Biden administration awards $1.8B for urban, rural transportation projects
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The more than 145 projects include funding for urban street upgrades, bike and pedestrian improvements, and highway expansions, among other things.
The Biden administration announced grants of $1.8 billion to fund 148 transportation projects in every state in the country Wednesday.
The projects include efforts to expand a highway in Arkansas, make streets in Tampa, Florida, safer for pedestrians, improve access to a Ute Tribe reservation in Colorado, eliminate a rail crossing in Dubuque, Iowa, and better connect residents of public housing in Philadelphia to a rail station and nearby park.
Individual projects received grants of up to $25 million to make better connections between different transportation modes, or to improve handling of freight as part of the federal RAISE grant program. Administration officials said the money was split evenly between urban and rural areas.
“Some of these projects are not the multibillion dollar projects that drive national headlines,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, “but every one of them is essential to the community where it's happening. And when you add up these and the other thousands and thousands of projects moving forward across the country, they add up to a transportation system that is getting significantly safer, more sustainable, and more efficient to move both people and goods.”
The Biden administration boosted funding for the RAISE grants as part of the 2021 infrastructure law. They are the latest incarnation of the popular competitive program previously known as TIGER during the Obama years and BUILD during the Trump administration. Each administration has put its stamp on the program to match its priorities. For example, the Obama administration favored urban projects, Trump’s prioritized rural ones and Biden’s team has tried to split funding between both areas.
But Buttigieg said officials in state and local governments have increasingly emphasized the safety aspects of the improvements they want to fund.
“Project sponsors have certainly responded to what we’ve been putting out there,” he said. “We’re starting to see a real focus on safety in the project justifications, but often projects that have overlapping benefit, where safety, climate, jobs and equity all gain by that.”
Local governments in particular have pushed “complete streets” plans or other designs that could help mitigate the surge in pedestrian deaths since the start of the pandemic, administration officials said. Meanwhile, projects that focus on combining affordable housing and transit access have also gained in popularity.
A majority of this year’s funding—57%—went toward road projects, although those road projects often include improvements for pedestrians and cyclists, too. The administration will fund an extension of Interstate 49 in the Fort Smith area of Arkansas, including a new bridge over the Arkansas River. The highway is eventually expected to connect Lafayette, Louisiana, to Kansas City, Missouri, but is currently a collection of several segments along that route.
Another 22% of the grants announced Wednesday are directed at bike and pedestrian facilities. That includes a new multiuse path in Washington, D.C., to connect the neighborhood of Fort Lincoln to an existing path along the Anacostia River. Another project will close an 11-mile gap in trails near the border of Indiana and Michigan, resulting in a 58-mile multiuse trail.
The rest of the RAISE grants awarded this week are directed to other modes of transportation, such as public transit, freight rail and even maritime projects. For example, a $25 million grant will help construct a multimodal transportation center in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, which will also include 10 new 40-foot electric buses. And three tribes in North Dakota received $1 million to plan for ways to allow wildlife to cross a five-mile stretch of highway near North Dakota’s first tribal national park.
Daniel C. Vock is a senior reporter for Route Fifty based in Washington, D.C.
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