloping an accessibility data set, making that data set available, and establishing evaluation measures for states, MPOs and regional transportation organizations.Set accessibility measures centered around equitable outcomes.
Carbon Reduction Program$6.4 billionPlanning, designing, and building on- and off-road active transportation facilities; roadway right-of-way improvements.Fund complete street designs that allow communities to access essential and popular destinations and integrate into public transit.
Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT)$7.3 billion (formula grant portion)Extreme weather resilience and emergency response infrastructure.Provide evacuation and recovery mobility to all road users. Build biking, walking, and rolling infrastructure into all resiliency plans and evacuation routes.
Bridge Formula Program$26.5 billionReplacing, rehabilitating, preserving, protecting, and construction highway and off-network bridges.Make sure that every bridge repaired under this program includes active transportation infrastructure, not just to check a box, but to connect to adjacent active transportation networks.

Outside of its funding streams, the infrastructure law introduces several policy changes that positively impact accessibility within existing laws. The Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loan program now more explicitly calls for the inclusion of projects that are within walking distance and are accessible to public transit systems. The State and Metropolitan Transportation Planning Act now calls for statewide and metropolitan agencies to coordinate transportation, housing, and economic development within their federally mandated plans.

What can the administration do to improve access?

The most important thing the administration needs to do on this count is to repeal their guidance for the value of time, which every agency uses to evaluate most transportation projects. This outdated measure incorrectly assumes that increased traffic speeds lead to time savings, when in fact it mostly just incentivizes sprawling development that spreads people and destinations apart, negating time savings as travel distances grow and grow. Instead, the administration should push for the adoption of data-driven accessibility-focused measures. We dive deep into this specific measure and offer four concrete recommendations for USDOT to follow in our blog post here.

Because Congress chose to make the new $3.2 billion Rural Surface Transportation program a competitive grant program, USDOT can shape this program to prioritize rural projects that actually improve access for more people rather than just the speed of travel for some people driving. This new program is designed to increase connectivity, improve safety, and facilitate the movement of goods and people, but many state DOTs just put forward simple highway expansion projects for rural areas that fail to measurably improve access in those communities. Rural communities deserve a better approach, as we’ve written. USDOT’s guidance for these rural competitive grants should require a multimodal approach and define connectivity, safety/reliability, economic growth and quality of life for drivers and nondrivers alike. 

The administration can also revise the Eligibility of Pedestrian and Bicycle Improvements Under Federal Transit Law to allow for bikeshare eligibility (and all shared micromobility for that matter) within the Section 5311 (rural transportation) program. While there are significant transit needs in rural communities, we should allow rural communities to decide for themselves about the best ways to improve access within their communities.

How can the new money advance our goals?

Climate

Assessing new transportation projects based on their accessibility benefits, rather than by travel time or level of service, could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.5 Today’s predominant practices exacerbate sprawl and lead to longer trips overall, which is directly tied to increasing emissions. And while most road expansion projects are justified because of their supposed ability to reduce congestion and because of improvements to the “value of time” noted above, in the end they actually just produce more congestion on our roads. Since transportation and land use are so interconnected, integrating transportation and land use measures that combat sprawl and reduce vehicle miles traveled (and emissions) requires assessing projects for their effects on accessibility.

Equity

More often than not, disadvantaged communities bear the brunt of the safety and climate issues brought about by our focus on vehicle speed. As we noted in our post on the value of time measure above, “a highway that destroys a community (see I-49 in Shreveport) is easily justified on the grounds of time savings, even if locals lose 15 minutes having to walk out of their way to cross a now-dangerous street or can no longer walk to their destination at all because a new highway blocks their path. The impact to their time is literally never considered as part of the process of developing such a project.” This is just one example of how focusing instead on access would improve outcomes for more people, especially those who are most harmed by today’s current practices. Our focus should be on bringing more jobs and essential services within reach to those disadvantaged by today’s practices.

So what?

As is the case with many of our other goals, it’s now up to the state, regional or local governments receiving this funding to use it responsibly and to be held accountable for their projects. And there’s no reason why we can’t start to pivot to measuring access instead of leaning on outdated 1950s measures like vehicle speed. With the amount of data currently available that can be used to measure the accessibility benefits of projects, there is no excuse not to start transitioning toward this goal as our guiding light for transportation decisions. And local advocates should start pushing their agencies in this direction.

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

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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

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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. 6 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.”

Longer trips, faster speeds, fewer options: What’s really valued in the “value of time”?

A pedestrian walks along the edge of a road filled with cars.
A pedestrian walks along the edge of a road filled with cars.
Whose time are we saving? T4America photo by Steve Davis.

Despite its name, the federal “value of time” guidance doesn’t actually value travelers’ time at all. Instead, this arcane but influential measure focuses on one thing: vehicle speed. The result is more dangerous, less convenient travel for everyone.

Bear with us for this one.

This may seem completely arcane, but the federal value of time guidance has monumental implications because assigning a value to time gained or lost guides nearly every transportation decision. This guidance instructs transportation agencies on how to measure (1) the current performance of the existing transportation system and (2) the cost and benefit of future projects. In other words, when agencies are deciding whether to add a crosswalk or expand a highway, they use this guidance to help inform their decision. Unfortunately, current guidance is flawed, costing taxpayers’ time, money, and safety.

“Time savings” are mainly determined by vehicle speed

When modeling for time savings, agencies focus on only one thing: getting and keeping vehicles moving. As long as vehicles are moving faster, agencies predict that their new project will save time. It doesn’t matter if, to speed up vehicles, daily trips end up being longer and taking more time overall. 

Imagine you’re driving to a grocery store located on the left side of a busy street. But allowing cars to turn left safely on this intersection would halt the flow of oncoming traffic and slow down car travel through the corridor. Instead, you have to drive to the next intersection and make three right turns to reach the grocery store. Your trip is longer, but overall, vehicle speeds stay high. This would be considered a time savings win under the current system.

Expensive roadway expansions justified by projected time savings because they’ll result in less traffic—promises that often never materialize thanks to induced demand—are another example. As the State Smart Transportation Initiative recently pointed out, as roadways expand and speeds increase, people just tend to spread out more. “So, while the distance a traveler is able to reach in a given amount of time is increased, there are not necessarily additional destinations available to them,” as Aaron Westling at SSTI noted. Even if added lanes miraculously solve traffic and cars can go twice as fast, people will still find themselves taking longer trips as destinations move further apart.

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

How do agencies get their numbers anyway?

For vehicles and transit, agencies measure end-to-end travel times on a segment of roadway. Yes, you read that right—they aren’t measuring how fast people are able to travel from their origin to their destination but how fast people can travel on individual segments of road. 

Agencies can often believe they’ll help cars move faster, even though they’re relying on outdated or flawed models. Failure to account for induced demand is a great example of this. The result: time and money are wasted on projects that make travel longer, more dangerous, and in some cases, even slower.

Whose time is considered worth saving? Whose time isn’t even being measured?

The value of time guidance puts heavy value on the “nine-to-five” (or peak period) business trip. Travel to and from work is given greater importance than what the guidance refers to as “personal” or “leisure” trips like travel to schools, daycares, and doctors’ offices, let alone off-peak/non-traditional work trips that are more common for low-income workers. To explain this imbalance, the guidance claims that the schedule of work, dictated by the employer, creates more structure for measurement, even though schools and daycares track late arrivals and doctors can cancel appointments when patients arrive late.

Local travelers get the worst of this bias. While agencies focus on making it easier for cars to move quickly, a highway that destroys a community (see I-49 in Shreveport) is easily justified on the grounds of time savings, even if locals lose 15 minutes having to walk out of their way to cross a now-dangerous street or can no longer walk to their destination at all because a new highway blocks their path. The impact to their time is literally never considered as part of the process of developing such a project.

As another example, the small changes that result in faster car travel often make travel for other people more dangerous, which is never considered. Look no further than slip lanes, which exist solely to keep vehicles flowing quickly through intersections, directly through marked pedestrian crossings. These projects have a disproportionate impact on the time and safety of the people walking who have to cross bigger distances and make extra crossings. In most metro areas, low-income people of color are more likely to be pedestrians, while the white and wealthy are more likely to be driving and enjoying the “time savings” this deadly design feature provides.

On top of this, in traditional travel modeling processes, pedestrians and cyclists aren’t even considered. Federal guidance assigns a possible value for active transportation, but only if agencies can figure out on their own how they’ll measure it. Transportation agencies end up being able to assign a value to driver time savings, however inaccurate, but not to cyclist and pedestrian time savings. Active transportation is a cheaper, healthier way to travel that’s far better for the environment than vehicle travel, but we stack the deck against realizing those benefits.

The value of time savings of longer distance trips is also worth more, so a ten-minute saving for a business traveler from DC to Miami is given more weight than saving ten minutes on a daily, local commute.

Worse still, value of time is scaled to household income. A wealthy person with more choice on where they live and more ability to pay is valued higher when they save time. Meanwhile, someone who works minimum wage, who has fewer options for places to live, is valued less in time savings.

Recommendations

The Biden administration should repeal the current value of time guidance and replace it, taking into account the advice below. Current federal guidance accomplishes little in actual time savings, and what little time it does save often benefits only a privileged few at the expense of the safety and convenience of all other travelers. All travelers deserve quick, safe, and convenient access to the goods and services they need. This is true no matter how you travel, no matter where you travel, and no matter when you travel.

Stop overestimating the value of time

One issue is that the models overestimate how exactly much travelers truly value time savings. One of the easiest ways to determine this is to look at drivers’ willingness to pay tolls to travel faster. Surveys find little evidence that people are willing to pay for time savings. Among others, there are examples of people in Texas sitting in traffic to avoid tolls, or drivers avoiding a new tolled bridge in Louisville which undermines the very basis of monetizing this benefit. 

Establish a minimum threshold for time savings

If a person saves five minutes on their commute each day, that won’t translate to sufficient time for work or a hobby or some other new, productive use. That’s why economists dismiss any time savings less than 10 minutes as “noise,” but under federal guidance, time savings as low as 10 seconds are considered valuable. Establishing a time savings minimum would ensure that costly projects result in real benefits to taxpayers.

Calculate the true time-saving value of other forms of transportation

People also value their time differently. Someone who bikes to work might prefer this method of travel over sitting in traffic. If getting some exercise during their commute means they can avoid a trip to the gym, a person might even feel that they’ve saved time—even though these time savings wouldn’t show up in agencies’ calculations. Agencies also ignore the benefits of forms of transportation like public transit that allow people to be productive by working, reading, or relaxing more on their trip than someone driving a car. 

Calculating these benefits wouldn’t be difficult and could result in better transportation for everyone. If guidance included clearer and equally promoted value on health benefits and credited multitask transit riding as higher time savings over single task driving, agencies could better prioritize other modes of travel.

Stop tipping the scales for nine-to-five commuters

As teleworking during the pandemic altered travel schedules, agencies should also take advantage of the opportunity to reevaluate their emphasis on the nine-to-five business trip and give nontraditional work schedules, as well as necessary trips outside of work, more consideration.

