fix-it-first Archives - Transportation For America

The country’s civil engineers agree: $1.5 trillion didn’t produce good infrastructure

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

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

Consider:

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

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

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

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

Credit where it is due

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a few facts on infrastructure spending:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fix it first in practice

VDOT Crew pulling ditches in a Work Zone on west bound Route 60.

One of our recently launched principles, fix it first, targets maintenance over expansion, advocating for federal highway dollars to be spent repairing old roads and bridges before expanding or building new ones. So, what would it look like in practice to implement this principle into the federal transportation program, to shift our states’ priorities away from grand openings and toward more resilient transportation infrastructure?

The problem

Make no mistake, requiring repair and maintenance before expansion would represent a complete reorientation of our transportation program. While some states certainly do better than others, the majority of them are ignoring or deprioritizing certain maintenance needs in favor of building new roads. And arguably none are creating long-term plans for financing the ongoing maintenance of those new roads or bridges. Which is why every five years, we hear the same rhetoric about why we need a massive increase in federal transportation investment to “fix our crumbling roads and bridges,” and why conditions rarely change. It’s a loop cycle.

A few years ago, before the passage of the 2021 five-year infrastructure law (the IIJA), we heard endless speechifying on Capitol Hill about the decaying infrastructure. Thousands upon thousands of deficient bridges. Bad roads. Unfathomable backlogs of neglected maintenance and repair. But with that historic infusion of infrastructure money in hand from the IIJA, state DOTs and a collection of senators lost their minds that USDOT would even deign to suggest that repair be prioritized first with that money.

It shouldn’t be a revolutionary principle: Federal dollars should not be spent on new roads and bridges if our existing ones are at risk of or already breaking down. The need for this reprioritization primarily stems from the staggering lack of priority that maintenance has historically been given. Instead of fulfilling repairs, our dollars are spent on expansion, resulting in the overwhelming 830 billion-dollar maintenance backlog.

If you have a flat tire, you don’t take a cross-country road trip before getting the tire replaced. We should have the same approach to our transportation infrastructure. In this video, bridges in Fife, Washington and East Providence, Rhode Island had to be closed due to safety concerns after decades of delayed maintenance. The closures reduced traffic flows to local businesses, causing significant concerns amongst local business owners seeing their revenues dip. Delayed maintenance also impacts access to necessary resources, such as healthcare, and can exacerbate damages caused by natural disasters, reducing our resilience to extreme events. On the other hand, investing in repairs holds numerous opportunities to improve quality of life and increase economic growth. If we invested only $1 billion per year into resolving delayed maintenance, an estimated 13,000 direct and indirect jobs would be created.

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

Implementing the principle

To reorient our federal program around repair and maintenance we’ll have to get to the root of the problem: policy, the resistance of state DOTs and their elected leadership to this idea, and a mistaken belief that new roads and lanes are the only viable strategy to reduce congestion, connect people to opportunity, and create economic benefits.

Congress came close in 2020 during the run-up to what eventually became the IIJA. In the House of Representatives, a much stronger and superior five-year reauthorization proposal (the INVEST Act) included an amendment from Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) that would have enshrined our ix-it-first principle into federal transportation policy. The amendment included three small but transformative changes to the bill:

Require a maintenance plan for building new capacity.
Require benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) on new capacity projects.
Include a range of new performance measures in BCAs.

Although small, these changes would have ensured that our federal dollars were spent responsibly, that expansions would not crumble just a few decades after being built and that new capacity projects have considered a wide range of accurately predicted benefits.

Unfortunately, this and some of the other best parts of the superior INVEST Act were removed during negotiations with the Senate to produce the final 2021 Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act (IIJA). This amendment is only one example that prioritizing maintenance is not an unpopular opinion, but it does happen to be less popular than a ribbon-cutting photo op. If state’s are going to prioritize spending on maintenance, it has to come from the top. As a former Mississippi DOT Commissioner told us a few years ago, left to their own devices, states will continue taking the blank checks to build new things. “If you want us to prioritize maintenance, then you’re going to have to tell us ‘you gotta do it!’”

Replicating the policies in the INVEST Act would be a good starting point, but the maintenance goals can be strengthened through a few other key details. The federal government could create strict requirements on deferred maintenance before states are permitted to utilize that funding for new builds. A strong example of this are transit formula funds, which currently prioritize funding maintenance over expansion. Furthermore, ties to federal dollars would require the federal government to develop stronger tracking methods on how state funds are being spent on maintenance. Additionally, the federal government should embed additional requirements to more accurately define the beneficiaries of expansion projects. Through stronger BCAs, the federal government can ensure that funds are being spent to improve the quality of life of those living in the communities near new projects.

So, why hasn’t this happened yet?

The longstanding myth that expanded roadways improve congestion has been debunked. Furthermore, expansion actually makes traffic worse. This idea is referred to as induced demand, and is an economic term that illustrates how an increased supply in something will make people want and/or use it more.

But most state DOTs still view expansion as the only tool in their toolbox, and are highly resistant to being good stewards if it comes at the expense of long-planned new highways and expansion projects. Shortly after the 2021 release of the IIJA, Federal Highway Administration Deputy Administrator Stephanie Pollack shared a memo gently urging states to prioritize repair over new capacity projects. As noted earlier, congressional reps carrying water for their state DOTs lost their minds at the humble suggestion (no requirement!) that they should prioritize repair. The outcry was so intense that USDOT had to recall the non-binding memo.

This controversy overshadowed the fact that their voters back home actually believe that repair is the best use of infrastructure dollars, as well as the fact that a majority also believe that new roads or lanes either don’t affect congestion or make it worse. (Focus groups we’ve conducted in the past have also shown that voters are shocked to discover that there are no requirements for repair first. Many assume there are.)

Now is the time for our federal government to ensure that our roads and bridges are in a good state of repair before expanding a system with insufficient plans to ensure it will stand the test of time.

It’s Fix It First Week

Click below to access more content related to our second principle for infrastructure investment, Fix it first. Find all three of our principles here.

Fix it first in practice

One of our recently launched principles, fix it first, targets maintenance over expansion, advocating for federal highway dollars to be spent repairing old roads and bridges before expanding or building new ones. So, what would it look like in practice to implement this principle into the federal transportation program, to shift our states’ priorities away…
We can’t afford to keep avoiding repair

When decision-makers fail to prioritize basic maintenance and repair, everyday Americans pay the price—in increased costs, increased time on the road, and suffering local economies. We can’t keep wasting taxpayer dollars without a clear plan to maintain what we’ve already built.
It’s time to stop expanding and start maintaining

To reshape our transportation system and address staggering maintenance needs, we must prioritize repairing existing infrastructure before expanding our roadways any further.

We can’t afford to keep avoiding repair

When decision-makers fail to prioritize basic maintenance and repair, everyday Americans pay the price—in increased costs, increased time on the road, and suffering local economies. We can’t keep wasting taxpayer dollars without a clear plan to maintain what we’ve already built.

We’ve written a lot about how decision-makers justify spending money on expansions instead of repair, even when we have a $830 billion maintenance backlog on existing highways alone. The idea is that when they add a new lane, they are saving travelers time, primarily by allowing drivers to drive faster. If you’ve been following us for a while, you already know that this logic is fundamentally flawed, but let’s set that aside for a moment.

