repair priorities 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.

It’s time for Congress to actually set a goal for repairing our infrastructure

We shouldn’t build new roads before fixing the ones we have. But that’s not how the federal transportation program is designed. Despite funding boosts, our backlog of maintenance needs have only increased because there is no requirement that federal funds be spent on repair.

The concept of fixing what you have before buying something new—when it comes to really expensive things—is pretty intuitive for most people. You should probably repair your leaky roof before building a new addition. You’d likely buff out that dent in the car you already own instead of buying a brand new one.

But what’s obvious to everyone is not obvious to lawmakers. Under our current federal transportation law, states are allowed to spend federal funding on building new (and often unnecessary) roads before fixing decaying ones, all without providing a plan for how they will maintain these new roads in the future.

This leads to massive and unsustainable fiscal problems.

According to our report Repair Priorities that we co-authored with Taxpayers for Common Sense, states spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion between 2009-2014. These investments in expansion don’t just redirect funds away from much needed investments in repair; they continually grow our annual spending need, widening the gap. Every new lane-mile of road costs approximately $24,000 per year just to preserve in a state of good repair—to say nothing of the long-term lifecycle costs and required eventual major rehabilitation projects in the future. By expanding roads—and neglecting the ones we have—we are borrowing against the future while letting our existing assets wither.

Yet lawmakers insist that the reason why our transportation infrastructure is crumbling is not how we (poorly) spend our money, but the amount of it. “We need more money,” they say. “It doesn’t matter how it’s spent!”

These cries for more money echo throughout Capitol Hill every five to six years when surface transportation funding needs to be reauthorized. I described this Groundhog Day-esque phenomenon in our blog post announcing our three new principles for transportation investment:

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.

As the current transportation law, the FAST Act, expires next year, it’s time to do something different. We simply can’t afford to waste billions of dollars every single year.

That is why we urge Congress to make a hard and fast commitment to cutting our maintenance backlog in half. We don’t want Congress to create some new federal program to achieve a state of good repair, or authorize more transportation funding. Simply setting a goal for our current dollars 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, Congress can tell us what the right target should be.

But they should have to tell us precisely where we will be in addressing our state of repair when this bill expires in five or so years, not just how much money will have been spent. Until then, we believe cutting the maintenance backlog in half is an achievable goal and we expect Congress to finally tie federal funding to their rhetoric.

Read our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half.

Federal transportation policy is undermining any progress on climate

The conversation on climate change tends to focus on a few big things—electric vehicles, renewable energy, putting a price on carbon. But no matter how much progress we make on those fronts, Democrats and Republicans remain deeply committed to antiquated policy that undermines any action we take on climate change: spending billions to build new highways, encouraging more and more driving.

Transportation accounts for the largest share of carbon emissions in the U.S., and those emissions are rising—even as other sectors have improved. As federal policy and funding encourages more and wider highways, people live further away from the things they need and the places they go. We’re driving further and further every year just to get where we need to go. Emissions have risen despite increases in fuel efficiency standards and the adoption of electric vehicles. Despite an admirable 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet from 1990-2016, emissions still rose by 21 percent. Why was that? Because the total amount of miles traveled increased by 50 percent in that same period.

Simply put, we’ll never achieve ambitious climate targets if we don’t reduce driving.

We don’t have a money problem, we have a policy problem

Politicians (and the media) love to bemoan our “crumbling roads and bridges.” That must mean we need more money to fix them, right? Here’s a secret: most of the billions we spend every year on our infrastructure never go to repair. Despite the rhetoric, there is nothing in federal law that requires states to repair the roads we already have, so most federal money goes to building more highways. That’s a problem that more money won’t solve.

Even the National Academy of Sciences, through the Transportation Research Board, has called for massively increasing highway spending to as much as $70 billion annually to accommodate (or encourage, as it were) an additional 1.25 trillion miles of driving each year—blatantly ignoring what this would do to our emissions.

California, Hawaii, and Minnesota have all found that even with a fleet of electric vehicles, they will still fail to reach their aggressive climate targets without an accompanying effort to reduce driving.

A better federal policy would be to invest more in climate-friendly transportation options like transit, walking, and biking, and to stop stacking the deck so that local communities have to choose between easy money for a highway or an uphill slog for transit cash. While we guarantee states over $40 billion annually for highways, only $2.6 billion is available for new or expanded public transit, and this funding is not guaranteed. Further, while the federal government will cover 80 percent of the cost of a highway project, it will only pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of a transit project.