Remember: it’s about time, not about speed

There are more ways to reduce time than simply increase vehicle speed. Take freight as an example. To save time, freight logistics experts don’t wait five years for a capital project as agencies do for roadways (and the benefits for these road expansion projects are quickly eroded by induced demand). In that time, freight companies make hundreds if not thousands of changes to their operations and practices that earn them more benefit than merely moving trains faster. They create redundancies in their system, which translates to choice for consumers. Furthermore, they recognize that the real time savings comes from warehousing and positioning needed goods closer to the customer, so that their trips become shorter overall. Yet nearly every model and metric we use ignores the growing length of our trips. 

To actually save travelers’ time, agencies need to take local travelers into account and consider how projects impact the length of trips, not just how quickly cars can go.

How will the infrastructure law improve active transportation and Complete Streets?

A Complete Street with a short crosswalk, two bike lanes, two lanes for cars, and wide sidewalks for pedestrians
A Complete Street with a short crosswalk, two bike lanes, two lanes for cars, and wide sidewalks for pedestrians
Screen grab from our recent video “Not just a way to get from A to B”, a look at Tucson, AZ’s attempts to expand Complete Streets while centering equity.

When done right, active transportation infrastructure can cut greenhouse gas emissions, improve public health, keep people safer, and promote equity. But how will the new infrastructure law’s $650 billion in formula and competitive grant programs help to build safer, Complete Streets? What policies changed to prioritize active transportation investments? Here’s what you need to know, and how you can make these programs and policies work for you.

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.

For the purposes of this piece, active transportation refers to bicycling, walking, and rolling, like on scooters, wheelchairs, segways, and other personal mobility devices—as well as the infrastructure that supports those activities, like bike lanes, trails, and safe sidewalks. These types of bike- and walk-friendly infrastructure are usually present in Complete Streets, which we define as streets for everyone—designed and managed to prioritize safety, comfort, and access to destinations for all people who need to use a street.

Getting more people out walking, biking, and rolling can have enormous benefits to public health, climate, economic growth, and equity. But encouraging more routine trips on these modes requires providing safe and convenient facilities in which more people feel comfortable and safe walking, biking, scooting, or rolling. While the infrastructure law preserves the state’s wide flexibility that most use to prioritize moving vehicles quickly over other forms of transportation, it does create new opportunities to expand and improve active transportation through Complete Streets and other projects.

What’s in the law?

Special programs or funds are NOT required for states to make sizable investments in active transportation. If improving safety and providing other travel options are important to your state or agency, the broad flexibility of the biggest federal programs allows them to shift their funding accordingly.

Active transportation and Complete Streets advocates did manage to get some key provisions into the infrastructure law in the form of both policy changes and new or improved funding opportunities. One new funding opportunity is the new $7.3 billion formula and $1.4 billion competitive PROTECT program for at-risk coastal infrastructure grants, where bike/pedestrian facilities were included as eligible projects. 

Within the largest pot of funding that states and metro areas control (the Surface Transportation Block Grant program), the amount set aside for smaller but vital transportation projects like bikeways, new sidewalks, safe routes to school, and micromobility was increased from 1.5 percent up to 10 percent. The law also lets local municipalities control more of that funding directly by increasing the share of that 10 percent that they directly control from 50 up to 59 percent. Note: the other largest formula programs with which you may be familiar (the alphabet soup of NHPP, STBG, CMAQ, HSIP) have flexibility for active transportation and Complete Streets projects, but states are responsible for flexing those formula dollars for those purposes versus the status quo of valuing vehicles and their speed. 

As is reflected in the table below, states and regional metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) now have to spend at minimum 2.5 percent of their federal planning funds to adopt Complete Streets standards, policies, and prioritization plans as well as to plan for active transportation, among other goals like transit-oriented development that make active transportation easier. 

The new Bridge Formula Program, meant to fix many of the nation’s worst bridges, will be evaluated based on “benefits to non vehicular and public transportation users.” Some groups are optimistic about the active transportation infrastructure that could emerge from these bridge repair projects, but there are numerous loopholes that will allow states to continue leaving these accommodations off as they repair or replace bridges. We want to see USDOT release clear guidance that these bridge projects shall provide benefits to those who bike, walk, and roll. 

Most of the new opportunities in the infrastructure law come through discretionary or competitive funding programs. Here’s a brief guide to the funding programs that can be most easily used for active transportation and Complete Streets projects:

Competitive programs applicable to active transportation

Program nameAuthorized funding (over five years)Can be used for:Should be used to:
Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP)$7.2 billion over five years. (10% of each state’s Surface Transportation Block Grant program funds)Projects that promote modes of transportation other than driving, with notable inclusions being anything eligible under the SRTS program and newly defined “vulnerable road user safety assessments”Build well-planned active transportation networks that provide enough connectivity and access to induce drivers to switch their mode of travel to walking, biking, and/or rolling.
Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program$1 billion, subject to annual appropriations of $200 million each year.“Active transportation” networks (within communities) and spine (between communities) projects.Build well-planned active transportation networks that provide enough connectivity and access to induce drivers to switch their mode of travel to walking and biking
Safe Streets and Roads for All$6 billion“Vision Zero” plans and implementation projects.Protect pedestrians and bicyclists not by moving them away from roads, but by making roads safer.
Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT)$1.4 billion (competitive grant portion)Extreme weather resilience and emergency response infrastructure.Provide evacuation and recovery mobility to all road users. Build biking, walking, and rolling infrastructure into all resiliency plans and evacuation routes.
Local and Regional Infrastructure Project Assistance (a.k.a RAISE competitive grants)$15 billion, up from only $4 billion spent from 2009-2020Local or regional projects that improve safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, economic competitiveness, state of good repair, and connectivity.Build projects that promote active transportation. Capital projects like in Rockford, IL and northwest Indiana as well as planning projects like in Charleston, WV serve as models for successful complete streets RAISE projects.

State and regional formula programs applicable to active transportation

Program nameAuthorized funding (over five years)Can be used for:Should be used to:
Complete Streets set-aside2.5 percent of each MPO’s federal planning fundsProducing Complete Streets standards, facilitating planning for Complete Streets project prioritization plans, and developing active transportation plans.Lead to Complete Streets policies that focus on equity and strong plans for implementation (more on what the best CS policies look like here).
Safe Routes to School Program$1 million minimum to states, formula based on primary and secondary school enrollment numbers. States can leverage core highway formula funds to fund the program.Active transportation and complete streets projects, plus education or enforcement activities that allow students to walk, bike, and roll to school safely.Build complete streets and active transportation facilities that access as many residential and commercial zones as possible.
Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program$13.2 billionAny transportation project that reduces emissions from vehicles, from traffic alleviation to micromobility (bike or scooter share) and electric vehicles.Focus emissions mitigation efforts on mode-shift away from driving, specifically toward enabling active transportation.
Carbon Reduction ProgramAbout 2.56% of each state’s total apportionment from the federal transportation programProjects that support the reduction of transportation greenhouse gas emissions.Give people safe and convenient options to bike, walk, or roll instead of driving by planning, designing, and building active transportation facilities.
Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT)$7.3 billion (formula grant portion)Extreme weather resilience and emergency response infrastructure.Provide evacuation and recovery mobility to all road users. Build biking, walking, and rolling infrastructure into all resiliency plans and evacuation routes.
Bridge Formula Program$26.5 billionReplacing, rehabilitating, preserving, protecting, and construction highway and off-network bridges.Make sure that every bridge repaired under this program includes active transportation infrastructure, not just to check a box, but to connect to adjacent active transportation networks.

How else could the administration promote active transportation?

America’s roads are increasingly dangerous for pedestrians and other vulnerable users. Without addressing that reality, biking, walking, and rolling will remain dangerous and therefore unattractive options.

Though the infrastructure law overall provides a pittance to active transportation while dumping money into the status quo, there are things USDOT can do to improve access to active transportation. For one, they can give teeth to their Safe System approach, encouraging and guiding State DOTs to develop projects that promote safe roads at low speeds. USDOT already has a statutory obligation on the books to prevent projects that “have significant adverse impact on the safety for nonmotorized transportation traffic” (23 U.S. Code 109(m)). USDOT has never enforced or codified internal procedures for that provision, so the department is actually out of compliance with the law and should rectify that with urgency.  

In addition, USDOT should update the MUTCD (the street design manual that all traffic engineers use) to build active transportation priorities into road design from the start.7 USDOT should also release clear guidance on how to best utilize the 2.5 percent Complete Streets planning funds set-aside mentioned above. States and MPOs should look to enhance and improve Complete Streets networks with this funding, not just use this new funding stream for work already underway. 

On a positive note, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) released a memo that, among other things, urged states to simplify the review process for carbon-cutting safety and multimodal projects like bike lanes and sidewalks. This swift language from the administration is encouraging but not binding, and states can still spend the money however they’d like.

USDOT should immediately pursue all avenues for institutionalizing their new road safety strategy which included a full section on the importance of street design and the role it plays in unsafe speeds and safety. Their guidance on revising our broken process for setting speed limits, including moving away from the 85th percentile rule, is powerful, but will fail to have an impact if states ignore it. FHWA should be trying to enshrine this practice with their division administrators and engage state and local traffic engineers in better training.

How can the new money advance our goals?

It can be hard to measure and assess the benefits of increasing active transportation and building safer, Complete Streets. That’s one reason why we at Smart Growth America produced a Benefits of Complete Streets tool to help local communities better measure the potential benefits to health, safety, environment, and economy (using an equity approach) of Complete Streets in your community. Let’s zoom in on how we can maximize climate and equity benefits from the new infrastructure money.

Climate

Vehicle travel is a key contributor to U.S. emissions, so providing people and goods with mobility alternatives is a clear win for climate. But this is a challenge for such a vehicle-dependent country. A 2018 survey found that travel distance and fatigue were the two main reasons why many vehicle trips were not replaced with bike trips. As such, new federally-funded projects should make walking, biking, and rolling as easy, safe, and fast as possible. Walkability audits and assessments, like this survey conducted by the City of Milwaukee in 2021, can help cities plan for Complete Streets and active transportation facilities in the places where they will have the most impact and shift as many trips as possible away from vehicles.

Equity

Biking, walking, and rolling in low-income communities are often hazardous, unpleasant, and inconvenient modes of travel. Good multi-use paths are often located in the wealthy enclaves of many American cities rather than more marginalized communities. This is a major factor contributing to the higher incidence of pedestrian deaths among BIPOC and low-income people. Cities with equitable active transportation plans use two key strategies: data collection and community engagement. Two good examples: Baltimore, MD models equitable data collection in their Complete Streets performance measures and Huntsville, AL has done great community engagement for their demonstration projects. With these strategies in place, every active transportation project has a stronger chance of creating positive equity outcomes and being strong contenders for competitive grant funding from the infrastructure law.

So what?