When we expand roadways at the expense of every other way to travel, we create a transportation system that all but requires owning and driving a personal vehicle for essential trips like going to work, school, or the grocery store. When we then fail to maintain those same roads and bridges, we see travel delays in the form of detours and slowed traffic—delays people must suffer through, because they have no other option.

Because the full transportation system is connected, when one intersection is rendered impassable due to poor maintenance, anyone traveling on the roadways around it can experience disruptions, even if those roads are in perfect condition. If time is money (as transportation officials like to believe), this is reason in itself to invest in more transportation options and maintain our existing infrastructure.

It gets worse

Infrastructure failures also have economic ripple effects. When bridges are closed due to maintenance concerns, changed routes can impact local businesses. Bridge collapses can cost local economies millions and disrupt national supply chains.

This doesn’t even factor in that every dollar we spend on expansion adds to our overall maintenance deficit, as new lanes and bridges have maintenance needs as well. And thanks to induced demand, new lanes often lead to more driving, which leads to even more wear and tear on our roads. These costs, too, will eventually be shouldered by taxpayers.

There are also real, physical costs to poorly maintained roads and bridges. When you don’t maintain the roof of your house, you end up with even more costs as water damages the interior. It’s the same with roads and bridges. Water percolates through cracked and potholed surface pavement leading to worse damage, leading to expensive rebuilds that could have been averted with proper resurfacing and minor repairs. Bridges that aren’t regularly cleaned, sealed and repainted have shorter lifespans leading to more frequent bridge replacements that are very expensive.

Costs accumulate for travelers as well. Driving over potholes risks damage to personal vehicles, which the city and state likely won’t pay. If pavement is in poor condition, risk of crashes can increase. And then there is the physical risk of driving over a poorly maintained bridge, hoping that it won’t collapse. When the Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh in 2022 due to lack of maintenance, a bus and six passenger vehicles fell with it, leading to multiple injuries. When a structurally deficient I-35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007, 13 people died and 145 more were injured.

You could put it this way: The maintenance costs state and local decision-makers fail to address are all eventually passed on to everyday Americans—to travelers, local business owners, and workers. The costs accumulate in the form of lost time, lost income, damage to personal vehicles, and increased risk of injury. They turn into even more maintenance expenses and higher taxes down the line.

When taxpayer dollars aren’t spent responsibly, we all pay for it, over and over again.

We don’t have the money for this

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure, but without a requirement to fix it first, a substantial portion of those funds went to more roadway expansions without any plan to maintain the roads we’ve already built. The environmental impact alone of these expansions will likely lead to even more maintenance needs in the future.

It’s unlikely we’ll see an investment like that again any time soon, which makes our maintenance needs even more concerning. In the next federal infrastructure investment, congressional leaders need to make sure that taxpayer money gets spent wisely. We simply can’t afford to keep this up.

It’s Fix It First Week

Click below to access more content related to our second principle for infrastructure investment, Fix it first. Find all three of our principles here.

Fix it first in practice

One of our recently launched principles, fix it first, targets maintenance over expansion, advocating for federal highway dollars to be spent repairing old roads and bridges before expanding or building new ones. So, what would it look like in practice to implement this principle into the federal transportation program, to shift our states’ priorities away…
We can’t afford to keep avoiding repair

When decision-makers fail to prioritize basic maintenance and repair, everyday Americans pay the price—in increased costs, increased time on the road, and suffering local economies. We can’t keep wasting taxpayer dollars without a clear plan to maintain what we’ve already built.
It’s time to stop expanding and start maintaining

To reshape our transportation system and address staggering maintenance needs, we must prioritize repairing existing infrastructure before expanding our roadways any further.

It’s time to stop expanding and start maintaining

Principle #2: Fix it first. If your house has a leaky roof, you fix that before remodeling your kitchen. the federal transportation program should do the same and prioritize existing maintenance needs ahead of building new things which require decades of additional repair costs. Cartoon of winding highways eating up a U.S. dollar

To reshape our transportation system and address staggering maintenance needs, we must prioritize repairing existing infrastructure before expanding our roadways any further.

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided an unprecedented level of funding for U.S. infrastructure, so why are our roads and bridges still deteriorating?

Despite a requirement for transit systems to maintain a state of good repair, there is no such requirement for our bridges and highways. As a result, decision-makers continue to use taxpayer dollars to fund new lanes rather than repair existing ones.

This wasteful cycle of expansion and misallocation of resources has created a system with a staggering maintenance deficit and no clear plan to address it. Each new lane has its own maintenance needs, meaning we continue to add to the number of roadways in need of attention. And the intensifying impacts of climate change and extreme weather events, as seen through the above-normal Atlantic hurricane season this year, will create new challenges on all of our infrastructure, further exacerbating our maintenance and investment needs.

A negative return on investment

Transportation agencies use models to predict future traffic and plan the roadway system accordingly. For decades, they’ve used these models to justify costly highway expansions, claiming that expansions are needed to help relieve traffic congestion. Yet billions of dollars have been spent on this strategy, and traffic has only gotten worse. With no requirement to revisit and update these models, we continue to throw our dollars at a solution that simply doesn’t work.

Our ever-expanding roads widen community divides, costing Americans more in travel time, especially if they don’t travel by car. They worsen traffic, meaning Americans spend more time in traffic than before. And low-income communities face the greatest burden, as they are more likely to be located near wide, dangerous roadways and also least likely to have their maintenance needs met.

Americans want to fix it first

Americans have caught on to the congestion con, as 82 percent of voters don’t believe that highway expansions reduce traffic. The most popular long-term solution to reducing traffic in U.S. communities is repairing existing roads—not building new ones.

We need to stop borrowing against the future and instead adopt an approach that values fixing what we have before adding to the system. Prioritizing “fix-it-first” principles would reorient our transportation program to emphasize addressing repair needs before creating new maintenance liabilities. This approach not only begins chipping away at our maintenance backlog, but produces more jobs, enhances safety, and brings roads to an improved state of repair in rural, urban, and suburban communities alike.

The last two decades have proven that pouring money into the same flawed system is failing to make it any better. Delaying investments in repair means that we will only increase the costs of our maintenance needs in the long-run. We cannot afford to continue the status quo. With the next transportation reauthorization bill looming, it is necessary for our federal funding to be focused on achieving a state of good repair and delivering on better economic, environmental, and social outcomes for our communities.

It’s Fix It First Week

Click below to access more content related to our second principle for infrastructure investment, Fix it first. Find all three of our principles here.

Fix it first in practice

One of our recently launched principles, fix it first, targets maintenance over expansion, advocating for federal highway dollars to be spent repairing old roads and bridges before expanding or building new ones. So, what would it look like in practice to implement this principle into the federal transportation program, to shift our states’ priorities away…
We can’t afford to keep avoiding repair

When decision-makers fail to prioritize basic maintenance and repair, everyday Americans pay the price—in increased costs, increased time on the road, and suffering local economies. We can’t keep wasting taxpayer dollars without a clear plan to maintain what we’ve already built.
It’s time to stop expanding and start maintaining

To reshape our transportation system and address staggering maintenance needs, we must prioritize repairing existing infrastructure before expanding our roadways any further.

