Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

MAP-21:

“Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act”

Twelve years in and we’ve made …progress that we should …move ahead …for. Congress aimed MAP-21’s text at program reformation—hopefully allowing for a better spend. What could we achieve if the methods by which we disbursed authorized dollars were more closely related to the expected objectives without these intentions being too hard to implement, track, and measure?

MAP-21 did not answer this question, even with its best intentions. Though it did seek to consolidate discretionary (competitive) programs from SAFETEA-LU and TEA-21, it still encouraged lots of highway spending and incomplete performance measures that allowed for some wacky results from our state DOTs. For example, tied to some dollars here was the promise to make our roads safer through design and construction intervention—but the performance measures didn’t hold recipients to some objective standard. If [insert state here] sought to reduce fatalities, all it had to do was to set a higher target than the number of crashes last cycle and then do…nothing.

So what are we spending our tax dollars on, really?

Power: State >> Regional >> Federal >> Local. MPOs get some more power here with “transportation alternatives” programs split between the regions and the states, though one can imagine what a state DOT (highways) would do with its share, and one might even imagine the state gumming up these funds for “flexibility” reasons. Really, though, the ownership/responsibility matrix continues to be goofy and wholly American: should a state own a “local” road only to forget about it when the time comes to reconfigure it? Should we signal that we want to install bike/ped infrastructure on state roads—most of which are limited access or highways that probably should separate modes more than the allocated funds would allow? The logic doesn’t follow once you realize the whole funding game is akin to “telephone.”

Mode: The omnibus bill reauthorizes spending for the modes, separately for the most part. Safety remains a big issue (but not really). It provides separate funding for the first time for “transportation alternatives,” which include non-highway related, non-auto-related spending dollars specially set aside and applied both formulaically and competitively.

Complexity: This bill was the first time the Fed made a concerted effort to shrink/consolidate the number of discretionary programs to administer them better. Some programs (New Freedoms?1) simply fell by the wayside.

MAP-21 continued USDOT’s approach to performance-based planning, asking recipients of federal funds to more thoughtfully organize project development, selection, and construction. Projects have become significantly more challenging; much of the easy ones are accounted for, and the land is developed in the densest of places. There are competing priorities and limited space. How best to organize and tie funding to its highest and best use? Who is the right actor for this?

Flexibility: The TA program compelled states to reckon with non-highway spending in earnest, in theory. “Flexibility,” as we entered the 2010s, was heavily tied to very specific definitions of what was and wasn’t allowed, rather than by mode. Lots of discretion is afforded to the Secretary to decide what does and does not meet certain thresholds. Lots of DOTs understand flexibility to mean they can flexibly ignore DOT directives by flexibly claiming the funds should flex to highway spending.

Geography: No earmarks here, so the geography of MAP-21’s investment is devolved to the states and the consolidated discretionary programs. There’s horse trading inside the distribution of competitive funds. My take is that this actually made corruption worse because it wasn’t as nakedly obvious to follow.

Here’s a great guide from T4America that says more:

Making the Most of Map-21

Catch up on older posts in this series below:

Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

SAFETEA-LU (2005):

There might be too much “tea,” even though it continues to be a great sequence of letters to put transportation, equity, and act together in a row. SAFETEA-LU is remembered for a few pieces of fun Congressional whosawatsits:

• Pork, a precursor to the pullback on earmarks in MAP-21, is out of control. We’ve got the “Bridge to Nowhere” mini fiasco, Dennis Hastert insider trading, and a huge handful of questionable dollars wasted as quid pro quo. I maintain that spending too much to root out graft is a relatively huge waste of money, and that we can afford a little hagglebacon to get the majority of what we want done, done.

• New Starts, Multimodalism, and the belief that if the Department of Transportation should exist, it should support movement by means other than highway spending. Remember, we’re only about 18 or so years out from the practical “completion” of the Interstate Highway System, and many of the Congresspeople who understood transportation very little then, understand it even less now.

Continuing the series:

Power: State >> Federal >> Regional >> Local. The big shift is in environmental review. The overwhelming confluence of new and complex projects intersecting with NEPA review (written and ossified in the 1970s) hasn’t kept up with our governments’ ability to monitor and certify projects. Time adds cost and risk, and no project can withstand an indefinite hold while the different authorities fight over who’s left holding the football, and lawsuit after lawsuit results in an injunction, while we debate whether a bird species’ habitat can be moved.1 So the Fed did the only logical thing: devolve NEPA review to the states to “self-certify.” Certainly, nothing could go wrong.