A new bike lane won’t have much impact if it just connects to dangerous roads on each end. As former Pittsburgh DOT head Karina Ricks said in this terrific video about their city’s Complete Streets policy, it really requires a complete network approach to build Complete Streets and create safe connections that connect many people to many destinations. Despite all the new funding programs, eligibility, and carve-outs, federal funding for active transportation and Complete Streets is still dwarfed by the hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for roads and bridges. Many of those projects will expand roads and increase vehicle speed, making walking, biking, and rolling more dangerous and inconvenient. 

States and localities should be ready to combat this by utilizing their limited active transportation funding in the most effective way possible. And states should use their considerable formula money flexibility to advance active transportation and Complete Streets (they have the authority to do so.) This will include utilizing the above strategies to maximize benefits, but it will also mean positioning for competitive grant application success. Local leaders will benefit from understanding the flexibilities within each funding program so they can make sure they get their share from their state and MPO, whether those entities are friendly to active transportation or not. 

The deep irony here is that for all the promises made by Congress about improving safety and providing more options for people to get around, it will be up to state and local leaders to do the heavy lifting to deliver on those promises and get the most out of this law’s modest provisions for active transportation and Complete Streets. 

(For more information on active transportation and Complete Streets funding in the infrastructure law, check out our funding brief on the topic.)

FHWA Complete Streets report lays out an actionable path for transforming street design to prevent unnecessary deaths and injuries

press release

After the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and USDOT issued a report to Congress this week about Complete Streets, Beth Osborne, Vice President of Transportation at Smart Growth America—the home of the National Complete Streets Coalition—issued this statement: 

“This simple but critical concept of Complete Streets—designing our streets so that everyone can use them safely—was created within our National Complete Streets Coalition almost 20 years ago. After years of working tirelessly to encourage towns, cities, counties, states and the federal government to adopt this approach, we are deeply encouraged to see the concept enshrined and  institutionalized within official USDOT documents, including this report. FHWA has done an excellent job in clearly laying out and describing the actions that are needed throughout the entire federal transportation program to truly build safe streets and roads for all people, including getting better safety data, assessing safety in project development, and making safety the primary goal and Complete Streets the default design.

“The title of this report is also telling. There are certainly ‘Opportunities and Challenges’ when it comes to making our streets safer and more convenient. Now we need to turn those challenges into opportunities and opportunities into reality. Every day the status quo approach stands and transportation agencies are allowed to design, build, or maintain their streets only for cars is a day where we allow the historic levels of death on those roadways to continue. This report gives us a path forward—one that needs to be acted on in the immediate future.

“The National Complete Streets Coalition will continue our hands-on work with states and localities to advance Complete Streets policies and upend our country’s outdated paradigm for street design that has produced a historic increase in traffic injuries and fatalities. We look forward to working closely with FHWA to turn their excellent recommendations into action.”

The National Complete Streets Coalition and Transportation for America are programs of Smart Growth America.

Our advice to USDOT and Congress: Make no little plans

Senator Capito uses visual aids at the EPW hearing
Senator Capito uses visual aids at the EPW hearing
Senator Capito uses visual aids to criticize the FHWA memo. Still from the hearing.

A Senate committee called Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to testify about implementing the new infrastructure law, but much of the day was spent criticizing or defending FHWA’s nonbinding memo encouraging states to prioritize state of good repair, safety, and climate mitigation—displaying a deep confusion in some members of Congress about the limits of USDOT’s authority.

On the heels of the president’s State of the Union address the night before, the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works (EPW) convened a hearing on March 2, 2022 to talk about the infrastructure law. 

Senator Carper (D-DE) opened with a discussion of the pivotal work the Committee took in formulating and passing the infrastructure law last year, and continued to underscore the need to take action on climate change (with Senator Carper noting 28 percent of emissions coming from transportation) as well as safety (after an alarming increase in fatalities, especially for vulnerable road users). 

Over the course of the hearing, various senators chimed in to check on the implementation status of various programs or projects, whether the electrification of the transportation system versus alternative fuel options, truck parking, reconnecting communities, Carbon Reduction and PROTECT formula programs, transportation accessibility, Buy America, or port infrastructure. But a considerable amount of discussion from a number of senators—most notably by ranking member Senator Capito (R-WV)—focused on the nonbinding FHWA memo released on December 16 (which T4America supported as a strong statement about how states should absolutely choose to spend this historic influx of cash).

In her opening remarks, Senator Capito deemed the FHWA memo a threat to the policy framework of the infrastructure law that the committee worked so hard to put together, advancing a partisan Biden administration agenda and creating a system of winners and losers depending on the project. Using large visual aids, Senator Capito accused FHWA of plagiarizing language in the memo about fix-it-first over capacity expansion from the House’s INVEST Act. The crux of Capito’s opposition to the memo is the suggestion of a (non-existent) mandate (and a one-size-fits-all context) in the fix-it-first language over capacity expansion. In later commentary, Senator Cramer (R-ND) went further by noting that the memo was threatening the concept of federalism and the powers that states have.

As Jeff Davis at Eno noted on Twitter, this is completely false:

As Secretary Buttigieg pointed out during the hearing, the memo serves as a values document (not a mandate or part of the infrastructure law), incorporating what USDOT is hearing from states and previous transportation reauthorizations. He also noted it would be a disservice to not remind the states of their flexibility to pursue goals like repair, safety, climate change, and equity.

Secretary Buttigieg at EPW hearing
Secretary Buttigieg at the EPW hearing

Senator Carper jumped into the conversation at this point to provide a core history lesson regarding state of good repair from (1) Congressional values in the federal transportation program that are codified into law and (2) values shared by a previous Republican administration, underscoring how the FHWA memo is entirely consistent with pre-established values. Senator Cardin (D-MD) also added that these values expressed in the FHWA memo are key priorities that are also reflected in the infrastructure law and shouldn’t be surprising.

Senator Cardin uses visual aids at EPW hearing
Senator Cardin at the EPW hearing

Overall, the day was full of much fury, signifying very little.

Republicans on the committee fiercely claimed that this unenforceable, nonbinding memo was in fact enforceable. They claimed that encouraging states to improve the state of repair, improve safety, and reduce the negative impacts of the transportation system goes against Congressional intent, that it will block projects like highway expansions, and that it lays out how competitive grant applications will be reviewed. 

Let us be clear: an unenforceable memo cannot stop anything or make any state choose to spend their money more responsibly. We agree that the language of the law failed to move the needle enough on topics like safety, repair, climate, etc. But we’re frankly shocked to hear the memo’s critics admit their preference for the broken status quo so boldly. This administration will and should evaluate projects for competitive, discretionary funding that they control using their priorities, which is how competitive grant programs have always been implemented by all administrations.  

Those who spent the day vociferously criticizing this memo are either ignorant to the law and how the program works, or they are just boldly stating their lack of interest in the outcomes they promised the American people when they passed the IIJA. Both are really bad news. It’s disconcerting that the bulk of this hearing was spent fighting about a priority statement—an utter waste of time. The lesson we hope USDOT gets from this is to be bold and not waste time with little plans. This modest action they took got all the blow back of a truly controversial move while in fact accomplishing nothing. As we move forward on the implementation of the IIJA, we hope USDOT and the EPW Committee reflects on the words of the architect and planner Daniel Burnham:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistency.

One year in, how is the Biden team really doing on transportation?

President Biden wears a mask as he signs executive orders
President Biden wears a mask as he signs executive orders
Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz

A year in, the Biden administration helped pass historic investments in infrastructure and spoke out about safety, repair, and equity, but a lot of potential improvements have been left on the table.  Congress passes the laws but the administration has to implement them. Here’s our update on their progress and the opportunities still left on the table for them to advance their stated goals. 

We recapped the administration’s progress after Biden’s first 100 days and again six months in. The biggest change since last July was the completion of the new infrastructure law. But as noted below, that’s really only the beginning of the work for the administration. 

The bottom line: A full year into the administration, we are still waiting for a lot of action on the various priorities we produced a year ago as they were taking office. Any new progress on our wish list since that six-month review has been meager, at best. This lack of progress makes the next year even more challenging. The massive, new infrastructure bill is missing the updates and reforms needed to promote the administration’s priorities while creating a mammoth workload for USDOT. The administration needs to make major progress soon if they want to impact how the IIJA’s funds—already being committed by state DOTs!—are spent.

Here’s what you need to know:

The good: Vocal support for safety, repair, and climate

Encouraging states to make smart investments

Shortly after the passage of the infrastructure bill, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) released a memo urging states to prioritize federal funds for repair projects and simplify the review process for carbon-cutting safety and multimodal projects like bike lanes and rapid transit lanes. While it isn’t binding (states retain all the flexibility in the world to use federal dollars for expansion instead of repair), we were encouraged to see the administration swiftly and directly speak out about the nation’s repair needs. 

Unfortunately, several states and members of Congress have criticized this and even claimed it has some binding authority. We wish! It is possible this backlash comes from ignorance of the program overall and the fact that DOTs retain full discretion over their funding. It is also possible that they are hoping to discourage the administration from taking more meaningful steps. If the administration cowers in the face of this somewhat performative backlash from DOTs—especially after they used “crumbling roads and bridges” as a central justification for the infrastructure bill’s high price tag—progress will halt with this memo.

94 percent of traffic crashes are NOT caused by human error

In January, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) took the misleading and oft-cited statistic that “94 percent of crashes are caused by human error” off of their website. Some examples of the types of “human error” this statistic refers to: 

  • A pedestrian without access to a crosswalk for a mile in either direction attempts to cross the street and is hit by a driver going the speed limit, which happens to be too fast to yield.
  • A driver is traveling down a wide open road at the 60 mph speed limit. The speed limit changes from 60 mph to 30 mph, but the driver doesn’t see the sign and no design changes signal a need to slow down. The driver continues traveling at 60 mph.
  • A driver in a large SUV turns right on a curved slip lane, indicating that they need not slow down on the turn. At that speed, there is no time to react to a pedestrian in the marked crosswalk. The high front end of their vehicle obscures their view of the road, and they collide with a five-foot-tall pedestrian that has just begun to cross the street.

These are all failures of design, not evidence of human errors.

This false statistic has misdirected attention away from the dangerous design of roadways, which fails to include adequate space for pedestrians and cyclists and makes safe driving unintuitive. While this statistic has been around so long and has been so frequently cited by transportation agencies, removing it from federal materials will help bring the focus back to the dangerous design decisions that often put nondrivers in harm’s way.

The new USDOT safety strategy calls out dangerous design and unsafe speeds

In January the USDOT released a new road safety strategy which included a full section on the importance of street design and a second section on the role it plays in unsafe speeds and safety for the very first time. The strategy also encouraged revisiting speed limits and our broken process for setting them, including moving away from the 85th percentile rule. They go further to state that USDOT is considering prohibiting state DOTs and MPOs from setting performance targets to do worse (e.g., increase fatalities), which would be welcome news.

Like the FHWA memo, this strategy cannot deliver on-the-ground changes by itself. Revising and reframing the handbook of engineering standards (the MUTCD), which engineers rely on to design roads, would be a more effective way to bring about safe street designs. But as we said in our statement in January, this strategy can work well if paired with that sort of administrative action.

