Tag: President Biden

In November 2020, we sent the incoming Biden administration a memo outlining immediate and longer-term actions we urged the new president to initiate. Four years later, while modest progress has been made on some, it’s hard to say that the transportation system or the most important outcomes by which we should evaluate it are significantly better or different than four years ago.

As the Biden administration comes to a close, it’s time to take stock of what President Biden and his team accomplished. (You can read our recaps of the Biden administration’s progress after their first, second, and third years.) There are certainly some tangible wins and progress to point to, like new programs focused on climate change and electrification, USDOT advancing smarter projects with their discretionary programs compared to the previous four years, and some positive administrative changes. There was also a massive infrastructure bill that did have some notable but small wins, though they all came alongside the IIJA’s historic amount of funding. Overall, the status quo on transportation that was in place when the Biden administration arrived is largely unchanged, though it is far better funded.

Before we get into the good and the incomplete, let’s look at the table of specific requests we made in November 2020.

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In truth, our hope was that many of these requests could be tackled in the first hundred days or over the first year. We were hoping to be able to check things off this list and add more ambitious tasks for the intervening years as time went by. But as you can see, four years later, most of the initial list is either undone or incomplete.

Beyond this list, it’s hard to say that the most important measurable outcomes for transportation overall—safety, state of repair, emissions, access to destinations, delay or congestion—are significantly better today than four years ago or are on track to improve significantly in another four or eight years, even after the IIJA’s $643 billion is completely exhausted. The IIJA overall is advancing projects that will increase emissions. Many of the new grant programs could either go dormant, be defunded by Congress, or be used by Trump’s USDOT to fund radically different kinds of projects—like when President Obama turned grant programs like TIGER over to the Trump admin eight years ago.

While Congress writes the laws that determine where most transportation dollars go, USDOT did not take full advantage of the tools at its disposal to make the kind of binding, institutional, structural changes that will move the needle and can’t be easily undone by a future administration.

The good:

Greenhouse gas rule

Resurrected from the Obama administration, a measure to assess the greenhouse gases coming from transportation projects was introduced in 2022 and finalized in 2023 (only to be ultimately overturned after challenges in the courts and Congress). While the administration certainly deserves credit for this attempt, they did slow-walk the development and implementation of the rule primarily due to fear that the opposition would block it versus swiftly developing and implementing the program and navigating opposition along the way.

Small steps for safety

Steps were taken to elevate the conversation on roadway safety as a national crisis and the need to fundamentally change the trajectory of the United States. This included the development of a National Roadway Safety Strategy, an overhaul of the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, and new vehicle safety rules aimed at addressing the safety of all users of our streets. However, those changes are modest and unlikely to be enough to overcome the entrenched auto-dominated culture.

Important though limited steps on reconnecting communities

One of the biggest highlights of the IIJA was the new Reconnecting Communities program, which funds projects that seek to repair past damage from infrastructure projects, such as divisive highways.¹ While USDOT can only choose from the projects that do apply, it’s fair to say that their track record has been mixed at best. As America Walks noted in 2024, more than $1 billion of the 2024 awards is going toward a) accommodating people while preserving damaging roads or b) mitigating some of the damage of actively expanding highways. Trying to mitigate brand new damage to Portland from expanding Interstate 5 is not what this small program focused on repairing past damage should be for.² USDOT should prioritize more inspirational, best-in-class examples for other states and cities to see what’s possible, like Syracuse removing I-81 and replacing it with a street grid.

Ample offerings for technical assistance

The administration did create numerous enhanced technical support offerings, such as the Thriving Communities program, which helps local communities and stakeholders access and navigate federal funding programs, and the (long-delayed) Reconnecting Communities Institute, designed to help communities plan and advance Reconnecting Communities projects. These new programs (and others like them) have been a smart way to help communities navigate the sea of new competitive grant programs created in IIJA.

Incomplete at best, bad at worst

The IIJA will increase emissions overall and fail to move the needle on other measurable outcomes. It should not be viewed as a major accomplishment.