Mode: Added more support for transit (New Starts in 5309), extended TIFIA and RRIF programs. The “New Freedoms” program focused on transit applications specifically for seniors and people with mobility challenges/disabled people. Safe Routes to School was added as a priority funding program for the first time.

Complexity: This bill feels like a hold steady; more sections added for hazmat, motor carriers (trucks/lorries). For the first time, there’s a specific pilot program authorized to leverage federal dollars with private investment—PPP or P3s take a prominent place. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics is established here, demonstrating the need for more data-driven decisions at the federal level. ALSO included are University Transportation Centers for the first time—devolving / and funding to our higher education institutions to work on complicated research projects.

Flexibility: Little mention of flexibility in this bill. I do find it strange that Highway Safety Improvement Program dollars were not incorporated in Title II Highway Safety, but that’s probably because we’re way too focused on the administration of roads and whose fault traffic deaths are to notice the interconnected nature of safety. We’ve lost the thread here a little—highway/road safety at its core is not about who’s responsible, but working at all cylinders to prevent these crashes/injuries/deaths.

Geography: Multimodalism focus and a focus on intergovernmental affairs and right-sizing the relationship between regional governments and states. Nothing about cities or sub-regional governments at all.

Included Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) (the guy who brought the snowball onto the Senate floor to argue against climate change) “midnight rider,” which sought to usurp EPA authority for oil and gas in sovereign territories in Oklahoma only. Not great and maybe a final straw for pork in these omnibus reauthorization bills.

One point that consistently comes up in my research and my socialization of these ideas is that there has to be more to each bill than a straighforward read of the text. And there is. We should ask questions like what was left on the House/Senate committee floors? What if we had just 1% more leadership for transit, rail and non-highway spending? What stories give excellent color to these bills that tell a bigger tale about power and Federalism? I hope my literature review gets into this eventually, so stay tuned.

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Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

TEA-21:

“Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century” (1998)

Seven years after ISTEA…new tea for the next century. It took 7 years to reauthorize federal funding for transportation, and then seven more to get us to SAFETEA-LU in 2005. The margins between funding paradigms and parameters continued to increase as priorities became more complex with multimodalism, federalism, and technology needs.

Power: State >> Local >> Regional >> Federal. Bike/ped-specific funding was identified for the first time here, which brought the Federal fight to the street level, which is, by definition, local. Funding is still allocated to the State (or MPO) first for passthrough and stickyfingers, but the increased focus on the human-powered transportation starts to tell a story that hadn’t been prologued before.

Mode: Focus and funding still on highways (fun fact, this still hasn’t changed) but there exist new and more programs to that focus on other modes, transportation “enhancements,” bike/ped funding specifically for the first time, recreational trail funding. scenic byways -- this bill specifically calls out these sub-modal programs for the first time and sets the stage for the future of a national vision.

Complexity: Added modal support means added complexity. TEA-21 added additional guidance for MPOs. The bill also introduces a narrower focus on ITS, or “intelligent transportation systems.”

Flexibility: “With the ‘intermodality’ mandate comes the need to match with appropriate flexibility; this is necessary on a two-axis basis. One: modal, including the flexibility of funds to be used for capital and operating costs and shifting between highway spending and *other* spending and two: state and local. This bill devolves a lot of the spending “”priorities”“ to state and local decisions. Good on paper, challenging in practice. Standard spending paradigms helps USDOT understand what’s working at the expense of solving local problems.

Also in TEA-21: the establishment of TIFIA for infrastructure finance. For the first time the federal government will issue and secure debt financing for eligible transportation projects. Debt enhances the resiliency of the system by filling market gaps and leveraging local dollars for projects that can self-sustain or attract statewide debt service monies.

TEA-21 also established state infrastructure banks (SIBs) pilots, capitalized with at most 20% federal funds and 80% non-federal funds.

Geography: Several thousand earmarks in TEA-21 and an even greater oversight of what an MPO's responsibilities are vis-à-vis regional planning and coordination with state DOTs.