The incomplete: Less talk, more action

However encouraging these moves above are, federal strategies and memos have no real bearing on state decision-making. Regardless of what the USDOT advises, states can take full advantage of the flexibility in the infrastructure bill to spend their new dollars however they would like to. 

But FHWA hasn’t added teeth to this request. Though their memo referenced above encourages states to invest in repair first, FHWA also recently released guidance clearly letting states know they can use bridge repair dollars to construct new bridges, even if this construction has nothing to do with repair needs. This is an example of the roadblocks the administration will face now because of policy changes they failed to negotiate for the infrastructure bill, and it’s all the more reason that the administration must take action now to meet their goals. The law alone cannot help them make repair a priority, because it specifically allowed states to ignore repair needs.

The administration continues to brag about the IIJA’s exciting-but-overmatched new programs focused on improving safety, reducing emissions, advancing equity and improving state of repair. But the funding for many of these new programs is not yet out the door because Congress has not approved a budget for the next year. This means that all brand new programs are in limbo and existing programs’ funding levels are currently frozen at FAST Act levels. So programs like the new Carbon Reduction program or increased funding for transit capital grants that the administration has been bragging about can’t go forward. The administration needs to put their political heft into pushing Congress forward on a budget.

The opportunity: Actions the administration can take right now

Our list of specific actions are listed in the table below, tracking the progress the Biden administration has made since taking office. Since our last update, not much has changed (and there’s a notable lack of progress on value of time guidance and ensuring models account for induced demand, both of which we highlighted in our six-month update). We have also added two high priority actions that we will track going forward.

Issue areaDepartmentStatusDetailAction
Access to federal fundsUSDOTSimplify applications for discretionary grant programs (like the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program) by creating an online application and benefit-cost analysis (BCA) process so that small, rural and limited-capacity agencies can more easily access federal funds.
Climate changeUSDOTIn progressStarted rulemaking processWe only measure what we treasure. Re-establish the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure for transportation abandoned by the last administration, follow this up with annual state GHG rankings, and provide guidance for projecting GHG emissions at the project level.
Climate changeUSDOTDoneRepeal the June 29, 2018, Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Dear Colleague to public transit agencies regarding the Capital Investment Grant program, specifically the treatment of federal loans as not part of the local match, inclusion of a geographic diversity factor in grant awards, and encouraging a low federal cost share.
Climate changeUSDOTAllow rural transit systems to receive funding from the Low and No Emission bus program.
EquityUSDOTIdentify infrastructure that creates barriers to mobility (such as highways or rail beds that divide a community). Then prioritize resources to address those barriers and the disparities they create (e.g., by removing infrastructure barriers or creating new connectivity).
Passenger railWhite House, USDOTThe board is functionally empty, with all members serving on expired terms and no-showing for meetings.Appoint new members to the Amtrak Board of Directors and assess the balance of the board with respect to support for and experience with vital long distance, state-supported, and Northeast Corridor routes, as well as civic and elected leaders from local communities actually served by the existing network.
SafetyUSDOTLimited progressCalled out in Roadway Strategy release, but they did not include or mention consideration of the visibility issues.Revise the New Car Assessment Program to consider and prioritize the risk that increasingly larger automobile designs pose to pedestrians and cyclists and the driver’s ability to see pedestrians (particularly children and people using wheelchairs and other assistive devices).
SafetyUSDOTLimited progressComments reopened and then closed in May 2021. Limited revisions underway

Admin not rewriting or reframing the guide, per their Roadway Strategy release. 		Reopen the comment period on the handbook of street engineering standards (the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices or MUTCD) used by transportation agencies to design streets, and reframe and rewrite it to remove standards and guidance that lead to streets that are hostile to or dangerous for those outside of a vehicle.
Technical guidanceWhite House, HUD, USDOT, GSARe-activate the Location Affordability Portal created by DOT and HUD and establish a location efficiency and equitable development scoring criteria to be applied to decisions involving location of new federal facilities, particularly those that serve the public.Re-activate the Location Affordability Portal created by DOT and HUD and establish a location efficiency and equitable development scoring criteria to be applied to decisions involving location of new federal facilities, particularly those that serve the public.
NEW
Ensure more accurate traffic and emissions modeling		USDOTRequire the measurement of induced demand and a review of the accuracy of current travel demand models by comparing past projections with actual outcomes, reporting their findings, and updating the models when there are discrepancies.
NEW
Replace value of time guidance with more equitable, multimodal approach		USDOTHelp states and metro areas accurately calculate the benefit of their projects by updating the value of time guidance and its focus on vehicle speed with consideration of actual projected time savings for all people, whether they travel by car or use other modes of travel.

In addition to the actions we called for above, there are additional steps the Biden administration can take now to help guide the implementation process:

Administer clear and firm guidance and discretionary funding opportunities that aligns with their goals 

The Biden team can deliver guidance and craft discretionary grant funding notices that significantly shape the impact of this bill. They should do all they can to ensure states don’t abuse their flexibility in a way that ignores rising crash rates, increases the repair backlog, and over-invests in projects that are inequitable or unsustainable, like wide roads and highways with limited crossings that can make local travel dangerous for those outside of a car. 

FHWA has issued a memo calling for states to invest in repair projects and lowering the impact of transportation projects on the communities adjacent and the environment, and we hope states will follow that guidance, in spite of the fact that it isn’t a directive.. But that’s really the bare minimum. They can send a clear message to other applicants by awarding competitive grants only to projects that strongly align with their repair, safety, equity, and climate goals, and send powerful messages by rewarding the states that are spending their formula dollars in productive ways toward those same goals.

Hire staff to support the implementation process 

Though the infrastructure bill allotted a lot of money for capital work, it will require a major investment in human capital, especially the new passenger rail program. For example, the Biden team will need to support opportunities to help solve staffing issues at the local and state levels, including the bus operator shortage and other workforce issues. They will also need to help states, most of which do have experienced staff for developing and building rail projects, stand up these new programs.

While the infrastructure law contains a generational investment in passenger rail, that potential will be squandered without sufficient staff in place to create and implement these new programs. Hiring in the federal government takes time, while these programs are expected to be running very soon. Additionally, USDOT nominees still haven’t been confirmed (some still haven’t been nominated), and the Amtrak board is functionally empty with all members serving expired terms. The board is in urgent and immediate need of new appointments, particularly those that can provide perspective outside of the Northeast Corridor.  

Reevaluate the metrics and definitions that will help determine how goals are reached 

The administration should audit and quantifiably measure how the nation is making progress on infrastructure goals. But the metrics and models that we use matter. States rely on flawed and outdated models to determine the need or effectiveness of projects. The Biden administration can and should deliver guidance on measuring time savings benefits, emissions reductions, and transit access to ensure that projects meant to achieve these goals are set up to succeed. Data on state DOT projects should also be more readily available to the public (and more current), so that taxpayers can better hold their local leaders accountable.

What does the new infrastructure law mean for micromobility?

Three people select citibikes at a docking station

The expansion of grant and formula eligibility in the infrastructure law to include micromobility will give communities and states additional options for providing more transportation options, but those that are doing the most to make their streets safe and convenient stand to gain the most as well.

Three people select citibikes at a docking station
Photo courtesy of Lyft
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.

Micromobility—local travel on smaller vehicles like bikes, scooters, or other personal mobility devices—has become a vital part of our mobility landscape in just a few short years. The recent growth of shared micromobility networks owned and maintained by either cities or private companies has made such vehicles accessible and popular in urbanized areas. For example, Citi Bike in New York City grew 38 percent year-over-year, with a total of 28 million rides taken in 2021; based on ride volume, Citi Bike would be ranked as the 25th largest transit system in the US.

When these networks are integrated into public transit systems, like in Los Angeles, they act as extensions to trains and buses that allow passengers to make valuable first- and last-mile connections. During major disruptions in transit service, such as in New York or Washington D.C., they can act as vital reinforcements.

The most notable change in the infrastructure law on this count was to expand the eligibility of numerous programs to include micromobility. Below, T4America breaks down those policy changes, funding opportunities, and how best to advance micromobility in your community. 

What’s in the law?

The 2021 infrastructure law is the first to authorize shared micromobility infrastructure—which can include vehicles, docking stations, protected lanes for bikes and scooters, or apps and websites for public access to shared networks—and operations funding. The most notable change comes from expanding the eligibility within the existing Transportation Alternatives Program, which “sets aside” 10 percent of each state’s Surface Transportation Block Grant Program—a state’s second biggest pot of federal funds—for transportation alternatives.8 Since 2015 this program has included projects to make walking or biking safer and more convenient; now, shared micromobility is an eligible project type.

This is a small but notable step to recognize the dramatic changes in our mobility landscape over the last decade, but whether or not any of this funding encourages greater shared micromobility will be left up to the states and metro areas who decide how to spend these funds.

Micromobility projects can also be advanced by new and revised infrastructure programs dedicated to climate change mitigation, transit improvements, safety, and disaster resilience. Other highlights include the new Carbon Reduction Program and the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program, which funds projects under $15 million that focus on safety, are designed to increase pedestrian and cyclist activity, and build active transportation networks. Also notable is the new Safe Streets and Roads for All program, which is intended for initiatives that reduce traffic fatalities, including “complete streets” projects that foster active transportation use.

The formula-based programs below are perhaps the best opportunities for states, MPOs and local governments to leverage funding for micromobility. These programs are not competitive, so it is up to these governments to use this money effectively as outlined.

Formula
Program Name		Authorized fundingCan be used for:Should be used to:
Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP)$7.2 billion over five years. (10% of each state’s Surface Transportation Block Grant program funds)Recreational trails, bike/ped projects, micromobility, and other types of transportation alternatives.Expand useful micromobility options and build connective networks in communities that address demand.
Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) Improvement Program$2.745 billionTransportation projects or programs that reduce congestion and improve air quality. CMAQ funding can be used for both capital and operating expenses.Maximize MPO provisions for bike- and scooter-share capital projects and operations. Use funding to support operations that increase equity and program reach.
Carbon Reduction Program$6.4 billionPlanning, designing, and building on- and off-road active transportation facilities; roadway right-of-way improvements.Fund complete street designs that integrate micromobility infrastructure such as protected lanes and docking stations.
National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program$5 billionImplement electric vehicle charging on designated Alternative Fuel Corridors, with remaining funds being spent at discretion of state governments.Implement electric bike/scooter charging facilities as part of integrated micromobility networks.
Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT)$7.3 billion (formula)
$1.4 billion (competitive grant)		Extreme weather resilience and emergency response infrastructure.Implement micromobility vehicles and stations as a redundancy measure for evacuation or recovery mobility processes.
Urbanized Area Formula Grant Program$33.5 billionPlanning, operation, and capital improvement for public transportation systems.Build micromobility infrastructure at and nearby public transportation facilities and promote integration of bike- and scooter-share systems with local transit fares and services.

The following programs are competitively funded (discretionary), and winning these grants is tied to strong local matching (at 20–50% of the project cost).