With limited funding for transit and the national rail network and federal dollars for walking and biking overwhelmed by the billions spent on highways, federal policy is designed to keep us in our cars. Further, highway funding is distributed by Congress to states based on how much fuel is burned. The more gas is burned in a state, the more money states get to spend on highways. It should hardly be surprising that this has forced people to drive more over the past decade while making the climate impacts of transportation worse.

When you consider U.S. transportation policy in light of the existential crisis that climate change poses, it starts to look pretty asinine.

Access to a better future

Getting where you need to go shouldn’t always require a car, but we’ve designed our communities to prioritize car travel over everything else. With nearly half of all car trips three miles or less, many trips could be easily traversed by foot, bicycle, or transit. But the way we build roads to prioritize high-speed driving makes shorter walking, bicycling, or transit trips unsafe, unpleasant, or impossible.

It’s time that we stop prioritizing expansion over maintenance. It’s time for a paradigm shift. Cars certainly have a place in our transportation system, but our climate simply cannot sustain a system that rewards more and more driving. Our communities would be happier, healthier, safer, and more equitable if we built them for people instead of cars.

If we can retire this system that has doubled the country’s amount of driving in just a little over 30 years, we could build a transportation system that would improve access to the places that people need to go and reduce our emissions at the same time. We drove ourselves into this mess; now we’ll have to drive a little less to find our way out of it.

Join us for a Twitter chat about transportation & climate change on Wednesday, September 18 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. @T4America and our cohosts will lead the conversation with a series of questions over the course of an hour. Use #BeyondEVs to tweet you answers.

There’s a reason why Missouri voters twice rejected gas tax increases

Missouri spends more of its transportation budget on building new roads than maintaining its existing roads—23 percent of which are in poor condition. If it did a better job prioritizing maintenance, perhaps it wouldn’t need to ask taxpayers for a bailout.

A truck painting lane markings on a two-lane road in Missouri. Photo by MoDOT.

The state of Missouri gets over $1 billion a year from the federal government to support their highway needs. They match that with another $1.5 billion in state transportation funding for a total of $2.5 billion in spending a year.

This large sum is what they have to cover the maintenance and upkeep of 77,000 miles of roadway. At ~$24,000 a mile per year to keep a new road in good condition, that means the state has somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.85 billion in baseline maintenance needs for its existing system each year. Of those miles of roadway, 23 percent are in poor condition. (Their repair costs could be much higher: to restore bad roads to good condition costs more than the $24k per lane-mile figure for keeping new roads in good repair.)

The bottom line is that Missouri has a lot of built-in, predictable costs that they need to cover and a pretty deep well of existing transportation funding. But Missouri, along with 20 other states across the country, is actually spending more money on building new roads than on maintaining the ones they already have. According to their own reporting, Missouri is spending 31 percent of their federal funding on new roads while spending only 20 percent on repair of existing roadways. (Note that Missouri’s largest metropolitan area, St. Louis, is heralded for having the least traffic congestion in the country, which makes you wonder why the state feels the need to widen roads.)

After spending more money on expansion than repair, Missouri cries poverty and asks its taxpayers for more money. Perhaps it’s no surprise that voters have said no to them—twice. Should a bank loan you money to expand your deck while your roof is leaking?

Now the state is selling bonds to cover the cost of replacing rural bridges—an important investment. But one has to wonder, how many bridges and roads could they have already replaced with existing funds if those funds were prioritized to maintaining existing infrastructure before building the next shiny new highway or adding more lanes somewhere? At the very least, shouldn’t taxpayers expect as much money to go into highway maintenance as into expansion?

Unfortunately, neglecting repair while spending more money on building new roads is perfectly legal and permissible under the federal transportation program. Congress is just fine with Missouri neglecting needed repairs and increasing their overall need by adding more lanes, and as a result, Missouri is not alone.

This lack of accountability and clear priorities is why Missouri’s roads—and other roads, bridges, and transit systems in poor condition across the country—won’t be fixed by simply spending more money. In spite of unprecedented high levels of transportation funding, including from the Recovery Act, roadway conditions nationally have deteriorated over the last 10 years. Even if we double nationwide transportation spending, there is no guarantee that roads will improve in Missouri or elsewhere without a change to the underlying policies. This is why every conversation about transportation policy that begins and ends with money just isn’t good enough right now.