TEA-21 aaaaalso established the idea of a Minimum Guarantee that formalized the return of surface transportation formula funds to states to be set at 90.5% of the amount it puts in and adds other guards to ensure geographic parity.

Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

ISTEA:

“Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991”

Four years after STURAA, we’re chillin’ with the MPO-maker. Multimodalism rears its ugly head. Transportation might be “intelligent.”

Power: State >> Regional >> Federal >> Local. The big shift here is the focus on MPOs, long required and long quasi-dormant because of the chasm between required activity (long-range transportation planning at a regional level) and the funding (you know, to build1 the stuff). Nearly 30 years since the Federal government mandated substate, regional planning, and crucially, the end of Interstate Highway spending, the authors of this bill turned their attention to regional planning—where most trips actually happen.

Mode: This bill unsticks the surface modes from their rigid silos (sort of) and, while it still focuses on highways more than (probably) reflects the national handle-grabbing that’s the highway system, the focus on mass transit and shift toward “intermodality” as a system is a reflection of contemporary thought around surface/aviation/maritime at the time. It was a novel approach.

Complexity: ISTEA acknowledged the growing complexity of movement. That the Interstate Highway System was nearly functionally done, this was likely a turning point for the “point” of USDOT—if its original purpose was to coordinate, manage, and fund the majority of the national highways, what was the need for a federal agency (bigger question)? I bet there was a growing sentiment to toss it out and devolve the spending to states; this is a common refrain for anti-Federalists whose sole purpose is seemingly to shrink the size of the Federal government. Intermodalism / multimodalism was a very obvious way to demonstrate the need. For the first time, the bill talks about “intelligent” transportation systems.

Flexibility: ISTEA promoted and recentered the idea of regional planning as a necessary dominant form of vertical federalism to spend and allocate resources most efficiently. While a political boundary is set by the states, a travel boundary is driven by commutes and movement patterns. What’s a reasonable purview for a single or chained trip to work, school, doctor, etc? What does that look like now and in the future? By imposing these rules from the federal standpoint, the government could compel states to think more flexibly about the future of spending, and hopefully(!?) rethink how to build and maintain our system, which is both broadly and nationally complementary and competitive.

Geography: MPOs and regional authorities were a big idea in ISTEA. The money still needed to passthrough the state DOTs (more on that) and earmarks still dominated a majority of the bill text, but ISTEA demonstrated that there was a possibility to rethink how we distributed money. Also important to note is the inclusion of “high priority corridors,”—which had the added benefit of being politically popular with the pork parade.

The Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act of 1987 (STURAA) was landmark legislation for a few reasons, not least of which is that it finally, finally, got us to cool acronyms.1 This bill also couriered Federal spending from Interstate Highway spending only to more multimodal spending, toward what it looks like today, albeit not yet and very slowly.

PRE-STURAA:

Since 1916, the Federal government still subsidizes state and local spending on transportation and infrastructure projects. The key changes to Federal spending in the 110 years since the aptly-named Federal Aid Road Act of 1916*2 …are the point of these next nine posts, so buckle in. We’ll examine them through the lenses proposed in the previous post.

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

A fun fact, because these posts are all only fun forever, is that because of this bill, each state, if it hadn’t had one already, created some vessel to collect and administer these Federal dollars.3

ANYWAY. Here’s some analysis I’ve been sitting on for months because I didn’t know how to share it.

Power: Local >> State >> Federal >> Regional. In the beginning, the power—and the knowledge—was dispersed at the local level. Roads were built and maintained by some checkerboard of public and private builders and were sometimes paved and continuous and sometimes not. The locals used their state as a Constitutionally-driven passthrough for much of this work, until MPOs were created in the 60s. Spoiler alert! MPOs become much more prominent later.

Mode: The first bills from the early 1910s focused mainly on highway and road building. The first transit bill came 8 years after the landmark highways bill, in 1964. This program established a dedicated, albeit smaller, funding source for mass transit. It established both formula and discretionary funding sources, including the Capital Investment Grants program (CIG) that still exists to day. Many transit bills are included in overall transportation reauthorization and often are not passed standalone (instead, omnibus) because of the direct tie to the highway trust fund (HTF) authorization. This is what makes the 1964 bill so special.