Competitive program nameAuthorized fundingCan be used for:Should be used to:
Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program$200 million, subject to annual appropriations and the whims of Congress“Active transportation” projects.Finance micromobility stations and vehicles as part of useful active transportation networks.
Safe Streets and Roads for All$6 billion“Vision Zero” plans and implementation projects.Incorporate micromobility stations and protected lanes into complete streets projects.
Rural Surface Transportation ProgramAt least $25 million to each eligible projectMost projects on rural roads, including projects that protect all road users but also highway projects with adverse effects.Introduce micromobility infrastructure to streets in rural areas; prioritize electric micromobility funding to achieve longer-distance trips. This should be framed so rural areas do not only have one choice in spending these funds.
Local and Regional Infrastructure Project Assistance (a.k.a RAISE)$15 billion (not a new program, but this funding is substantially more than in the past)Local or regional projects that improve safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, economic competitiveness, state of good repair, and community connectivity.Prioritize shared micromobility infrastructure that benefits surrounding communities, improves bike/pedestrian safety, and serves communities equitably.

How else could the administration improve micromobility?

To further aid the development and expansion of shared micromobility infrastructure, there are several steps the administration could take. 

Further study and guidance is needed on how micromobility can be integrated with transit to better support ridership and access. Micromobility options work best when they circulate short distance trips within communities and connect them to transit facilities for longer-distance travel. In Washington, D.C., for example, 82 percent of Capital Bikeshare riders have used shared micromobility services to get to or from public transit. Best practices in design, both national and international, should inform more pointed recommendations and project eligibility standards for shared vehicle infrastructure.

The administration needs to provide guidance and technical support so everyone can fully understand how their projects can be made eligible for each grant. Many agencies won’t know much about micromobility eligibility, and USDOT can and should help fill those knowledge gaps.

In light of these suggestions, it is important for local and state governments to also consider every point of flexibility within the infrastructure law to fund micromobility infrastructure. For example, funding for electric vehicle infrastructure can be used to support electric scooter and bicycle charging facilities. The administration should also evaluate grantees based on how they will protect and connect disadvantaged users and communities. Colorado is establishing an emissions budget for new highway projects that requires corresponding investment in greener modes, which could be a good model for a cross-program policy.

How can the new money advance our goals?

Safety

The most significant constraint on the expansion of shared micromobility is the supportive infrastructure that makes riding on a bike or scooter feel safe, in both perception and reality. This can include fully protected bike lanes, visible and enforced curbside pickup/dropoff zones, complete signage and wayfinding standards for bicycles and other shared mobility options, and traffic control improvements such as signal retimings that allow micromobility users to safely traverse streets. Places that will realize the greatest benefits of expanded shared mobility options are those that also make safety the fundamental consideration of every other dollar spent.

Climate

Micromobility is a valuable tool in helping to decrease driving (and emissions) for short-distance trips, which are the bulk of all trips taken each day. Good micromobility service can also increase transit ridership by improving access and expanding the catchment area around stations, helping to lower emissions with greater transit use at the same time. Moreover, a 2021 report by Lyft states that 41 percent of its micromobility customers are weekly users of public transit and 54 percent do not own or lease a personal vehicle. The design of micromobility access points and networks is also important. Incorporating shade into station and protected lane designs can go a long way toward reducing the disastrous urban heat island effect, which can come from trees or in the form of solar panels.

Equity

When administered and implemented thoughtfully, micromobility makes car-free transportation accessible in areas that are underserved by our current road network. Localities will need to plan the location, price, and other features of bike- and scooter-share in a way that is viable across all communities. In particular, micromobility must address the fact that Black, Hispanic, and Native American pedestrians are disproportionately killed on America’s roads, and safety improvements should be prioritized where they are most needed. Furthermore, low-income communities experience the brunt of the urban heat island effect. When planned equitably, incorporating shade and landscaping into micromobility stations can be a step toward making such communities more resilient to high temperatures.

So what?

States, regions, and communities now have several avenues through which federal funding for micromobility is available. But micromobility is one of many applications from an already small funding pool, and without a thoughtful overarching plan for implementation, new initiatives will have limited and inequitable benefits. As such, advocates must work with their governments to pursue a detailed, equitable vision for micromobility so they can build a strong case for federal funding and the local matches needed to secure it.

Note: There are ample opportunities for the infrastructure law to support good projects and better outcomes. We have also produced short memos explaining the available federal programs for funding various types of projects. Read our memo about available funding opportunities for micromobility projects.

A blueprint for healthier, safer streets: Complete Streets videos from Pittsburgh, PA, Louisville, KY, and Tucson, AZ

three cyclists ride their bikes down a tucson street
three cyclists ride their bikes down a tucson street
From the Tucson, AZ video

Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, with partnership and support from CityHealth, produced a series of videos telling the story of Complete Streets policies in three U.S. cities. These videos provide insight into what Complete Streets policies can accomplish, what makes for an effective policy, and strategies for complete streets implementation.

Don’t miss our videos about three cities that have passed a policy and are now doing the work to make the transportation system safer and more accessible for all members of their community.

About Complete Streets and these videos

Complete Streets are streets for everyone—designed and managed to prioritize safety, comfort, and access to destinations for all people who need to use a street. Complete Streets policies can help cities transform how they make decisions about their streets. Done right, these policies can help cities improve public health and address longstanding inequities in the transportation system. The National Complete Streets Coalition at Smart Growth America has been advancing the adoption and implementation of Complete Streets policies for two decades to ensure that everyone who needs to use our streets—no matter how they get around—can safely and comfortably do so. 

CityHealth and the National Complete Streets Coalition at Smart Growth America recognize cities with exemplary Complete Streets policies—a key step in producing safer streets that can be used by everyone. Learn more at cityhealth.org and completestreets.org.

Pittsburgh, PA

In Pittsburgh, the need and demand for modes of transportation beyond car travel was clear when former Mayor Bill Peduto and the City Council passed the 2015 Complete Streets ordinance, creating the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI), and starting the ongoing process of creating space for transportation modes beyond car travel. Though a Complete Streets policy didn’t change Pittsburgh overnight, the policy serves as a blueprint that will outlast individual mayors and DOMI directors and continue guiding Pittsburgh towards safer streets.

If you are a mayor, look at your population. And if your population needs multiple different ways to get from point A to point B, then you have a responsibility. Because mobility not only affects being able to get to work, it affects being able to get to the doctor, it affects being able to get food. And in fact, the greatest factor in economic mobility is the ability to get from point A to point B.

Bill Peduto, mayor of Pittsburgh, 2014-2022

Hear from

Mayor Ed Gainey

Bill Peduto, mayor 2014-2022

Kim Lucas, acting director of DOMI

Karina Ricks, former director of DOMI

Erika Strassburger, City Councilmember, District 8

Louisville, KY

“A lot of our high-intensity traffic areas are also in the same areas that our poorest health outcomes are occuring at. Now we have the opportunity to try and correct that.” —David James, City Councilchair & co-sponsor of the Louisville Complete Streets ordinance

Adopted in 2019, the Louisville, KY Complete Streets policy is newer, but some changes are already underway in the city, including simple design changes to Bardstown Road, a neighborhood main street that was instead engineered to move as many cars as possible as fast as possible, at the expense of moving all people safely and enhancing a valuable destination. In the video, city council members, city transportation staffers, and a Louisville resident describe the changes they’ve observed in the city and why they are excited to see implementation continue.

Hear from

David James, City Council Chair & co-sponsor of Complete Streets ordinance

Cassie Armstrong, City Councilmember

Dirk Gowin, City of Louisville, Transportation Division Manager

Amanda Deatherage, City of Louisville, Transportation Planner Supervisor

Jackie Cobb, Louisville resident

Tucson, AZ

For three years, local groups, including the Living Streets Alliance, advocated for a Complete Streets policy in Tucson in response to the city’s pedestrian injury and fatality rate. The policy was adopted unanimously in 2019. Now, the city is focused on implementing the policy in the communities that need safety and public health investments most.

We’re using safety as a key driver…as well as investing in areas of our community that have historically seen lower levels in investment…where you see residents that are going to be more dependent on walking, biking, taking transit as their primary means of transportation, and they’re gonna face [street safety] risks at higher levels.

Patrick Hartley, City of Tucson, Complete Streets Coordinator

Right now, the city is building hundreds of miles of bike boulevards throughout the city, and as they restripe streets, they’ve found opportunities to expand bike lanes, narrow car lanes, and even drop travel lanes on larger roadways that don’t have much traffic. Residents look forward to a safer, healthier, and more equitable city.

Hear from

Mayor Regina Romero

Patrick Hartley, City of Tucson, Complete Streets Coordinator

Evren Sönmez, Living Streets Alliance, Director of Strategic Policy and Practice

Gene Martinez, Community Liaison

Grecia and Antonio Ramirez, Tucson residents

Jennifer Flores, Los Amigos Elementary, Librarian

The infrastructure law and safety: Will it be able to move the needle?

Image from Vignesh Swaminathan, a keynote speaker at this year’s SGA Equity Summit, of his quick-build bike lanes in Emeryville, California

The new infrastructure law authorizes around $650 billion to fund transportation infrastructure through formula and competitive grant programs, some of which have safety as a core emphasis. Here’s what you need to know about the new money and (modest) policy changes to the safety program, as well as how you can make them work for you.

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.

Update March 3, 2022: This post was updated to reflect that Safe Routes to School funding is subject to appropriations (see the formula safety programs for details).

We are facing an astonishing safety crisis on our roads. The first nine months of 2021 were the deadliest first nine months of a year on America’s roads since 2006, with an estimated 31,720 fatalities. There’s no reason to think that 2022 won’t continue this same trend, which prompted Secretary Buttigieg to present a National Roadway Safety Strategy to set a goal of zero deaths and end this crisis.9

One reason we are facing this crisis of preventable deaths is that within most transportation agencies, prioritizing vehicle speed over safety for all users is a deeply embedded priority. Our priority is different, and we need to start there if we’re ever going to make good on USDOT’s new stated goal of zero deaths:

The new infrastructure law does include some bright spots for holding states and localities more responsible for improving safety, which we discuss below. But overall, Congress largely decided to uphold the status quo, failing to reorient the giant formula programs around safety. Now it’s up to USDOT to do all they can to prioritize safety within their program guidance and grant programs, and for applicants to submit projects that improve safety.

Note: this explainer and webinar from America Walks is full of practical advice about “how volunteer advocacy groups, or local governments without a full-time planner” can steer these funds into improving safety.

What’s in the law?

The new infrastructure law does include funding for safety improvement projects like road diets and Complete Streets, but these are spoonfuls compared to the giant excavator of overall road funding where safety is just one of many considerations as we illustrated here: 

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

The new bill does not reorient the transportation program around safety.  It allows funding to be used to build safer roads but doesn’t require it. Dedicated safety funding remains a relatively minor amount of the entire program. But the new law does make some alterations to safety policy. One is how we measure state performance and then hold them accountable. If 15 percent or more of a state’s fatal crashes involve vulnerable road users (i.e. pedestrians, cyclists), then a minimum of 15 percent of their Highway Safety Improvement (HSIP) dollars must go toward making those vulnerable users safer.

