State DOT report cards: Transportation performance across all 50 states

It’s simple: Most state DOTs get a failing grade when it comes to achieving outcomes that matter. When we evaluated the data to see progress on outcomes, 98 percent of state DOTs received a failing grade.

Despite spending billions of dollars on transportation, state DOTs have failed to make progress on safety, state of repair, and transportation choices—outcomes that benefit everyone who uses the transportation system. That’s because state DOT investments are misaligned with outcomes, resulting in many investments that actually make outcomes worse, not better.

Explore the interactive map or table to see how your state performed, compare results across states, or download the report cards for all 50 states.

To determine a grade for each State Department of Transportation, we started by looking at the performance of the transportation system against Transportation for America’s priorities: safety over speed, fix it first, and invest in the rest.  Safety is our top priority and is usually listed as the top priority for transportation agencies at all levels of government, so safety performance makes up the highest percentage of a state DOT’s scores, followed closely by fixing our crumbling infrastructure.

Beyond our three priorities, we chose two additional performance areas to score. The first is transportation costs. Considering the affordability crisis in the country, this is important to include. Transportation is the second-highest household expenditure, with housing plus transportation costs making up 50% of the average household’s expenses according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And high gas prices are responsible for almost 30% of the increase in the Consumer Price Index, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. So it is hard to imagine making significant progress in lowering Americans’ cost of living without bringing down the cost of transportation through policies that allow people to take shorter trips, switch to less expensive modes, or access more efficient vehicles.

The fifth measure, congestion, is included for very different reasons. While reducing congestion is not one of T4America’s priorities, transportation agencies often cite congestion reduction as the obstacle that prevents them from addressing the other four priorities, and is the stated purpose of so much of their spending. So, according to one of their own preferred measures, how are states doing when it comes to congestion? This is why we included this clear high-priority factor in the score to determine whether the trade-offs were worth it.

This approach also focuses on outcomes, not spending, except in the category of investing beyond highways. Because transportation data often lags by several years, these grades reflect past performance rather than current investments. It is worth considering where each state is spending their time and funding today to get a sense of how these scores might change in the future.

Finally, this is a report card based on Transportation for America’s priorities. If your state has different priorities or different levels of emphasis on those priorities, it is a good idea to design your own to determine whether you are getting the outcomes you want from your state’s transportation investments. This approach reflects our first recommendation: set a limited number of priorities and measure progress in those areas as well as how investments will contribute to better outcomes in the future.