Complexity: Increasing level of complexity that continues and will need to continue, starting with the exponential ramp up of maintenance funding for highways -- the IHS had been built and will continue to be built going forward through the late 1980s and early 1990s but that’s rolling disrepear that continues today because we never and continue to not account for the maintenance. Transit (especially trains) is a different beast. More moving pieces; assets that can be sold or rehabbed off-site or replaced by newer technology. There is a real challenge with maintaining a transit system and railroad network that simply doesn’t exist in road building. If only cars weren’t so damn inefficient.

Flexibility: Continues to change. The Highway Trust Fund -- the major source of ALL transportation funding not specifically authorized from the general fund -- was created and endowed in 1956; the mass transit account came in 1982. Because of the dissasociative nature of spending in general the Congress and USDOT have created over 100 different discretionary programs to fund all sorts of projects that don’t fit into the narrative of older laws; lots of different authorizations are carry-forwards and amendments to older ones. There have been attempts to reform the HTF funding sources over the years; only a few before STURAA, but the main source of funding, the federal gasoline tax remains free-based around a 1993 level of a gas tax. There’s no appetite to increase it as of 2024.

Geography: Earmarks made it much more obvious which projects would get funded from which districts/states. Remember the “geography” here needs to be parsed and thought of in so many different ways: there’s vertical and horizontal federalism; one relies on the stack of gov’ts that track funding through a usually impenetrable tube of tumble. The other is how nicely locals, regions, and states play with each other. There was a moritorium on earmarks in the 2010s but they’ve since been eased back in. There’s a good balance of earmark versus competitive blind-spend that makes it more or less useful for politicking and logrolling. How much ~corruption~ is acceptable to fund the better part of our system?

STURAA:

“The Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation and Assistance Act”

Fast forward 71 years and 33 bills and we’re at the Named Bills.

Power: State >> Federal >> Local >> Regional. The dynamic has shifted. State DOTs are responsible for STIPs and systemwide maintenance (good!) and capcity (read: highway) expansion (not good!) and in some instances, like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, transit investment and operations. The Feds still cover a majority of these costs by tapping into the Highway Trust Fund and other appropriated dollars, but it still feels like local and regional work gets lost in the mix.

Mode: The focus of this bill is still highways. There’s a greater attention detail for the 4Rs—resurfacing, restoration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction including a set aside for discretionary funding for high-need projects in urban areas. The Federal Mass Transit Act made some changes to CIG and nothing particularly important here.

Complexity: STURAA expects transit to be at least equally complex to highway spending. This lack of distinction, which continues the STAA funding from 1982 but continues a marked changed in spending authority and authorization from older bills pre-1982, when mass transit funding switched to contract authority vis-a-vis the highway trust fund rather than general appropriations from the general fund.

Flexibility: STURAA continues earmarks but makes subtle changes to the idea of spending. Added a 4th “R” to maintenance spending.

Geography: Lots of earmarks here and “demonstration projects” that ultimately led to President Reagan vetoing the Bill before Congress overrode him. A death knell to the Presidents skinny agenda, this veto override also indirectly destroyed public housing in the US.4 Pork/earmarks survived 2010/2011 and then again in 2021. The interesting thing to look out for is how this type of spending shapes national narrative.

We’re entering The Matrix (as promised)

It’s taken me a year to wrap my head around this next post mostly because reading through thousands of pages of bill text is exhausting in theory and in practice and well, I was waiting for more information on the direction of reauthorization. The good news is that the Federal government still exists. The okay news is that many different Congressional offices have begun the important process of information herding and data gathering and stakeholder engagement.1 The bad news is that there’s likely not going to be enough of a consensus (or government) to pass the IIJA’s successor by the end of September 2026, when the funding authoriziation expires.

What’s right now?

In short, three things could happen:

1. The funding authorization simply expires and Federal investment in infrastructure would halt. Not ideal as Federal tentacles extend, vigorously, into many corners of the economy.2 This is the nuclear option.

   Likelihood: .000001% + the slopulism coefficient.3

2. We get a new Bill, called something stupid like the Transportation Reauthorization Ultimate Massive Pavement Act. It will keep many programs that don’t work and cut the ones that do. Pork is back so there will be several hundred pages of earmarks for Rs and a few for Ds that lean right. Because this bill will have multi-year authorization and is generally an omnibus effort, it will bloat like crazy and be filled with hydrogen sulfide, seeking to be odorless but deadly. It will pass at $1.5 trillion in new spending that solves no problems and actually makes all of the existing ones worse. But GDP go brrrrr.