We’re giving states a small amount of money to improve a problem that transportation agencies can continue to create or exacerbate with a much larger amount of money. 

The law also made several other important changes to how USDOT will evaluate safety. It updates standards for the mandatory Highway Safety Plans to change the word for vehicle collisions from “accident” to “crash” (a small but meaningful shift) and to include more public participation and feedback. It updates uniform standards to acknowledge the role of human error in new vehicle technologies. The law allows USDOT to reapportion (i.e., give away) state funding to other states if a state continuously fails to improve their safety outcomes and prevents states from setting worse/lower safety performance targets than the year before. 10

And the law requires USDOT to set minimum performance targets for states in consultation with the Governors Highway Safety Association. This is not an exhaustive list, but overall USDOT does have several more policy levers to create safer roads across the U.S.—if they use their new powers effectively.

Formula safety programs

Program nameAuthorized funding (over five years)Can be used for:Should be used to:
Transportation Alternatives Program$7.2 billion (10% of STBG funding), up from a flat $4.2 billion in the FAST Act, with 41% going to state DOTs and 59% going to MPOs and localities.Projects that promote modes of transportation other than driving, with notable inclusions being anything eligible under the SRTS program and newly defined “vulnerable road user safety assessments”.Make roads safer for all users by planning for and building facilities for walking, biking, and other modes that protect those users from high-speed vehicles.
Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Program$1 million minimum to states by formula (subject to appropriations), based on primary and secondary school enrollment numbers.Active transportation and complete streets projects, plus education or enforcement activities that allow students to walk and bike to school safely.Give students safe, convenient routes to school by prioritizing their travel over the speed of cars.
Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP)$16.8 billion, apportioned to states by formula.Highway safety improvement projects, which are defined very broadly, from rumble strips and widened shoulders to data collection and safety planning.Re-orient highway safety spending toward traffic calming and projects that protect all road users, not just drivers.
Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program$13.2 billionAny transportation project that reduces emissions from vehicles, including micromobility (bike or scooter share) and electric vehicles.Focus emissions mitigation efforts on mode-shift away from driving, not on increasing vehicle speed. Specifically, states and localities should use CMAQ funding for micromobility projects.

Competitive programs applicable to safety

Some of the safety funding in the infrastructure law is split between several programs, many of which are made available directly to states or localities as competitive grants (more here on best practices for applying to those). 

Program nameAuthorized funding (over five years)Can be used for:Should be used to:
Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program$1 billion, subject to annual appropriations of $200 million each year.“Active transportation” projects.Provide safe and integrated road facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists to access community destinations.
Rural Surface Transportation Program$3.25 billion, with $1.5 billion set aside for Appalachian highways.Most projects on rural roads, including projects that protect all road users but also highway projects with adverse effects.Retrofit roadways to serve the community’s road users vs speed.
Safe Streets and Roads for All$6 billionVision Zero plans and implementation projects.Expand upon road diets, sneckdowns, and other treatments to improve vulnerable road user facilities (through directness to destinations, level of comfort, and intersection visibility).
National Infrastructure Project Assistance$60 billionProjects that provide economic, mobility, or safety benefits.Build safety infrastructure to protect all users on highways (like traffic calming) and across highways (like pedestrian bridges that reconnect communities). But those uses are likely to face headwinds in delivering true safety benefits without accountability.
RAISE competitive grants. (This is the former TIGER and then BUILD program, so is not a new program, but is now funded at a much higher level)$30 billion, up from only $4 billion spent from 2009-2020.Local or regional projects that improve safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, economic competitiveness, state of good repair, and connectivityBuild projects that accomplish numerous goals including safety. Many of the best TIGER projects over the years made major safety improvements while ticking off other goals.

How else could the administration improve the safety program?

In addition to creating robust guidance for administering all of the programs listed above, the Biden administration should modernize the traffic engineer’s go-to guidance (the MUTCD) to reorient it completely around safety and people, and away from its outdated focus on vehicle speed and flow. Unfortunately, the indication from USDOT is that they are punting more substantial edits to a future revision. USDOT closed comments in May 2021 and have suggested that only modest revisions will be forthcoming, but what they choose to change will still matter.11

In addition, the FHWA Administrator’s vulnerable road user research should make sure the agency’s very good recommended safety countermeasures have teeth and recommend substantial design changes, not just behavioral suggestions.

How can the new money advance our goals?

Equity

The safety of all road users is closely tied advancing racial equity and addressing climate change, among many other goals. Our research in Dangerous by Design indicates that low-income and people of color make up a disproportionate amount of the people struck and killed while walking. So providing safe ways for all people to use our streets is critical for advancing our communities’ goals of being more inclusive and connected.

Relative pedestrian danger by race and ethnicity

Climate

There is incredible interest and demand in switching more trips from cars to bikes or other modes (an important strategy for cutting down on carbon emissions) but if Americans do not feel safe enough to bike or walk regularly, the ones who have the option to do so will continue to drive.

Translating federal funding into projects that advance safety is more complicated. As outlined above, formula grants are mostly controlled by state and regional governments who have other top priorities other than safety, no matter how much they profess that safety is #1. Approaching them with projects that have wide and deep support within a community usually gives you the best chance for success. For the highly flexible competitive grants, the America Walks’ explainer contained some concrete advice:

Ken McLeod of the League of American Bicyclists gave a great breakdown of the biggest opportunities in competitive grants for active transportation. First, he said, start by looking at your existing transportation plans. “If you have a plan that is a 20 year plan, and if you are in phase 3, this is like a perfect grant program to get your phase 4 or phase 5 funded in a quicker timeline than you might working through other federally funded programs,” explained Ken.

National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)’s Sindhu Bharadwaj underscored the importance of coalition building for competitive grants. Advocates in small towns or very car-centered regions might be able to acquire some additional funding. The key to their success, though, is focusing and working together. As Sindhu said, funding opportunities can be a chance to bring together a number of organizations and advocates to pick one big goal, like adopting a new design plan. She suggested that the pursuit of funding can be a galvanizing point for a governing body or advocacy group.

So what?

The most important thing to remember is that every single one of the federal transportation programs can be used to improve safety. Safety is always an eligible use. So as you engage with local, metro, and state decisionmakers, you can remind them: If safety is the top priority then every dollar from every program that they have at their disposal can and should go to improve safety for all users. And then hold them accountable: Congress has given them the complete freedom to prioritize safety, so if safety is getting worse, there is no one else to blame.

Considering the crisis of roadway deaths and the limited funding available for safety, it’s critical that we ensure that 1) the safety funding is spent in the best way possible, and 2) that states and metro areas feel the pressure to tangibly improve safety with their bigger, flexible pots of road funding. Creating a vision for what you want to do is a great first step. More from America Walks:

 ‘I think the most important thing is to have a strong vision locally, and worry about resources next,’ [Beth Osborne of Transportation for America] stated. ‘With good commitment and vision, you can find resources. And…there are tons of places to go for money! You do not have to stay in one tiny pod, you also do not need to make every active transportation effort its own project.’ With that vision, ask your state and local transportation officials how they are planning to seek federal dollars. They ultimately write the grants or propose budgets to elected officials. You need to know if they are working to fund a walkable equitable vision for the community, or are they trying to fund projects envisioned in a prior era. With prompting from community leaders you can help break the inertia of the past.

For planners, engineers, local officials, and other decision-makers, you will be competing with other states, MPOs, and localities for these competitive grants. Understanding the programs in and out will be critical for mustering the financial and vocal support needed to put forth a strong application. That’s how you learn, for instance, that National Infrastructure Project Assistance grants can be used for safety projects. 

One last important note we addressed in our competitive grants blog post: Strong local matching funds (ranging from 20 to 50 percent of project cost) are critical to winning these grants, and the process to raise these funds starts by engaging in state and local budget processes far in advance (6-9 months before the start of the fiscal year.) So advocates, this means you should engage agencies early and often on resource prioritization to realize transit projects.

(Note: For the more policy-minded, read our pre-existing funding memos on the programs that the IIJA can fund. Many of them have the possibility to improve safety if used well, but the active transportation memo contains the programs that can be most easily flexed to fund safety projects.)

If you have additional ideas for how to utilize these expanded programs, or have questions about the content listed here, please contact us. Our policy staff is eager to hear from you. 

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.”

Positioning for competitive grant application success

A conference room filled with diverse people taking notes

With scores of competitive, surface transportation grant programs to administer, USDOT faces a heavy lift to get these programs off the ground, on top of administering the legacy programs that already existed. How should prospective grant applicants start preparing for success?

A conference room filled with diverse people taking notes
Image from Inner City Capital Connection
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 USDOT will have to find ways to administer and harmonize nearly five dozen programs with other Biden administration goals, like the Justice40 initiative that emphasizes equitable distribution of resources, especially towards historically marginalized communities. They’ve got a lot of work to do. But communities don’t need to wait on USDOT to begin preparing their projects that emphasize the state of repair of their transportation system, advance safety for all users, and improve mobility and access for all people.

Here are three pivotal strategies that communities can use to better position themselves to win competitive grants.

1) Match project objectives to the program criteria

The most successful projects clearly define the problem or need of your community, and tailor the project to clearly address these needs—and those needs match the criteria that USDOT has laid out for evaluating projects. This means collecting and utilizing data, observations, and community feedback that affirm the problem or need. 

It also means putting the project in context. Remember those reviewing your application may not be familiar with your project or your challenges and may never have been to your community at all. So start your application by clearly stating what the project is, why it is needed in the community, what will be accomplished by building it, and other efforts in the area (past and current) that will support those results. It is also helpful to include maps, pictures, and sketches to help those reviewing your application fully understand what is at stake and what could be accomplished. 

For example, depending on the context of the grant, USDOT looks favorably upon projects that are well-integrated into the development of their adjacent built environment and region, and that have broad support from everyone involved or affected. While transportation projects can have specific goals like cutting down on traffic or creating economic development, they should not do these at the expense of other goals like equity, housing affordability, or environmental health. USDOT recognizes this and rewards projects that form diverse coalitions, have buy-in from local businesses, and best meet the broader needs of the surrounding community. 

Projects will be filtered for eligibility but evaluated first and foremost on how well they address the criteria included in the notice of funding opportunity. Everything else is secondary. Your project does not need to knock it out of the park on all of the criteria (rarely does any project do that), but it should produce impressive results in two or three areas.

2) Build a strong, broad coalition of support

Projects with a broad base of supporters will always do better. This means support from the community, civic leaders and local elected leaders. It also helps to have support from your state, especially if you need your state department of transportation to manage the money or help with the project. But USDOT will understand if you are dealing with a state that does not share your (and USDOT’s) priorities. If that is the case, state it outright.