Three principles to guide federal transportation spending

T4A's three principles for transportation funding are Safety over Speed, Fix It First, and Invest in the Rest

It’s time for transportation investments that achieve results for all Americans. For future investments in U.S. infrastructure, Congress should follow three key principles: prioritize safety over speed, fix it first, and invest in the rest.

We’ve released our three principles for future federal investments in our nation’s infrastructure. Learn more about them at t4america.org/platform.

Federal transportation policy has very serious problems to solve. Our roads, bridges, transit, sidewalks, bikeways, and rail systems are in disrepair; congestion has increased; pedestrian fatalities and emissions are the highest in decades, and rising; and too many people lack safe, affordable, and convenient access to jobs and essential services.

For too long, Congress has thrown more funding at the problem, hoping that spending more dollars on the same thing will lead to different results. However, all this money has only continued to make our problems worse. As Congress makes decisions about limited taxpayer funds, it’s time that they invest smarter, prioritizing our dollars to create a transportation system that works for the average American.

With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expiring in 2026, the next surface transportation reauthorization, a significant federal investment in our nation’s infrastructure, will be top of mind for the next Congress. Based on the results of the last reauthorization (and the one before that, and the one before that), it is clear that we need a fundamental change in approach. That’s why we’re calling on Congress to update the decades-old federal transportation program to design for safety over speed, prioritize maintenance, and invest in the full transportation system, including opportunities to walk, bike, and take public transit.

Invest in the rest

For more than half a century, we’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars into building a sophisticated highway system that attempts to connect everyone to everything everywhere—by car. We’ve completed a highway system that was once the envy of the world, but now that same system is failing to meet today’s needs. Imagine what we could achieve if we applied the same level of funding and energy into investing in more options to get people where they need to go.

Past road projects destroyed walkable communities or eliminated walking as an option. Investments in highways have drastically outpaced transit investments, with roughly 80 percent of federal transportation money going to highways since the 1980s while only 20 percent has gone to public transportation. As a result, most Americans have to travel by car to get where they need to go—whether or not they want to or can afford to—which leads to more traffic, more lanes, and more harmful climate emissions.

It’s time for Congress to invest in the rest of our transportation system, which has been neglected for far too long, and bring the freedom of choice back to everyday Americans trying to get where they need to go as conveniently, safely, and affordably as possible.

It’s Invest in the Rest Week! In our next three posts, we’ll be diving into this principle and why it should be a top priority in federal transportation spending. Check out the first post here for more on this new T4A principle.

Safety over speed

Ask any member of Congress, and they’ll tell you that they believe our roads should be safe for all travelers. Yet federal investments in transportation have made our roads deadlier. In 2022, the number of people hit and killed while walking reached a 40-year high.

This is because our transportation models and policies prioritize the speed of vehicles over the safety of all road users. High-speed car travel makes sense in some environments, like on interstates or limited access highways. However, when fast-moving cars encounter people walking and biking on our local roadways, crashes, injuries, and deaths become far more likely. When it comes to roads like these, we have to choose between vehicle speed and the safety of all road users—we can’t have both.

Fix it first

There is an $830 billion backlog for repairing existing U.S. highways alone. The entire federal program spends about $50 billion per year, so even if we devoted 100 percent of all federal money to maintenance for ten straight years, we’d still be unable to fully address this backlog. This does not even account for the costs of maintaining and preserving the additional roads and bridges that we continue to build.

Our congressional leaders are well aware of this deficit. In fact, when they are determining how many taxpayer dollars to devote to our nation’s infrastructure, the need for maintenance is always top-of-mind. However, when states go to spend those dollars, they almost always prioritize costly highway expansion projects over needed repairs. And despite the clear public desire to see maintenance needs addressed, there is no federal requirement that they spend these funds any other way.

We can’t continue to build more roads and bridges if we can’t take care of the ones that already exist. Our federal funding needs to be focused on achieving a state of good repair.

For decades, Congress has poured money into the same flawed system. We’ve seen the results of that strategy. It’s time to make smarter investments in our transportation system. Starting now, we will continue to engage our congressional leaders to advance these three principles—and in the year ahead, we’ll be calling on you for help.

Building back better: Reflections on the state of infrastructure repair in the U.S.

A long bridge over a river stops abruptly halfway across, with a quarter-long section lying crumped in the river below

Despite substantial federal funding available to address “crumbling roads and bridges,” our infrastructure’s state of repair is an ongoing issue, and climate change is only adding to the problem.

You don’t have to look far in history to see major infrastructure failures around the country. The same day as the Key Bridge collapse (a tragedy that was likely not due to a state of repair issue), in the Greater New Orleans metro area, the Chalmette Paris Road Bridge was closed due to hazardous structural integrity issues (i.e. it could collapse at any time). There also has been multiple notable roadway infrastructure failures in the past two decades: the I-95 bridge collapse in Philadelphia, PA; I-85 bridge collapse in Atlanta, GA; I-5 bridge in Skagit, WA; DC-295 in Washington, DC; I-25 in Pueblo, CO; I-64 in Norfolk, VA; and most notably I-35W in Minneapolis, MN.

For the Philadelphia, Atlanta, and DC cases, the bridges were structurally sound, but failed due to a catastrophic event without safeguards to protect the structures. For the Skagit, Pueblo, Norfolk, and Minneapolis, flawed design paired with a changing climate and mobility patterns (i.e. vehicle weight and size) led to structural failures. And if we look beyond roadways and towards other modes of transportation in the US, top of mind is mechanical failures leading to East Palestine, OH train derailment, the 2007 DC MetroRail crash at Fort Totten (and again on DC MetroRail in 2015 with a train fire at L’Enfant Plaza), the 2017 NYC Subway Summer of Hell, and even a failing seawall that cofunctions as a pedestrian walkway at DC’s famed Tidal Basin (#ripstumpy).

What’s going on with our state of repair?

There are compounding factors that are threatening our nation’s mobility infrastructure. The most notable threat is our climate. With ever-fluctuating temperatures, precipitation (or lack thereof), and major weather events, the structural integrity of our infrastructure is being challenged. When originally built, a lot of our nation’s infrastructure was designed with the assumption of historical climate precedent going forward. Fluctuating temperatures affect building material, while precipitation impacts foundational integrity. When also subjected to increasing extreme weather events that stress the infrastructure, wear and tear accelerates.

Then there is the reality of changing travel patterns on our mobility system. A growing population paired with changing commuting patterns post-COVID pandemic that is stretching system demands for longer periods of time plus using different types of vehicles (that are bigger and heavier, including trains and ships) on our roadways, waterways, and railways is taking a toll on infrastructure designed with a different population and vehicle demand in mind.

There also are factors that are in the hands of transportation operators and decision makers. When the Silver Bridge collapsed between West Virginia and Ohio in 1967, one of the outcomes was the development of the National Bridge Inspection Standards. After the 1980 Skyway Bridge collapse, infrastructure design was altered for future projects to create structural redundancy and fortification. However, as alluded to earlier, changing climate and system demands may render design, maintenance, and inspection standards developed 40-60 years ago “functionally obsolete,” borrowing a term from bridge inspection standards. This also can be seen (or not seen) on the ground via the decreasing frequency and rigor of asset condition inspections.