The Biden administration will be leaving office continuing to hail the 2021 infrastructure law (IIJA) as “once in a generation,” “climate-friendly” legislation that will transform the status quo on transportation. Unfortunately, both the IIJA as written and the Biden administration’s implementation of it have been a boulevard of broken dreams. It was always unwise for this administration to sell the IIJA’s massive climate, equity, or state of repair benefits when those benefits have to be delivered by states that don’t share the administration’s goals or preferred outcomes.

Equity investment outcomes muddled

Equity was a core component for the Biden administration, which introduced the Justice40 executive order aimed at ensuring 40 percent of federal funds flowed to and benefited historically marginalized communities. However, it has yet to be seen whether this policy initiative truly targeted benefits towards marginalized communities or just directed funding to areas and projects that just happen to also have a notable marginalized population. The future of such initiatives is in doubt due both to the challenges they’ve had in implementing Justice40 during their time and the fact that Justice 40 can be easily undone by future executive orders.

All-in on electrification only

The Biden administration put all their eggs in the single basket of electrification to tackle transportation emissions. The flaws in that strategy are becoming more obvious by the day, with President Trump and Speaker Johnson signaling their intent to claw back money for new charging infrastructure and repeal mandates requiring more electric vehicles in the future. Transportation electrification is important for decarbonizing transportation, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. The administration’s emphasis on climate change was far out of sync with the reality of how IIJA funding was being used: many states using their formula funds to expand highways and spur more vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Even discretionary grants that USDOT had control over were also still contributing to more VMT. Meanwhile, under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, onerous requirements directed funds toward highway-oriented development and away from communities, helping to undercut the economic development benefits and potential rural support for a program almost certainly to be targeted for cuts or elimination by President Trump.

Failure to modernize street design guidelines

After more than a decade of waiting for a promised update, the release of the most recent edition of the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices promised to shake up roadway design standards. But as we noted upon release, the cautious and overall incremental update “falls short of the kind of major paradigm shift required to protect vulnerable users at a time when the United States leads the developed world in roadway fatalities.” Future updates may still happen, but this administration failed to take advantage of the potential of long-term, structural changes like these, perhaps not grasping the long-term impacts.

No changes to traffic models and measures

While Congress sets the policy and states have enormous flexibility for spending transportation dollars, USDOT and FHWA determine what models and measures states can use in conceiving and advancing new roadway projects. On day one, we hoped that USDOT would make moves to require the measurement of “induced demand” and use their bully pulpit to kickstart a long overdue conversation about the inaccuracies of current traffic models, perhaps starting to compare past projections with actual outcomes. USDOT could have delivered guidance on measuring time savings benefits, emissions reductions, and transit access to ensure that projects meant to achieve these goals are set up to succeed. Unfortunately, there was no real movement on the small but powerful changes that would outlast this administration.

Amtrak oversight and staffing

Appointing a full Amtrak board that’s representative of the people the passenger rail system serves would have been a notable, easy win for the administration. But rather puzzlingly, “Amtrak Joe” took a year to nominate anyone to the board. The administration and Congress have only recently finally filled all board slots, but as composed, it still doesn’t fully represent the full network that Amtrak serves. The overall lack of oversight has led to declining service reliability and customer satisfaction, further hurting Amtrak’s reputation with the public and Congress. Further, at a time when there is historic funding for passenger rail, the funding is not being spent due to slow movement in the program and a failure to get sufficient staff in place at the Federal Railroad Administration quickly after the IIJA’s passage to create and implement these new programs.

Closing reflections

The question for an incoming administration hoping to have an impact should not just be “How can we steer the money we control toward good projects?” but instead, “What changes can we institutionalize to disrupt the status quo and produce better results for years to come after we’re gone?” Modest progress has undoubtedly been made during Biden’s time in office, but so much of it is of the first variety—temporary and potentially undone by any future administration. This administration also spent an inordinate amount of time soliciting feedback and research before taking any action on rulemakings that help interpret laws like the IIJA—and, in many cases, never acted on the comments at all. And if the cost of creating valuable but small new climate-focused programs (a la the IIJA) is doubling the size of the blank check programs that are damaging the climate, that’s a bad deal for everyone except concrete and asphalt contractors.