Missouri is fortunate to have powerful members of Congress that are uniquely positioned to change and improve policy. We can require states receiving federal money to maintain roads before building new ones. They could also require it of themselves.

Prioritizing repair is common sense. We cannot afford to waste any more time and money.

Read more about Missouri and 20 other states making the same mistake in our report Repair Priorities.

Repair Priorities Resources

On May 14, Transportation for America released Repair Priorities 2019. Here are all the resources related the report, available to T4A members in one place:

1) Full report

2) Webinar recording

3) A PowerPoint slide deck describing the report’s findings, which you can use in your own presentations. (Member-exclusive resource).

Repair Priorities 2019 is here — and it shows that more money won’t fix our infrastructure problems

It’s infrastructure Week again and politicians are back at it, bemoaning our “crumbling roads and bridges” and insisting we must spend more to fix the problem. But we’ve got some cold water to throw on this pity party: Despite more transportation spending over the last decade, the percentage of the roads nationwide in “poor condition” increased from 14 to 20 percent.

That’s the headline from our new report—Repair Priorities 2019—which finds that states are neglecting repair and routine maintenance in favor of costly expansions and widenings. Even when given more flexibility by Congress to spend money as they see fit, states, on average, spent as much money expanding their road networks ($21.3 billion) as they did repairing their existing roads ($21.4 billion) each year.

In short, our infrastructure issues are more of a policy problem than a money problem.

As T4America Director Beth Osborne said in our release today, “While a handful of states are doing an admirable job putting their money where their mouth is by devoting the bulk of their federal dollars to repair, many other states are spending vastly more on expanding their roads or building new ones—creating new liabilities in the process—even as their existing system falls into disrepair.”

Download Repair Priorities for a state-by-state look at how states are spending their money and what it will take to fix the system. Then join us for awebinar on Wednesday May 15 at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT to hear from two state DOT officials about the findings.

Putting the (money) cart before the horse

Two trillion is the hottest number in Washington right now—it’s how much money politicians want to pump into a yet-to-be-fleshed-out infrastructure plan. Although they haven’t yet articulated what all that extra spending will actually achieve or how this money will be spent more responsibly than the hundreds of billions we spent over the last decade, they already know the price tag.

We need to #BuildForTomorrow, they say. We have a question: Build WHAT for tomorrow?

The scope of our vision and ambition should determine how much money we need to spend on infrastructure. And that vision should then be supported with thoughtful policy—not a blank check—that will make sure we achieve our goals.

Getting back on track

So what might thoughtful policy look like? For starters, we should give taxpayers an idea of what they’re paying for with clear, measurable outcomes—do we want to cut the number of roads in poor condition in half over the next six years? Reduce traffic fatalities by 60 percent? Decrease emissions by 70 percent? Define the vision and set some measurable goals first.

We could require states to use available federal funding—billions of dollars they’re given automatically every year—to fix the system before expanding it. We could establish a competitive funding program for new road capacity that requires a higher standard for asset management—just like we do for transit. We could require more frequent and diligent reporting so that taxpayers can hold their officials accountable.

What do all these ideas have in common? They’re about policy not money. Whether it’s a stand-alone infrastructure bill or our existing federal transportation program, policy is the key to fixing America’s infrastructure problem. It’s about time the policy makers took that to heart.

Download Repair Priorities 2019

New report chronicles how the nation’s road conditions have worsened as many states prioritize expansion instead of repair

Report comes as the White House and congressional leaders continue discussing a $2 trillion infrastructure package that could exacerbate the problem

WASHINGTON, DC — Repair Priorities 2019, a new report released today by Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense, shows that, despite more spending, the percentage of the roads nationwide in “poor condition” increased from 14 percent to 20 percent and 37 states saw the percentage of their roads in poor condition increase from 2009-2017.

This is happening because states are neglecting basic repair in favor of expanding their roads. Given increasing spending flexibility by Congress over the last two long-term transportation reauthorizations, states spent nearly as much money expanding their road networks as they did repairing their existing roads ($120 billion spent building new lane-miles from 2009 to 2014).