And this can be attributed to a deteriorating focus on our transportation policy and investments aimed at fixing things first. There are leaders, such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who have made it a priority to rethink transportation policy and investments aimed at fixing things first, but unfortunately, that is still a troublesome rarity in light of these challenges to our nation’s mobility infrastructure state of repair. This is also paired with the lack of institutional knowledge at the federal and state legislative levels, deferring often to state DOT for guidance on policy and investments. Unfortunately, those same policies and investments are opaque to decision makers and the public, if not the state DOT itself not understanding their origins and being flexible enough to rethink strategies that haven’t worked for decades to yield different results.

Bridge inspectors investigate the wall of I-84 bridge, which has small amounts of debris. — *Oregon DOT bridge inspection along Eagle Creek Viaduct on I-84 MP 40 after a fire. Flickr photo by ODOT.*

What’s our path forward?

President Biden made commitments to rebuild the fallen Key Bridge within hours of the event, supported by key Congressional appropriators. There is a need for that same urgency across the entirety of the transportation system’s state of repair, which has breached $1 trillion in deferred maintenance, before disasters occur. There also is a need to rethink investment strategies and policies that encourage a reduction in vehicle miles traveled, which is corollary to reducing transportation’s GHG emissions, and in turn, slowing down climate change’s impact on our transportation system.

While decision makers hash out policies and investment strategies, the transportation industry needs to double down how they assess the state of repair in light of changing conditions. That means reassessing our nation’s assets and the climate and mobility demand assumptions that play into an asset’s condition. Digging into this further, that means understanding implications on existing and future building materials and asset designs, plus looking at how and what frequency an asset is assessed and future-proofed from catastrophic failure (whether by deterioration or an extreme event (whether induced by nature or not).

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

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.

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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. ² 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.

“We invested all that money to build a 4-lane highway with absolutely no provision for maintaining what we built. Not a dime. And that has come back to haunt us.”

– @MississippiDOT Commissioner Dick Hall on why we need to #FixItFirst pic.twitter.com/VpQwt5FUZu
— Transportation for America (@T4America) October 24, 2019

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.”

Everyone agrees repair is important. No one wants to require it. pic.twitter.com/ov234XqCLe
— Transportation for America (@T4America) March 8, 2022

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.

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.

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.

Fix-it-first would be a win for rural communities

The lack of repair requirements in the infrastructure bill will shortchange rural areas, costing them potential jobs and leaving them with crumbling roads and bridges that won’t get repaired. Our report highlights why using highway funds to fix roads and bridges would bring numerous benefits to rural America.

The infrastructure deal that passed the Senate in August and is currently waiting on a House vote after budget reconciliation will fail to make meaningful progress on the maintenance backlog on our nation’s streets, roads, and highways. That’s because there is no requirement for state DOTs to prioritize repair before building expensive new roads they will struggle to maintain. Historically, when given new funds with this kind of flexibility, they’ve chosen to expand their roadways (with dubious results), with no real plan for maintaining their highway system.

Cover of Rural Transportation Policy report

Read our latest report on the transportation needs in rural areas
Rural Americans need and deserve reliable and convenient transportation options, but current policies are failing them. This short report we released last week has six recommendations and stories of success from rural America that show a better approach.

What’s the impact on rural areas?

Despite what you may have heard from scores of Senators from rural states, failing to prioritize repair first is a big loss for rural America.

Instead of fixing potholed roads and preventing key farm-to-market bridges from being weight-limited or closed outright, a large portion of the infrastructure funding will go to costly expansion projects in big growing metropolitan areas. State DOTs will burn through the funding buying expensive right-of-way to widen roads for metro commuters. Oftentimes, these highway projects will worsen neighborhood connectivity by creating new barriers and will just end up inducing more driving, which means widened roads fill up with traffic in a few years, failing to deliver on the (expensive) promise of reducing congestion.

Meanwhile, rural areas, which aren’t growing as quickly as their urban counterparts, don’t have much rationale for road expansion, but they absolutely do need their roadways repaired. In fact, a report from TRIP (a national transportation research nonprofit) estimates the rural road maintenance backlog at $211 billion. With metro areas sucking up a majority of the funding for wasteful roadway expansion projects, there will be little left for the vital but unglamourous job of fixing rural highways, county roads, and small-town main streets.

What’s worse, the jobs that come with road repair—good-paying blue-collar jobs that rural communities need—won’t be as abundant. Maintenance work produces more jobs per dollar than roadway expansion since a greater share is spent on labor thanks to the lack of costly right-of-way acquisition. And since maintenance is the big need in rural areas, instituting requiring that existing roads are fixed before new ones are created would ensure that not only is the money spent better, but it actually goes to the greatest needs, creating more jobs along the way.

We don’t have to keep wasting highway funds on endlessly expanding highways. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill failed to include fix-it-first accountability, we can still hold our leaders accountable to actually use funds to repair roads and bridges before constructing new ones. Doing so would help preserve the rural roads that are vital for connectivity and bringing goods to market, all while creating the most jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Nails all three of T4America’s core principles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7) Support for expanded national passenger rail

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

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

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

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

8) A strong commitment to transit…

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

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

9) But with opportunities for greater improvements on transit

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

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

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

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

UPDATED: Amendment to the House’s INVEST Act will close the repair loopholes

UPDATE, June 17: This amendment was accepted by unanimous consent in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. We thank Chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, Rep. Jesús G. “Chuy” García, and Rep. Mike Gallagher for their tremendous support and leadership.

The House’s transportation bill is being debated and voted on starting Wednesday, June 17th, and a vital new amendment would strengthen the repair provisions in the bill, helping to strengthen the bill’s language and better align it with the legislative goal of prioritizing maintenance over new road capacity.

The House transportation committee’s markup of the INVEST Act starts at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17th. View our amendment tracker here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, visit our hub for all T4America content about the INVEST Act, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

As we wrote last week about some of the shortcomings in the INVEST Act’s repair provisions:

When we first read through the INVEST Act last week we were excited to see that the committee clearly made a good faith effort to prioritize maintenance and after a cursory look we were inclined to give it a passing grade on our first principle of prioritizing repair. But the deeper we looked into the language, the more we saw the loopholes. …the INVEST Act’s fix-it-first language still needs to be strengthened to ensure a true focus on prioritizing repairing what we have before building new things that come with expensive, long-term repair costs. There were three misses in the House’s approach, but all can be fixed if the House is truly committed to ensuring that we preserve and maintain our existing transportation network.

We’re pleased to report that there has been a bipartisan amendment offered for tomorrow’s markup that would address the concerns outlined last week. Amendment #63 from Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL), co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), would make three important changes:

1) Require a maintenance plan
If your state or metro area wants to use core highway dollars for building new capacity, then they must present a financial plan for maintaining it. This is already true for transit, and it should be true for roads. The amendment would require a public plan for maintaining the new road while also maintaining the existing system. It is vital that we finally start requiring states to prove they can maintain what they’re building with the billions that they are given.

2) It will be hard to justify new road capacity with old models.
The INVEST Act requires states planning new capacity road projects to perform benefit-costs analyses (BCAs), but this amendment requires them to use demand models with a demonstrated track record of accuracy. The models in current use don’t have a good track record.

3) Require a more complete accounting of the benefits and costs.
The INVEST Act includes a new host of performance measures, including greenhouse gas emissions, and access to jobs and services. This amendment would require states planning new capacity projects to consider the benefits of ALL the performance measures, including new ones created by the bill. Without the amendment, project sponsors could have chosen one measure, like the narrow measure of “congestion reduction,” which is so often used to justify projects which just induce new driving, failing to consider the other priorities of the program like safety, emissions and access.