For the incoming Trump administration, we’re working on a to-do list for their first 100 days and the following years to reduce wasting limited resources and ensure that every dollar works towards advancing safety, economic opportunities, and better state of repair.

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

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

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

Here’s what you need to know:

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

Encouraging states to make smart investments

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

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

94 percent of traffic crashes are NOT caused by human error

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The incomplete: Less talk, more action

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

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

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

The opportunity: Actions the administration can take right now

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

Issue area	Department	Status	Detail	Action
Access to federal funds	USDOT			Simplify applications for discretionary grant programs (like the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program) by creating an online application and benefit-cost analysis (BCA) process so that small, rural and limited-capacity agencies can more easily access federal funds.
Climate change	USDOT	In progress	Started rulemaking process	We only measure what we treasure. Re-establish the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure for transportation abandoned by the last administration, follow this up with annual state GHG rankings, and provide guidance for projecting GHG emissions at the project level.
Climate change	USDOT	Done		Repeal the June 29, 2018, Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Dear Colleague to public transit agencies regarding the Capital Investment Grant program, specifically the treatment of federal loans as not part of the local match, inclusion of a geographic diversity factor in grant awards, and encouraging a low federal cost share.
Climate change	USDOT			Allow rural transit systems to receive funding from the Low and No Emission bus program.
Equity	USDOT			Identify infrastructure that creates barriers to mobility (such as highways or rail beds that divide a community). Then prioritize resources to address those barriers and the disparities they create (e.g., by removing infrastructure barriers or creating new connectivity).
Passenger rail	White House, USDOT		The board is functionally empty, with all members serving on expired terms and no-showing for meetings.	Appoint new members to the Amtrak Board of Directors and assess the balance of the board with respect to support for and experience with vital long distance, state-supported, and Northeast Corridor routes, as well as civic and elected leaders from local communities actually served by the existing network.
Safety	USDOT	Limited progress	Called out in Roadway Strategy release, but they did not include or mention consideration of the visibility issues.	Revise the New Car Assessment Program to consider and prioritize the risk that increasingly larger automobile designs pose to pedestrians and cyclists and the driver’s ability to see pedestrians (particularly children and people using wheelchairs and other assistive devices).
Safety	USDOT	Limited progress	Comments reopened and then closed in May 2021. Limited revisions underway Admin not rewriting or reframing the guide, per their Roadway Strategy release.	Reopen the comment period on the handbook of street engineering standards (the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices or MUTCD) used by transportation agencies to design streets, and reframe and rewrite it to remove standards and guidance that lead to streets that are hostile to or dangerous for those outside of a vehicle.
Technical guidance	White House, HUD, USDOT, GSA		Re-activate the Location Affordability Portal created by DOT and HUD and establish a location efficiency and equitable development scoring criteria to be applied to decisions involving location of new federal facilities, particularly those that serve the public.	Re-activate the Location Affordability Portal created by DOT and HUD and establish a location efficiency and equitable development scoring criteria to be applied to decisions involving location of new federal facilities, particularly those that serve the public.
NEW Ensure more accurate traffic and emissions modeling	USDOT			Require the measurement of induced demand and a review of the accuracy of current travel demand models by comparing past projections with actual outcomes, reporting their findings, and updating the models when there are discrepancies.
NEW Replace value of time guidance with more equitable, multimodal approach	USDOT			Help states and metro areas accurately calculate the benefit of their projects by updating the value of time guidance and its focus on vehicle speed with consideration of actual projected time savings for all people, whether they travel by car or use other modes of travel.

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

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

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

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

1/2 Sen. McConnell has fired off a letter to governors in response to FHWA's guidance encouraging states to prioritize repair and safety over expansion. He writes that the guidance “has no effect of law…” This is true.

So what can USDOT do? I'm glad you asked. pic.twitter.com/b8RZhDixyj

— Kevin DeGood (@kevin_degood) February 9, 2022

Hire staff to support the implementation process 

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

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

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

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