“Whether during debate over an infrastructure bill or the long-term reauthorization looming next year, the rhetoric I hear over and over again from Capitol Hill and the White House about the need to invest more money in transportation is all about ‘repairing our crumbling roads and bridges.’ But our spending priorities rarely match this oft-repeated rhetoric,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America.

“A look at the numbers from the Federal Highway Administration in Repair Priorities makes it clear that we can scarcely afford to maintain the roads we have, let alone the new roads we keep adding to the system. While a handful of states are doing an admirable job putting their money where their mouth is by devoting the bulk of their federal dollars to repair, many other states are spending vastly more on expanding their roads or building new ones— creating new liabilities in the process—even as their existing system falls into disrepair.”

“Lawmakers and officials like a good ribbon cutting at a new road, but repair is too often treated like flossing teeth: A tedious, sometimes painful extra step that’s all too easily skipped. Except that it’s critical and saves taxpayers cash and pain down the road,” said Steve Ellis, executive vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Instead of sending blank checks to the states, federal taxpayers deserve to have some assurances that their tax dollars will be spent effectively and efficiently on the highest priority projects, which in most cases is taking care of what we already have.”

It’s unclear if we could even afford to maintain all the roads that we’ve built, even if we devoted all available capital dollars toward repair. Repair Priorities estimates that we would need to spend more than $231 billion per year just to keep our existing road network in acceptable repair and bring the backlog of roads in poor condition into good repair over a six-year period (the typical length of a federal transportation reauthorization). By comparison, all highway capital expenditures across all government units in 2015 totaled just $105.4 billion, only a portion of which goes to repair.

The latest available data shows states have made some improvement in their spending since the first edition of Repair Priorities in 2011, but states are still spending just as much on road expansion as road repair. States spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually between 2009-2014 and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion.

When states devote money to expanding their roads, it doesn’t just redirect funds away from repair and maintenance; it also continually expands our overall annual spending need. We built enough new lane miles from 2009-2017 to criss-cross the width of America 83 times, requiring an additional $5 billion per year just to keep those new roads in good condition. That’s more than Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas receive combined in federal highway apportionments every single year.

So what will it take to fix the system? Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense provide four concrete recommendations for Congress to consider in any infrastructure package they consider, including the upcoming 2020 federal transportation bill. Congress should: guarantee measurable outcomes for American taxpayers with any new funding, require that states repair their existing systems before expanding, require project sponsors to demonstrate that they can afford to maintain new roadway capacity projects, and track progress and require that FHWA publish results.

Repair Priorities 2019 provides a national snapshot and state-by-state evaluation of current roadway pavement conditions, spending trends, and unmet needs. It also recommends crucial actions federal policymakers should take in the next transportation reauthorization bill to get the nation’s roads—and spending priorities—back on track.

The full report and state-by-state findings are available at https://t4america.org/maps-tools/repair-priorities

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Transportation for America, a program of Smart Growth America, is an alliance of elected, business, and civic leaders from communities across the country, united to ensure that states and the federal government step up to invest in smart, homegrown, locally-driven transportation solutions. These are the investments that hold the key to our future economic prosperity.

Smart Growth America envisions a country where no matter where you live, or who you are, you can enjoy living in a place that is healthy, prosperous, and resilient. We empower communities through technical assistance, advocacy, and thought leadership to realize our vision of livable places, healthy people, and shared prosperity.

Taxpayers for Common Sense is an independent, nonpartisan voice for taxpayers working to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly and that government operates within its means.

Did you know that it’s Infrastructure Week once again?

After two solid years of everyone in Washington, DC talking nonstop about a standalone infrastructure bill to pump trillions into America’s infrastructure, we’d understand if you weren’t aware that the last Infrastructure Week ever ended.

If you haven’t seen the evidence in your inbox already, the incessant drumbeat for more money is already underway today. All this week, you’ll hear the usual interest groups starting this conversation by talking about nothing but money:

Why are they telling us the price before they’ve told us what we’re buying?

We think that this is backwards, and our Repair Priorities 2019 report, launching tomorrow, will help show why. Even as we gave states more than $300 billion to spend almost however they wanted to—in addition to billions more in the 2009 stimulus—the condition of our nation’s roads actually got worse from 2009-2017. Thirty-seven states saw an increase of roads in “poor” condition.