Who supports this amendment?

So far, in the limited time since it was released before markup began:

Transportation for America
Bipartisan Policy Center
League of American Bicyclists
League of Conservation Voters
National League of Cities
National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)
Taxpayers for Common Sense

We’ll be keeping tabs on this amendment and others that are going to be considered as the House transportation committee starts debating and voting on these amendments starting at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17th. Learn more about amendments and view our tracker here.

For those of you that live in a district represented by a Member of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, you can send a message to your rep with this page and urge them to support the INVEST Act and to support this very necessary amendment. If you’re not sure if your rep is on the committee, just go on over to take action and the form will let you know.

TAKE ACTION

Note: This amendment was accepted by unanimous consent in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Thank you Chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, Rep. Jesús G. “Chuy” García, and Rep. Mike Gallagher for your tremendous support and leadership.

The House bill needs some changes to make repair the number one priority

UPDATE, June 17: A bipartisan amendment to fix the issues we detailed below was accepted by unanimous consent in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Thank you Chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, Rep. Jesús G. “Chuy” García, and Rep. Mike Gallagher for your tremendous support and leadership. View our amendment tracker for the INVEST act here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

The House’s new INVEST Act made a strong effort to prioritize maintenance, but there are still loopholes that can allow states and metro areas to avoid the legislative intent of a real, concrete focus on repair first. Here’s a run down on our concerns with the repair provision and how it could be strengthened in next week’s markup in the House transportation committee.

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

We’ve spent 60-plus years building an unparalleled highway system with hundreds of thousands of bridges, in addition to scores of metropolitan transit networks and a network of other streets. But we have failed to steward our assets well. For no good reason at all, we’re still spending money like it’s 1956, expending money we don’t have to build roads we can’t afford to maintain which fail to bring the promised economic returns—all while neglecting repair needs. Liberals have supported and aggressively funded the status quo, ignoring the transportation program’s impact on climate, public health, and access to opportunity. Conservatives have joined them, failing to take a stand for bedrock values of good stewardship of federal dollars and keeping federal spending low. We must make repair and maintenance the core, number one priority of the federal transportation program. We cannot afford to keep expanding our system without any plan for maintaining it.

When we first read through the INVEST Act last week we were excited to see that the committee clearly made a good faith effort to prioritize maintenance and after a cursory look we were inclined to give it a passing grade on our first principle of prioritizing repair. But the deeper we looked into the language, the more we saw the loopholes.

It is indeed a major change that the committee proposes dedicating 20 percent of the two biggest sources of state DOT funds toward repair. In addition, states have to fulfill some new conditions to add new capacity with the largest highway program. Both are good steps and we applaud them. However, the INVEST Act’s fix-it-first language still needs to be strengthened to ensure a true focus on prioritizing repairing what we have before building new things that come with expensive, long-term repair costs. There were three misses in the House’s approach, but all can be fixed if the House is truly committed to ensuring that we preserve and maintain our existing transportation network.

1) Too many definitions are either missing, or too vaguely defined

Because the committee left a lot of the vital details to the USDOT Secretary to determine via regulatory language, the final verdict on repair won’t be decided in the legislation (as it should). As an example, for states to add new capacity with core highway funds, they have to fulfill three conditions: They have to demonstrate that they are making progress on repair, they have to consider operational improvements and transit and show that expanding roadway capacity is more cost-effective than either, and they have to demonstrate that the expansion project would meet another performance target, like congestion reduction.

Those three terms in italics will be left up to the USDOT rulemaking process, and can already have a long history of being manipulated to add new capacity. It would help to put more explicit parameters on what defines “progress on repair.” Does it mean meeting the state or MPO’s own repair targets, which could be unambitious? And when it comes to measuring cost-effectiveness and benefit cost analysis, the way these have been applied to transportation projects in the past have overstated the benefits of highway capacity expansions and undervalued or failed to value climate, equity and public health benefits.

2) To truly prioritize repair, states should prove they can maintain the new things they build

Even if states fulfill these conditions above to add new capacity, there’s no language requiring the project sponsor to prove they can maintain the asset they are building. This is a big miss, and this is one of the primary reasons we’re all in this mess in the first place.

Even if states make valuable and measurable progress on state of good repair, it would be negligent to allow them to build new things without requiring that they consider and plan for how they will take care of them. You don’t buy a house when you manage to secure some of the upfront costs (a downpayment), you also have to prove to the bank that you have a plan for paying that monthly mortgage for the next 15 or 30 years. We already require transit capital project sponsors to provide a plan for long-term maintenance when they apply for federal funding. It’s time to start requiring this degree of stewardship and responsibility to a highway program that has been sorely lacking it. Simply adding this as a core requirement to the conditions for expansion via an amendment could bring about this powerful change.

3) All the tools the states have to fulfill this repair focus were designed to justify new highways

The biggest challenge here is that the House is counting on an entrenched culture that was organized around the building and expanding a national highway system to accomplish something entirely new. The tools that transportation agencies have at their disposal—the ones the House is asking them to use to fulfill this new focus on repair—were developed specifically to justify new highways. Without other changes, they will continue to do so.

The transportation demand models assume the same amount of driving in a neighborhood built only for cars as they do for a neighborhood built for walking. These models do not foresee that making space on a highway might invite more driving in the space cleared up. They often predict, strangely, that narrowing a lane in the city from 12 to 10 feet somehow means that the road can accommodate fewer 6-7 feet wide vehicles. These tools are old, flawed and often wrong. Comparing costs and benefits is a great idea, but we need to make clear that the benefits should be calculated in a way that is reasonably likely to be correct. And that can be done by simply asking the agencies to look back and report on how often their projections actually turn out to be right when making a justification for a massive new investment with taxpayer dollars.

We are hopeful that we’ll be able to report news of a specific amendment to make many of these fixes when the committee considers the bill, so stay tuned. We will need your support!

Wrapping up

If infrastructure is as bipartisan as everyone always claims then commonsense should prevail on this point. Republicans should care deeply about conserving taxpayer funds. Democrats should care about climate and equity impacts. Both should seek to maintain faith and public trust in the program. Strengthening these repair provisions should be an easy, bipartisan win and we urge Chairman DeFazio and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee members to make it happen.

Laser focused on repairing our bridges

Despite advances in technology, the standard practice for evaluating a bridge’s maintenance needs is a visual inspection, just as it was a half-century ago. To address our nation’s huge backlog in structurally deficient bridges in a more accurate and fiscally responsible way, the federal government should evaluate and speed the adoption of available technologies.

For the past 50 years, trained technicians have inspected highway bridges every two years (or more frequently) to assess the need for repairs or replacement. But in the early 2000s, a review of this practice by the Federal Highway Administration found the process “subjective,” “widely variable,” and incapable of optimizing spending.

Like so many things in transportation—the lopsided funding for roads compared to transit, our use of vehicle speed as a proxy for access, or our focus on building new infrastructure instead of repairing what we have—the way we inspect bridges is stuck in the past, decades behind the needs of the country. Transportation for America believes that we need to make repair one of our national priorities, but to do that, we also need to rethink how we evaluate what most needs to be repaired, and when. Better information can help inform a fix-it-first policy.