When building a coalition for a project, consider who else would care about a potential project? Who else is a logical partner and stakeholder that you could collaborate with? Perhaps a neighboring community is also pursuing a similar priority, presenting a chance to pool resources together. Explore partnerships with the private sector. Advocacy to state legislatures to set aside funding to support state and local matches to grant programs, like what Colorado is doing, can go a long way in making grant applications more competitive. And even better is to build or develop projects from the beginning with partners and stakeholders who will be automatic champions as that project moves forward, rather than trying to gather support for a completed project idea.

A broad range of supporters can help you put together a local match, which most competitive grant programs still require. State and local project sponsors must bring some amount of non-federal funding to match the federal dollars. Any funding that does not originate with the federal government will do, including local, state, philanthropic, business and even some in-kind contributions. A broad number of contributors is often more impressive than a larger single source of funding. This is important because projects often run into trouble along the way. Maybe bids come back high or construction finds an unexpected utility or artifact. When such problems occur, projects are more likely to proceed and be successful with a broad range of support.(It’s nearly a decade old, but our primer on local revenue best practices is still a good starting point to learn about the available options.)

Finally, support from your congressional delegation is good too. It won’t help if your project doesn’t match the program criteria, but USDOT might use this support as a tie breaker. If there are a few equally good projects, it just makes sense for USDOT to choose the one that has support from the Congressional delegation. Letters are a good starting point, but phone calls and meetings with USDOT are better.

3) Know the funding program parameters

Choosing and applying to the right competitive grant program is necessary for most effectively coordinating the above strategies. If you would like to know the breadth of options available, check out our funding briefs. You can view all the various programs by the projects they can fund and for which jurisdictional level. Note: many grants have wide flexibility that may not be immediately obvious. We did our best in these funding briefs to describe these flexibilities, so read closely. 

Once an applicant selects a program, applicants must identify what USDOT requires for that funding. The Notice of Funding Opportunities (NOFO) for each program explicitly states the requirements (such as the 2022 RAISE grants NOFO that was released on January 28th). Past NOFOs and grant applications—even from other applicants!—available in the public record, are a useful resource for understanding what successful applications look like. Applicants who are willing to put in more time can dig into the US Code (23 or 49 USC) or the Code of Federal Regulations (23 or 49 CFR). 

Applicants will also need to set up the necessary administrative steps. For instance, they will need to know or request a Unique Entity Identifier through SAM.gov. If your organization has been using a DUNS number, a unique identifier has already been assigned since the federal government is migrating away from DUNS by April 4, 2022. These steps are more numerous than we can easily include here, but we can direct you to some resources that can help: 1) The USDOT maintains a website on how to do business with the FHWA, which contains a specific page on FHWA terms and conditions, 2) FTA has its own website outlining the The Transit Award Management System (TrAMS), its hub for federal transit grants, and 3) the General Services Administration maintains a site for live grant opportunity listings. 

Read and pay close attention to who is eligible to apply, what projects are eligible for funding, as well as when and how to apply. And get to work on all of these requirements early. Get your Unique Entity Identifier as soon as you can, as this will take weeks if you don’t already have one. In fact, you do not have to wait to apply for a grant to set this up. Also, Grants.gov requires you to set up an account, and it can get overloaded by very popular programs close to the deadline. Don’t risk it! Do everything you can in advance. Apply a week early because you will not get more time if the system goes down at the last minute.

Still unsure on program parameters or if your project is eligible? Each NOFO lists a webinar to get an overview of the funding opportunity, ask questions, and learn the process to follow up with additional questions. You can also contact your FHWA Division HQ or Regional FTA HQ and ask questions of them over email or phone. In addition, T4A members gain access to our staff and our knowledge of federal programs. 

Want access to in-depth analysis of what your community needs to do to tap into federal funding? Consider joining as a T4A Member.

Passenger rail funding in the infrastructure bill: Building a national network

Passenger rail was one of the brightest spots in the new infrastructure bill, with $102 billion for passenger and freight rail projects through direct grants to Amtrak and competitive grant programs. Here’s what you need to know about this new money and the bill’s rail policy changes, and how they can be best used to expand and improve passenger rail service across the U.S.

Boarding the inaugural FrontRunner commuter train from Provo to Salt Lake. Flickr photo by Steven Vance.

When it comes to the new infrastructure bill, there was a lot of bad and ugly in the highway and transit sections, but passenger rail was by far the biggest winner, with over $102 billion set aside to invest in the expansion of reliable and frequent rail service and much needed changes to Amtrak’s mission and priorities that can put us on a path to a more robust national and regional passenger rail network. But the work is far from done. The ultimate verdict will rest on Amtrak and the Biden administration’s ability to get organized, engage with regional leaders, and then spend this historic money quickly and effectively.

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.

What’s in the law?

New funding

Building upon the success of the FAST Act, which included passenger rail in a multi-year authorization for the first time (see p.4), the 2021 infrastructure law takes the biggest step forward yet to invest in the future of passenger rail in America. Congress increased rail funding by 750 percent over FAST Act levels with an increased focus on bolstering service on the national network and making needed investments to improve the Northeast Corridor. The law also made policy changes to several key grant programs, making them more attractive to eligible recipients.

$41.5 billion of the law’s $102 billion for rail will go to Amtrak, and a majority of those funds ($27.5 billion) will go to Amtrak’s national network. This is in stark contrast to how funding has been traditionally allocated, when passenger rail networks had to justify their existence by showing a high profit margin. In the FAST Act, the Northeast Corridor (Amtrak’s busiest and most profitable rail corridor from DC to Boston) received a larger share of federal funds.

This vital step will encourage more passenger rail and intercity rail expansion, giving more people in more places the ability to affordably travel, thanks in part to a recalibrated Amtrak mission to place customer experience and community connections over profits.

Policy changes

The law also makes a number of changes to improve the passenger experience. For the stations in many (mostly rural) parts of the country, there are no station agents available to answer questions, help riders purchase tickets, or check luggage. For those who do not have access to a computer or internet at home, not having a station agent at their local station means they cannot purchase a ticket or if they are elderly, do not have assistance to check luggage. A station agent will now be required at any location that has 40 or more passengers per day. From a service standpoint, the bill also prohibits Amtrak from discontinuing or cutting rural services as long as Amtrak receives at least baseline funding (i.e. the same amount of money they received last year) to operate service, preserving the national network.

Amtrak is also no longer required to provide food service with a profit margin. The old requirement to turn a profit on food put Amtrak in a position of either providing cheaper, nutrient poor food (i.e. junk food) or no food service at all. Access to good, nutrient rich food on passenger trains will drastically improve the rider experience, which will help increase ridership. 

When it comes to governance, Amtrak’s board of directors has traditionally drawn heavily from people that lived or had expertise in the Northeast Corridor, leading to a very lopsided investment and expansion strategy focused on northeastern passenger rail, often at the expense of better service elsewhere or a truly national network—the stated purpose of Amtrak. The infrastructure law changes the requirements and sets quotas for who can be appointed to the Board, enabling a more regionally diverse group of decision-makers that will more fully represent the interests of a truly national network. (Right now the board is functionally empty, with all board members serving expired terms. The Biden administration should have appointed a new board yesterday. More on that below.)

The law also directs funding to improve accessibility for all riders, especially those who may use assistive devices (wheelchairs, walkers, canes, etc.). It invests $50 million annually to help cover the additional costs that make the Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF) program (a loan program for making capital improvements) more user-friendly and less financially onerous. This same RRIF program was also tweaked so that it can help finance transit-oriented development projects around passenger rail stations—a smart way to grow ridership. 

The law includes $50 million annually to the Restoration and Enhancement (R&E) grant program that provides funds to help operate passenger rail. The increase in funds can help subsidize the overall cost a state or locality may need to pay in order to cover the costs of operating new or existing passenger rail routes. As an example, the Gulf Coast rail project has long planned to use these R&E grants to support the new service as it gets off the ground for the first three years. A change in this law allows projects like this one to extend R&E funds over six years rather than the current three, allowing for a longer off-ramp to help cover operations costs. Lowering the financial burden that poorer states would need to contribute for service operations would significantly benefit their communities by connecting them to regional economic centers, healthcare, and educational opportunities. The law also allows Tribal entities to apply for R&E grants.

The law also creates the administrative infrastructure needed to expand passenger rail. 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 final provisions were similar to a House proposal from Rep. Cohen, which we wrote about here.) The bill allows for these ten commissions to apply for up to $1 million annually to operate their respective commissions.

How else could the administration improve the rail program?

These rail provisions are worth celebrating, but in order for the nation to reap the benefits, the administration has much more work to do, and must take action quickly on several items. The work is not done, and if the administration is not proactive, they could squander the promise of this historic, once-in-a-generation investment in rail.

Their first step should be to immediately (it’s overdue) nominate a new board to lead Amtrak in accordance with the new law. We hope the administration will appoint a board that reflects the demographics of our nation and create a requirement that board members ride the three levels of service Amtrak offers on an annual basis (commuter, long-distance, etc.). The sooner the administration takes action on Amtrak’s Board, the quicker the American public can ride passenger trains in parts of the country that need it most.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) should begin the process to stand up the new interstate rail compacts program, which is key to fostering the bottom-up growth of the national network. The FRA Administrator should convene those who have expressed interest in creating a compact to explain how to establish one, how the FRA can ensure their success, and how to maximize this new funding.

When it comes to awarding competitive grants such as CRISI, R&E, and others, the administration should be very careful with awarding grants to private sector passenger rail companies. Private sector passenger rail companies like the Brightline in Florida and Las Vegas are important components but are not essential to building the national network. While there are limited cases where private passenger rail can be additive to the national passenger rail network, it should remain the goal of the administration to connect communities, and we should not let the private sector reorient the goals and vision of the national rail network.

How can the new money advance our goals?

There are people across the country that are unable to experience everything their region or the country has to offer due to the barriers of long-distance travel. Not to mention the major greenhouse gas emissions that result from driving a personal vehicle or flying. Passenger rail can help bridge these equity gaps and achieve our climate goals.

Equity: For poorer Americans who live in rural areas, long-distance travel poses a number of financial obstacles to overcome. A regional airport that has commercial flights can often be a few hours’ drive away, require lengthy layovers, and charge expensive rates. And for many, driving long distances can be a challenge as well. The financial barriers of owning or renting a car are already extremely high for low-income families and the need to have and maintain a car that could sustain long hours of highway driving poses an even greater barrier to travel. Accessible passenger rail is an affordable option that can connect more people to regional economic hubs, educational opportunities, healthcare or even recreational activities. Passenger rail can boost local economies and create jobs for communities along a service route or who have a stop in their community. 

In a study conducted by the Trent Lott institute, the States of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi would bring in, at minimum, an estimated $107 million in economic output from restoring Gulf Coast passenger rail service. The funds from the infrastructure law should also be used to make platforms, train cars, and stations more accessible for all riders. The demand for rail service in this corridor is very high, as seen during the 2018 inspection train along this corridor.