Our roads got worse not because we lacked money, but because too many states spent that money on building or expanding new roads rather than being good stewards by prioritizing repair. We built enough new lane-miles during that period to criss-cross the country 83 times, roads that will cost us $5 billion more per year just to maintain in good condition.

This is more than a money problem—it’s a priorities problem.

Congress has to stop asking taxpayers for more funding to fix crumbling roads and bridges without providing concrete, measurable assurances that any new money will actually improve things.

The public deserves to know first what more money is going to buy us—not just how much money they “need.” Congress’ decisions over the last two decades has just led to a lack of transportation options, more inequality, and more and bigger roads filled with more traffic and more pollution.

If you think we need to fix our spending priorities before we even think about pouring more money into this broken system, then bypass the Infrastructure Week rhetoric and share our social media message for Monday instead:

Today is the 1st day of #InfrastructureWeek. Why in the world would we give more money to the same people who have been neglecting basic maintenance in order to build more things we can’t afford to maintain? #BuildWHATForTomorrow?”

Repair Priorities 2019 is being released tomorrow. Sign up for Wednesday’s 3:00 p.m. EDT webinar examining the findings now.

Are we creating assets or liabilities?

New roads are often considered new assets, but by ignoring repair many states have let those assets become liabilities—as our upcoming Repair Priorities report shows.

Building new infrastructure is sexy—it’s a tangible sign of progress and officials get to cut ribbons. Policymakers often talk about new roads as economic “assets,” but they are more truthfully classified as liabilities, bringing decades of baked-in maintenance costs. Without a regular commitment to upkeep, these liabilities can break the bank.

As Repair Priorities 2019 will show next week, we have a lot of liabilities on our hands.

Look for the full report in your inbox on Tuesday, May 14. Then join us for a webinar on Wednesday, May 15 where we’ll dig into how states are spending their existing money, hear directly from a number of state DOT officials, and discuss our recommendations for fixing this looming financial crisis.

Not all states are in the same situation. Many states make responsible decisions to invest the majority of their money in repair. Other states are borderline irresponsible, spending vastly more on expanding new roads—and creating new liabilities—even as their existing system falls into disrepair. Much of this money comes directly from the federal government with little to no direction about how those funds should be spent.

In the midst of ongoing talk about a purported infrastructure plan—notably, all the talk is about funding levels, not what we want it to actually accomplish—and as Congress begins crafting a long-term replacement for the expiring FAST Act, Repair Priorities will be a wake up call.

More funding won’t fix our infrastructure problem without a serious change in priorities.

Register for the webinar next Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT.

Is repair actually a priority?

While politicians are focused on how much more funding we should give to infrastructure, our upcoming report sheds light on how states are using existing funding for repair vs. new roads and how policy can get the nation back on track.

Earlier this week, President Trump, House Speaker Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Schumer met to discuss funding levels for a yet undefined infrastructure plan.

We don’t know what the plan will fund or build, what problems it’s trying to solve, or how we will measure its success—if at all—but politicians have somehow already settled on a $2 trillion price tag.

This is the standard practice on Capitol Hill when it comes to infrastructure, and we believe it’s time for a change.

Much of the rhetoric around this mythical infrastructure plan has focused on “repairing our crumbling roads and bridges.” But if past decisions are the best predictor of future behavior then much of any extra transportation spending will likely be squandered on building and expanding roads rather than repairing them—as we show in our forthcoming report, Repair Priorities 2019.

Repair Priorities 2019 will be released during Infrastructure Week on Tuesday, May 14. Join us for a webinar on Wednesday, May 15 at 3 p.m. ET for a closer look at the findings.

Despite the growing maintenance backlog, states have continued to spend a significant portion of funding to build new roads. Repair Priorities 2019 provides a national snapshot and state-by-state evaluation of current roadway pavement conditions, spending trends, and unmet needs. It also recommends crucial actions federal policymakers should take in the next transportation reauthorization bill to get the nation’s roads—and spending priorities—back on track.

As we have said repeatedly, when it comes to infrastructure we don’t have funding problem, we have a policy problem. But policy makers are still putting the cart before the horse, jumping straight to how much of our money they need before telling us why or what we’re going to get for it in the end. Repair Priorities will help make the case for policy change using the government’s own data.

Register for the webinar on Wednesday, May 15 at 3 p.m. ET.