Fortunately, there are proven structural monitoring technologies commercially available today that can objectively assess which bridges must be replaced, which replacements can be safely deferred, and which might be able to continue functioning effectively with only minor repairs. This would allow state DOTs or local agencies to better target their repair dollars. But nationally, the norm is still subjective visual inspections.

This is no small issue. There are over 50,000 bridges across the country that are considered structurally deficient today, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The rehabilitation & replacement cost for this problem is an estimated $123 billion. But using technologies that are available today could potentially shave billions off that price tag. A number of projects conducted by some transportation agencies have shown that using structural monitoring technology in lieu of relying solely on visual inspections to more precisely assess bridge conditions is highly effective and has saved hundreds of millions of dollars by avoiding unnecessary replacement projects.

We believe that with the right policies and practices in place we can cut the national maintenance backlog in half. Part of the solution will be changing how we allocate resources, and part of the solution could be using the best available technology and data to evaluate the scale of the problem. But the federal government must lead this change for there to be widespread adoption of this technology.

The U.S. Department of Transportation should embark on an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of structural monitoring technologies to more objectively and accurately inspect bridges for safety. And Congress can be part of the solution by providing incentives and funding to spur their adoption.

Change is never easy, especially when it comes to transportation. There are decades of inertia within state departments of transportation which are already tasked with far more than their original mission of yesteryear (building the interstate highway system). But the interstate highway system is complete, the country has changed, and it’s time for U.S. DOT and state agencies to catch up. Facing deficits and uncertainty brought on by the pandemic, there has never been a better time to adopt new technologies that could yield large savings.

Explaining our three principles for transportation investment

Today, T4America is releasing a new set of three concrete, measurable principles for transportation investment.

Last week we explained why T4America is no longer advocating for more money for the federal transportation program and why we need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. Today, we’re rolling out our new principles, which are clear, simple, and measurable. You’ll find them incorporated into the “platform” section of our website and we’ll be using them to evaluate every single proposal in the months and years ahead: whether a standalone infrastructure plan or the forthcoming proposals for reauthorizing the nation’s surface transportation law that expires in 2020.

It’s time to stop spending billions with an unclear purpose for diminishing, marginal returns. We believe these three goals will help finally move us in the right direction.

#1 Prioritize maintenance

The process is inevitable as it is predictable every time the process of transportation reauthorization comes up. We’re stuck in a groundhog day with an infinite loop. Here’s how it goes:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program. And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble. And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

Our first principle is not about creating some new federal program to achieve a state of good repair. And it’s not about how much money is needed to repair our infrastructure, either. Our principle is simply a commitment to the American people that the maintenance backlog is cut in half. This would be a sea change.

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, let Congress tell us what the right target should be. But tell us exactly where we will be in addressing state of repair after this bill expires, not how much money will be spent. Until then, we believe half is right and we expect Congress to finally tie the program to their rhetoric.

#2 Design for safety over speed

When we talk about safety, we typically talk about reducing drunk driving, wearing seat belts, and wearing helmets on motorcycles. In recent years, thanks to leadership from former US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood, distracted driving was brought up to equal importance as these areas.

Yet what has been largely ignored is the role of speed itself in making our roadways completely unsafe for everyone outside of a motor vehicle. Speed isn’t always necessarily deadly. The way to make a high speed roadway safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets, and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. That’s called a limited-access highway. But we’ve tried to design for similar speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly.

Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets all across the United States, reaching levels in 2017 not seen since 1990. When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking. Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, found in their report Dangerous by Design that most cyclist and pedestrian crashes occur on these arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but without removing conflicts. If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

We have to take this seriously. The NTSB issued a landmark study in 2017 about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, and that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. Currently we only track whether someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits. It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds.

#3 Connect people to jobs and services by prioritizing accessibility

Fundamental to our transportation system (and the hundreds of billions of dollars we invest in it) is that it should provide people with access to jobs and services. This access is essential to an efficient economy, to ensuring that people can make a living and provide for their families, and to providing employers with reliable access to talent.

Our current federal transportation program uses a poor proxy for measuring access to jobs and services. Transportation agencies measure the speed of vehicle movement along observed portions of roadways and assume that if those vehicles can move quickly, then all trips must be smooth and short. That kind of measurement has resulted in a system that values a 40-minute commute to work in free-flowing traffic over a 20-minute commute in some congestion.

As it turns out, to make vehicles move quickly means building limited access roadways or widening roads and spreading out all destinations, making trips longer and biking or walking dangerous. So even though vehicles are traveling at high speed, people may not reach their destinations any faster because everything is more spread out. This is particularly true of pedestrians and cyclists, who once may have had to travel across short blocks, now have to cross long distances designed for cars, thanks to the limited-access changes that cut off local streets and eliminate shorter trips.

The technology has finally caught up. We can now understand, quickly and affordably, how well the transportation system connects people to the things they need. Thanks to aggregated GPS data, we can know where homes and likely destinations are located. We also have congestion data and real-time transit arrival information. With this data, we can accurately calculate how easily people can access the things that they need and how various proposed transportation investments would improve or worsen it.

Some states, particularly Virginia and Hawaii, have already started scoring potential projects under consideration for funding based on the extent to which they improve access to jobs and services. Massachusetts and Utah are investigating doing the same. Congress should follow their lead.

As Congress considers the next surface transportation policy bill, they should ensure that these destination access data are available nationwide. Congress should also update performance measures to replace 1950s proxy measures like speed of travel with accurate, updated 21st century measures. People don’t talk about the average speed of a trip: they talk about how long it took. We should evaluate transportation projects and the overall system the same way.

By the end of this next reauthorization cycle, the federal transportation program should be reoriented from a program focused on the fluidity of vehicle movement to one that prioritizes and measures access to jobs and services.

Go more in-depth on our principles here, and read our specific policy proposals for reauthorization here.

Rep. Bill Shuster’s infrastructure proposal scores 50 percent

On Monday, July 23, the Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Bill Shuster, released his proposal to reform transportation investment. While there are some novel ideas in the proposal, it ultimately scores a 50 percent based on our four guiding principles for infrastructure investment.

Local governments and millions of Americans are counting on the federal government to be a partner in rebuilding our transportation infrastructure. In November 2017, Transportation for America released a set of four simple principles to inform and evaluate any potential plans for federal infrastructure investment. The Chairman’s proposal is a serious one, and should be commended for being the first proposal with real funding in more than a decade, advancing the national conversation about our infrastructure. However, on the policy, it fails to meet our four principles.

How the proposal measures up to our principles

Provide real funding
We need real federal funding, not just new ways to borrow money or sell off public assets to support transportation investments.

The Chairman’s proposal addresses our infrastructure funding deficit through new short term revenue sources and a Highway Trust Fund Commission. While the proposal ultimately eliminates the gas tax, the proposed short-term fixes would include new/steeper taxes on bikes and transit (which we have concerns about). The gas tax would be replaced by a new revenue source (such as a mileage-based fee/road user charge) identified by the Commission. While we believe this proposal generally holds the promise of providing real funding. and we look forward to working together to advance this shared goal.

Fix the existing system first
We must immediately fix the system we have and fund needed repairs to aging infrastructure.