Climate: While the overall law failed to prioritize climate change in a holistic way across all programs, passenger rail investments can be a powerful tool for reducing emissions. As mentioned above, investments in passenger rail can provide another viable alternative to car travel or plane travel which emit large amounts of dangerous pollutants. If travelers have affordable medium- to long-distance travel options, they will take advantage of those opportunities. This, however, requires a true investment in intercity passenger rail corridors throughout the country that work together to create a fully connected national network. The infrastructure law provides the money to make this happen, but it will be up to Amtrak and the Biden administration to get organized, engage with regional leaders, and then spend the money effectively.

So what?

There are ample opportunities for states, cities, localities and even advocates to help create our national rail network. There are multiple funding opportunities available for regions that, like the Gulf Coast, are working to reestablish and expand passenger rail service. Advocates can encourage their state to join or start an interstate rail commission or inform their state and local governments of the federal funding opportunities available.

An important note for advocates (that we will also address in detail in a future post about putting together strong applications for competitive grants): Strong local matching funds (ranging from 20 to 50 percent of project cost) are critical to winning these grants, and the process to raise these funds starts by engaging in state and local budget processes far in advance (6-9 months before the start of the fiscal year.) So advocates, this means you should engage agencies early and often on resource prioritization to realize transit projects.

Note: There are ample opportunities for the infrastructure law to support good projects and better outcomes. We have also produced short memos explaining the available federal programs for funding various types of projects. Read our memo about available funding opportunities for passenger rail projects.

If you have additional ideas for how to utilize these expanded programs, or have questions about the content listed here, please contact us. Our policy staff is eager to hear from you. 

Reducing emissions with better transit, part three: Examples from leading cities

Flickr/Creative Commons of a Metro Transit METRO C Line bus photo by Tony Webster. https://www.flickr.com/photos/diversey/49040491042.

Greater transit use is key for lowering emissions, and cities across America are reconsidering how they serve their residents with public transit—and the land uses that encourage better service and ridership. Several cities are laying the groundwork to make this happen—even outside of the “transit hotspots” one may expect.

This post was written by T4America policy intern Jackson Pierce. This post is the third in a series of posts on this topic—find the full set here.

In our first and second installments of this series, we showed how proper funding for transit operations and for increasing transit access are a one-two punch that makes transit more useful, lessening the need to drive and in turn lowering emissions. The historic influx of transit funding coming from the infrastructure bill provides an opportunity to better connect people to the jobs and services they need while reducing climate impacts. These improvements will also help address equity concerns by providing better quality service to more people who urgently need it. In our third installment, we highlight how Houston, Columbus, Austin, and Minnesota’s Twin Cities have made strides toward better service and smarter planning by focusing on providing better transit access to adapt today’s limited funding to existing infrastructure.

Houston and Columbus rescued their bus systems from low ridership by starting fresh

Houston—with a population ranked 4th in the nation by city proper, 5th by immediate metro area and 9th by expanded metro area—is infamous for its wide highways, sprawling cityscape, poor walking infrastructure in many areas, and nearly ubiquitous accommodation of the motor vehicle. Yet Houston has also become a public transit leader by significantly redesigning its bus service from the ground up in 2015 to focus on giving as many people as possible access to frequent, high quality transit, with help from transit consultants Jarrett Walker & Associates.

Houston is recognized as a leader for good reason. The city redrew its former bus network from scratch, allowing METRO (the city’s transit agency) to consolidate redundant routes into more frequent, centralized patterns that served population centers more often.

Houston’s frequent bus routes before and after the redesign.

On August 15th, 2015, a network of mostly infrequent bus routes converged downtown, which was not where most bus riders needed to go in the very decentralized metro area. On August 16th, these same buses ran on a brand-new network, a grid of 22 frequent routes that allowed access to multiple spread-out dense activity centers and neighborhoods. It was a transformation that required no new resources (outside of signage and wayfinding changes), just a smarter approach that recognized the city’s changing development patterns. (Read Smart Growth America’s longer 2015 profile of this story, just before the changes went into effect, which details the planning and work that went into it.)

There are a few things worth recognizing when discussing the replicability of Houston’s plan in other cities. Houston’s old network had clear redundancy in its routes. In other cities these routes may not exist, or have been cut in the past, so a comparable result to Houston’s “cost-neutral” solution may require greater investment overall or adding more resources elsewhere. Houston is also anchored by the Red Line, one of the most successful modern light rail projects in the country, and having that service as a network cornerstone bolstered METRO’s ridership on both modes. 

While Houston is a popular example of a completely redesigned network, the idea has been successfully replicated at smaller scales.

By Ɱ – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89607531

Columbus: Before Columbus redesigned its routes in 2017, for example, their bus map had been largely unchanged since 1974—even though the region had become one of the fastest-growing in the country. COTA (the Central Ohio Transit Authority) didn’t have the fleet size or duplicative routes that Houston’s METRO did, but managed to add seven frequent routes to their previous total of three, including two new crosstown routes that matched the city’s multi-centered development patterns. 

Equity was a major concern during Columbus’ route redesign, leading Columbus to emphasize improving the frequency of their routes on weekends. Columbus also introduced their CMAX rapid bus line in 2018. While not “true” bus rapid transit—lacking dedicated lanes, off-board fare payment, and frequent headways on weekends—it still provides a solid anchor service for COTA’s other routes to feed into.

Frequent routes on COTA before and after the update.

Despite a nationwide decrease in transit ridership in the 2010s, Houston and Columbus both grew their ridership with their redesigns. Within a year of opening Houston saw a six percent growth in system ridership, and before the pandemic, Columbus’ ridership was up four percent overall since the 2017 redesign. This occurred because both cities updated their transit network to match changes in development patterns, improving transit access in the process.

In Austin, a strong baseline is paying off

CC photo of an Austin bus by I-ride capital metro on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/i-ride/5179709865/

Austin’s population has nearly doubled from 2000-2020 and its transportation systems are struggling to keep up, but the region’s major transit agency, Capital Metro, is working its way toward an accessible and intuitive system.

In 2010 Austin launched Capital Metrorail, a 32-mile commuter rail line that failed to draw significant riders, because it runs infrequently and misses much of the city’s density. To address that gap, in 2014, Capital Metro launched MetroRapid, a rapid bus system (similar to Columbus’ CMAX) featuring two lines making limited stops along some of the city’s main north-south corridors, hitting the neighborhoods that Metrorail missed, including the downtown core, south Austin, and the University of Texas. And in 2018, Capital Metro also embarked upon a full bus network redesign, which they dubbed “CapRemap.”

Austin’s current high frequency transit network.

CapRemap followed the principles of Houston and Columbus’ work, achieving similar results. A year after CapRemap’s release, the total bus system’s ridership had increased by about 4 percent and MetroRapid’s increase was about 6 percent—indicating that improving the grid of routes that increase accessibility across the city also strengthens the core of the system. Capital Metro also introduced new standards of mapping and signage that make Austin’s buses easier to use and navigate. 

These improvements contributed to the success of a ballot initiative in November 2020 for the agency’s much more ambitious $7 billion ProjectConnect plan (click to see a map.) At the center of that plan are two light rail lines, which largely follow the current MetroRapid routes, paired with the introduction of new MetroRapid upgrades for some of the busiest existing bus routes. ProjectConnect is evidence that a well-planned baseline system will grow public support for more substantial infrastructure through incremental upgrades.

The Twin Cities are focused on serving corridors with the highest driving demand 

Compared to the prior examples, Minnesota’s Twin Cities are taking a more incremental and perhaps unconventional approach to transit improvement and network strengthening. Like in Houston, many of the region’s main activity centers—like downtown Minneapolis, downtown St. Paul and suburban Bloomington—are connected by well-used local light rail services, which are reinforced by a grid of crosstown bus routes. Sixteen of these bus routes run every 15 minutes or better on corridors that are highly traveled but do not need the level of capacity that rail provides, and the region’s transit agency, Metro Transit, sees this network as a key to improving access throughout the region. 

A METRO C Line bus by Tony Webster.

Kick-started in 2010 by the region’s Transit Master Study, Metro Transit has begun upgrading several of its busiest bus lines to what they call rapid arterial routes by “stopping less frequently and allowing passengers to pay before boarding.”

The A Line and C Line are currently operating as “backbone” routes of the bus network, with three more (F, G, and H) prioritized for near-term service frequency upgrades in the agency’s 2021 Network Next plan. This plan, set to be updated every five years, is centered around making data-driven, equitable decisions that improve speed and reliability. 

Metro Transit is also working to better integrate local buses into its larger regional bus network, branded with colors, which operates partially on major freeways. The Orange Line, which just opened in December 2021, travels in dedicated high-occupancy toll lanes southward from downtown along Interstate 35W, one of the region’ busiest freeways. Unlike some freeway express routes in other cities, the Orange Line runs in both directions at 15-minute intervals (during weekdays) and serves substantial, accessible modern stations that bridge the gap between the speed of freeway travel and the pedestrian accessibility that serves successful transit. This approach also acknowledges the reality of the region’s multiple centers and serves the places that people are already going by car.

One of the I-35W rapid bus median stations on Metro Transit’s new Orange Line. Photo by Metro Transit.
Final construction of an I-35W rapid bus median station on Metro Transit’s new Orange Line. Photo by Metro Transit.
An early rendering of an I-35W rapid bus median station on Metro Transit’s new Orange Line. Photo by Metro Transit.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Metro Transit became one of a number of agencies to adjust its service to respond to shifting transit needs and provide better access: by lowering fares, providing near-term service to get students to school in the wake of bus driver shortages, and expanding a program to provide targeted transit passes to specific apartment buildings to better meet the needs of residents and actively reduce car-dependence. 

The agency’s strategies stem from three principles, according to Metro Transit arterial bus rapid transit manager Katie Roth, who collaborated with T4A in this case study: 1) to meet the market for transit as it stands today, 2) improve the market for transit for the future, and 3) improve access to transit in communities that have historically suffered disinvestment. “This is how we’re going to emerge from the pandemic as a transit system,” she says. 

Following traveler demand and creating a reliable all-day network will boost the resilience of neighborhoods around the region, providing a solid foundation to expand upon with their Network Next plan.

What other communities can learn about improving transit access 

Making a real impact on our climate will require providing transit that offers a true alternative to driving. While there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer that works for every city and no US city that has fully solved this puzzle, the agencies profiled here have several things in common: they used data to understand service needs and were willing to rethink their route structure—sometimes dramatically—to provide better access for people most reliant on transit and keep up with changing development patterns, often seeing significant increases in ridership as a result. 

Unfortunately, no amount of clever service redesign will make up for resources that simply aren’t there, so increasing transit funding must be part of the picture. And even a significant boost in funding won’t be enough to meaningfully improve transit access for all the people who need it in the more sprawling areas of our metro regions, so putting more people in the path of high quality transit by changing local development practices is a critical step on the path to a lower-emissions transportation system.

The Twin Cities region isn’t the only one that has updated its transit service to respond to evolving needs during the pandemic and beyond. In our final post in this series, we will be profiling agencies that have changed their approach during COVID to shift some focus away from traditional 9-to-5 commuters, make transit more affordable, and rethink what the future of transit should look like to reduce emissions and provide access for those who need it most.

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/