The Chairman’s proposal does not prioritize maintenance over other investment. The proposal creates a vehicle miles traveled tax pilot with a goal to “steadily reduce the state of good repair backlog in surface transportation.” This is a commendable goal, however it cannot be achieved by a funding source. Addressing the state of good repair backlog requires policy makers to set this as a priority and to dedicate available funding for this purpose. This proposal, like the current program, fails to do that.

Build smart new projects
Our current approach, largely driven by formula funding, is necessary to ensure baseline investments, but funding that flows automatically for specified purposes does not encourage innovation or flexible action.

The Chairman’s proposal holds the promise of meeting this principle. Through three proposed programs—national infrastructure investments grants, incentive grants, and projects of national significance—the proposal increases the amount of funding distributed through competition. Competition is an effective way to identify the projects that bring the greatest benefits for the investment.

Measure success
Infrastructure investments are a means to foster economic development and improve access to jobs and opportunity for all Americans.

Unfortunately, the Chairman’s proposal fails to ensure that communities measure the success of their investments or connects what they measure to their investment decisions. Congress started a performance measures framework in MAP-21; however, those measures miss major community priorities (like improving access to work) and fail to connect results to funding and thus lack real accountability.

Our four principles cannot be considered independently of each other. Well crafted programs that are underfunded miss the mark. More money spent ineffectively is certainly not the point. Bringing our infrastructure up to a state of good repair requires both real funding and refocusing the program on maintenance (as opposed to expanding out the highway system).

While Chairman Shuster is the first to propose real funding in quite some time and we thank him for providing real leadership, we can not just spend our way to our goals without other reforms. The proposal therefore scores only a 50 percent, far from a passing grade in the classroom or for something as long-lasting as infrastructure.

We appreciate the chairman’s thoughtfulness and determination and we look forward to working together to ensure that future proposals ultimately spend taxpayer money wisely.

The infrastructure plan that cuts infrastructure funding

After the release of the Trump administration’s long awaited infrastructure plan yesterday (along with their FY19 budget request), Beth Osborne, vice president of technical assistance at T4America, joined CBC News to talk about some of the issues with the plan in particular.

We have numerous concerns about the infrastructure plan, including the complete lack of any new money, the dismantling of existing, popular programs that fund transit infrastructure or pressing local needs (TIGER and transit capital funding), and the complete lack of any mechanism or requirements to ensure that any money spent will go toward fixing our existing infrastructure first.

“One of the reasons there’s a break in trust between the taxpayer and the federal government is that there are only so many times you can come before the taxpayers and say, ‘our nation’s roads and bridges are crumbling, please give us more money to fix it,’ and then not dedicate [the money] to fixing it.”

Watch the full interview with Beth:
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Transportation for America’s guiding principles for an infrastructure plan

As we continue to await either broad principles or specifics of the Trump’s administration much-anticipated infrastructure plan, T4America has released these four simple guiding principles to inform and evaluate any such future plan.

It’s past time to elevate the national conversation about infrastructure beyond just the breadth and cost of it. We need an examination of exactly which projects we are investing in and why. Whether the $50 billion we currently spend each year or the $1 trillion originally suggested by the administration, we need to do more than just pour money into the same old system for planning and building transportation projects.

America’s current federal transportation program does not bring us the returns we deserve for the sums we invest. There’s far too little accountability for accomplishing anything measurable and tangible with the billions we spend.

We urgently need a new way of doing business.

To get us there and truly realize the benefits of robust federal transportation infrastructure investments, we need a renewed focus on fixing our existing system first and foremost, on investing new dollars in only the smartest projects, and on creating new mechanisms to measure what we get in return for our money.

In lieu of any substantive details offered by the administration, Transportation for America offers its own set of guiding principles to help inform or evaluate any standalone infrastructure bill, aimed at influencing the national dialogue and encouraging members of Congress and White House officials to talk plainly and honestly about a smart approach to infrastructure planning and funding. They are:

1 – Provide real funding

We need real federal funding, not just new ways to borrow money or sell off existing assets, to rebuild our transportation systems. Historically, economic development and opportunity have depended on federal investments in transportation that connect communities and allow businesses to bring goods to market. Direct federal investment funded the construction of our highways, bridges, and transit systems, creating economic opportunities. Today, deteriorating transportation infrastructure—the result of years of reduced federal investment—is a roadblock to continued economic growth. Real funding, invested according to the principles outlined here, will rebuild the nation’s transportation infrastructure and restore economic opportunity.

2 – Fix the existing system first

We must immediately fix the transportation system we have and fund needed repairs to aging infrastructure. If we have a house with a leaky roof, it’s only prudent to fix the roof before building a new addition. Our transportation systems are no different.

Congress should dedicate federal transportation formula dollars to maintenance to make sure the system is returned to a state of good repair, is resilient, and works for all users; before funding new projects that bring years of additional maintenance costs. The application of federal performance measures to both the state and metro area programs would help prioritize needs and ensure that the greatest of them are addressed first.

3 – Build smart new projects

At a time when transportation resources are scarce, it is critical that funds go only to the best new projects. Competition, local control, and objective evaluation can ensure that federal funds flow to the projects that deliver the greatest benefit to communities. When communities are given the opportunity to compete for federal funds, they work harder to put forward projects that maximize return on investment, provide creative solutions, and involve a diverse range of stakeholders. Congress should direct new federal transportation dollars through competitive processes, such as the TIGER and transit Capital Investment Grant programs, which are accessible directly to city, county, regional, and state governments. Merely adding new funding into existing and outdated formula funding programs will not deliver the transformative projects that deliver long-term economic growth.

4 – Measure success

Investments in transportation are not an end in and of themselves. They are a means to foster economic development and improve all Americans’ access to jobs and opportunity. Agencies should be held accountable by evaluating how well their investments help achieve their regions’ goals. Newly available data and tools allow agencies to measure—better than ever before—how well transportation networks connect people to jobs and other necessities. The federal government should harness these tools so that state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations can ensure that federally funded investments are effectively connecting people to economic opportunity.

Download these principles as a sharable one-page PDF here or by clicking below:

A broke Highway Trust Fund means job losses equal to Denver’s population, President Obama warns

Speaking today at the Key Bridge in Washington, DC, President Obama called on Congress to save the Highway Trust Fund from its pending insolvency, and to adopt a long-term transportation bill on the scale of his proposed four-year, $302 billion program. [Full text here.]

In doing so, he retraced the bipartisan history of transportation funding in the U.S.:

Soon, construction workers will be on the job making the Key Bridge safer for commuters and for families, and even for members of Congress to cross. (Laughter.) This is made possible by something called the Highway Trust Fund, which Congress established back in the 1950s, and which helps states repair and rebuild our infrastructure all across the country. It’s an example of what can happen when Washington just functions the way it was supposed to.

Back then, you had Eisenhower, a Republican President; over time you would have Democratic Presidents, Democratic and Republican members of Congress all recognizing building bridges and roads and levees and ports and airports — that none of that is a partisan issue. That’s making sure that America continues to progress.

Now, here is the problem. Here is the reason we’re here in the heat. If this Congress does not act by the end of the summer, the Highway Trust Fund will run out. There won’t be any money there. All told, nearly 700,000 jobs could be at risk next year. That would be like Congress threatening to lay off the entire population of Denver, or Seattle, or Boston.

That’s a lot of people. It would be a bad idea. Right now, there are more than 100,000 active projects across the country where workers are paving roads, and rebuilding bridges, and modernizing our transit systems. And soon, states may have to choose which projects to continue and which ones to put the brakes on because they’re running out of money. Some have already done just that, just because they’re worried that Congress will not get its act together in time.

We spend significantly less as a portion of our economy than China does, than Germany does, than just about every other advanced country. They know something that I guess we don’t, which is that’s the path to growth, that’s the path to competitiveness.

We share the President’s frustration at the lack of progress, but we are encouraged by recent glimmers of bipartisan interest in a solution. Just last week we saw a bipartisan proposal for a long-term solution in the form of a 12-cent gas tax increase over two years. To us, that is far preferable to a last-minute accounting trick to get us through the election, which seems to be the betting of conventional wisdom at the moment. And it strikes us more sustainable than the one-time infusion from a tax holiday for offshore profits the Administration has proposed.

Still, we are glad to see the President use his bully pulpit to call attention to an issue that remains something of a sleeper for a public largely unaware that the trust fund that their safety, convenience and economy depend on is seriously threatened.

One in 9 bridges still “structurally deficient” as average age nears 50 years

One in nine of the bridges and overpasses American drivers cross each day is rated in poor enough condition that some could become dangerous or be closed without near-term repair, according to an updated analysis of federal data released today by Transportation for America.

New data and report: https://t4america.org/resources/bridges

Nearly 67,000 of the nation’s 605,000 bridges are rated “structurally deficient” and are in need of substantial repair or replacement, according to bridge inspections analyzed in The Fix We’re In For: The State of the Nation’s Bridges 2013. Nearly 8,000 are both structurally deficient and “fracture critical”, meaning they are designed with no redundancy in their key structural components, so that if one fails the bridge could collapse. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that the backlog of troubled bridges would cost $76 billion to eliminate.

The report ranks states and the District of Columbia in terms of the overall condition of the their bridges, with one having the largest share of deficient bridges, 51 the lowest. Twenty-one states have a higher percentage of deficient bridges than the national average of 11 percent. The five states with the worst bridge conditions have a share over 20 percent: Pennsylvania has the largest share of deteriorating bridges (24.5%), followed by Oklahoma (22.0%), Iowa (21.7%), Rhode Island (21.6%), and South Dakota (20.3%).

At the other end of the spectrum, five states have less than 5 percent of their bridges rated structurally deficient: Nevada and Florida lead the rankings with 2.2%, followed by Texas (2.6%), Arizona (3.2%), and Utah (4.3%).

“With the collapse of the I-5 bridge in Washington state last month, coming just six years after an interstate collapse in Minnesota, Americans are acutely aware of the critical need to invest in our bridges as our system shows its age,” said James Corless, director of Transportation for America. “Today, though, there more deficient bridges in our 100 largest metropolitan areas than there are McDonald’s locations nationwide.” Put another way, laid end to end, all the deficient bridges would span from Washington, DC to Denver, Colorado or from Tijuana, Mexico to Seattle — more than 1500 miles.

The need is growing rapidly, the report notes: While most bridges are designed to last 50 years before major overhaul or replacement, American bridges average 43 years old. Age is a major factor in bridge conditions. Roughly half of the structurally deficient bridges are 65 or older. Today there are nearly 107,000 bridges 65 or older, and in just 10 years, one in four will be over 65.

Congress has repeatedly declared the condition and safety of our bridges to be of national significance. However, the money to fix them is getting harder to come by with declining gas tax revenues and a fiscal squeeze at all levels of government. At the same time, Congress made the prospects for bridges even more uncertain last year by eliminating a dedicated fund for them in its update of the federal transportation program. The new law also reduces access to funds for 90 percent of structurally deficient bridges, most of which are owned by cash-strapped local governments.

We’ll have much more later today, but don’t miss the new data, new report, new interactive map and infographic over at the home for the bridge report.

About those 66,000+ deficient bridges: What did last summer’s transportation law change?

With the second collapse of an Interstate bridge in six years, Americans might expect Congress to leap into action to ensure adequate funding for bridge rehab and replacement. But as we have reminded numerous reporters since an I-5 bridge dropped into Washington’s Skagit River, federal lawmakers took a gamble and eliminated the nation’s dedicated bridge fund last summer.

I-5 photo by the Washington DOT on Flickr.

The bridge fund came into being in 1991, and especially in the first decade afterward, the country made enormous progress repairing deficient bridges. But that progress had slowed to a trickle when Congress took up the transportation funding bill, MAP-21, last summer.

With the I-35W collapse fresh in our minds and progress on repairing deficient bridges slowing, many assumed Congress would think about ways to make bridge repair more of a priority.

Not quite.

Instead, they took a gamble, eliminating the dedicated repair fund so that states could “set their own priorities,” as long as they promised to set targets for the repair of bridges on the National Highway System. That sounds great in principle, until you remember that competition for funds is growing rapidly, with no corresponding drop in the political pressure to build pet projects.

Though they won’t say it out loud, many DOT chiefs like a dedicated maintenance fund because it allows them to say “no” to projects they can’t afford, while helping to ensure existing facilities stay safe and functional. The changes in MAP-21 also don’t give similar attention to bridges not on the National Highway System – 90 percent of all bridges in need of repair – more on this below.

T4America has been a strong advocate of measuring performance against clear targets and goals. But for something as critical as bridge maintenance, there needed to be a well-considered transition period to understand how the new performance management system works, and establish clear targets and guaranteed enforcement mechanisms.

Instead, Congress scrapped the existing bridge repair program and directed USDOT to work with states to cooperate on setting measurable targets for things like bridge condition — but without significant penalties for failure. And considering that MAP-21 is only a two-year bill, states won’t be reporting on these measures until after this bill has already expired.

The second big change made last summer will force state and local communities into painful choices about priorities.

Before MAP-21, all 600,000+ highway bridges were eligible to receive funding for repair under that dedicated bridge repair program.

From the biggest interstate bridge down to that crucial bridge that connects your town across the river to another nearby town, all 66,500-plus deficient bridges could get the dollars dedicated for bridge repair.

Under MAP-21, Congress decided to focus the former bridge repair dollars almost exclusively on a narrow set of roadways known as the National Highway System (NHS). Think of the NHS as the interstates, state highways and most major four-lane and larger highways. The bridges on these roads are our most heavily traveled, no doubt, but they represent only about 10 percent of all structurally deficient bridges.

The other 90 percent will now have to compete with all of the other transportation needs in your community for the flexible funding that can be used on almost anything. And all of those needs will compete for less funding too, reduced from about 60 percent of all funding to 40 percent.

Bridge repair is added into the mix of choices along with regional transit investments, safe streets for all users, congestion relief, other transportation options, and other road repair — leaving communities with tough choices to make.

Bridges STP NHPP

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All this comes as our transportation network begins to show its age. At an average age of 43 years, the typical bridge is nearing the end of its 50-year design life, and many thousands are far older than that. Structurally deficient bridges are more than 20 years older on average.

The federal government should be all about making sure that bridges are being systematically upgraded, repaired or replaced. And in the wake of a calamity like the closure of a key commercial corridor, we Americans ought to be all about letting Congress know we’re willing to pay for a safe and secure transportation network, and making lawmakers pay at the ballot box if they won’t deliver it.