   Likelihood: 4.7% + log(the slopulism coefficient)

3. We get a series of 90 to 180-day continuing resolutions (“CRs”) for the remainder of this presidential term that will authorize funding of the IIJA at some percentage of its current levels indefinitely. This is not unheard of—even in normaler times the Federal government will use this option when they can’t come up with a solution to a required problem, when the solutions matrix is so far apart or when the existing spare tire has more life on it and the required parties haven’t finished their problem-solving.

   A CR might contain an anomaly that reduces funding or alters policy or attention, but it does not allow for new funding to be authorized or new programs that require funding to start.

   Likelihood: 100%. We’re 100% getting a CR this year, especially because this is an election year, and there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to get the TRUMP Act done. We may get multiple CRs

What was there?

I’ve spent too long reading each of the bills not to share this with you. But first:

We’re still in Section 2: Understand some context and history to get a big-picture idea of what’s going on. I have a relatively large spreadsheet that’s gone through a ton of edits and framing to make sure I’ve understood the temperature and tenor of each bill. Big shout-out to Katie Economou of AMPO and Corrigan Salerno of T4America for reading through the crazed notes of someone who’s skimmed nearly 5000 pages of prime government text and providing guidance and feedback.

I have a spreadsheet, and I’m not really sure how to present this so it makes any sense at all, so I’m just going to try this out.

Captain Policy: Or, The Five Lenses of Analysis

With Our Ideas Combined…

It’s always helpful to try to understand the lenses through which advocates and authors might view the development of new policy. For mine, I sought five lenses:

Power, Mode, Complexity, Flexibility, and Geography. They’re all fairly distinct, but I’m going to use these terms in the context of how I would use them.

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

Let’s go bill by bill — but starting next week with pre-STURAA (“Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act of 1987”). Subscribe to get it right to your inbox.

In a fit of acronyms, we’re going to walk through past bills at a brisk pace. The goal of this post (and the upcoming one) is threefold:

• To break down a reauthorization bill—ISTEA (1991). This bill was signed 30 years ago and the world has since materially and socially been ripped apart. What did it say and what are some lasting impacts?

• (Next post) To track different issues through time: highway funding, rail funding, transit funding, and “other” programming. We’ll see that USDOT’s purview has only increased—perhaps not proportionally to the number of pages in each bill.

• (Next post) To offer a plea toward caring about this at all. Why should you—staffer, advocate, citizen—care about what’s in this bill?

Let’s remind ourselves where we are in this long-ish process of exasperation:

At their core, laws are statements of intent and the rules that follow. Federal law is written to amend the United States Code, which is the book of standards and regulations that guide how the Federal government operates and interacts with its citizens and other levels of government—states, cities, MPOs, counties—and other sovereign bodies. For our intents, we care about Titles 23 (Highways) and 49 (Transportation) and how Congress writes laws that change the text.

How to read a Bill (in theory).

The trick (secret) to reading law is twofold:

1. It’s mostly written in legal gibberish and

2. Ninety percent of a bill’s text is not important to read closely; nine percent is meaningful enough to have on hand as information and a final one percent is often truly groundbreaking new policy and rulemaking.

Save for committees and legal editors, very few people will actually read a bill from summary through approval. It’s often not necessary and there’s often not a whole lot in there that needs to be committed to memory. One of life’s great joys is that information is available at the notice of need—and for Federal law, there will be multiple places to access the text, and hopefully, interpretation of the text; the translation into English is key to disseminating the information to people who need it.

Transportation/legal scholars will be able to pull up the necessary information more quickly; they’ll make the connection to other strands of law/policy/norm/rule more efficiently. This skill and expertise takes time to develop and the forking of bill comprehension to contextual framework building to ease of communication about major points and how this affects an individual is a path I’m hopeful EI can help.

How to read a Bill (in practice).

I read ISTEA—the “Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act”—of 1991 and you probably should, too, if you want to take the ideas you read here seriously into practice.

Istea

45.6MB ∙ PDF file

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The Bill is 294 pages long, but if we apply our math—265 pages are references, 26 pages are important changes/rules that might affect how you interact with the Federal apparatus and 3 are truly important and groundbreaking. The policy written into these laws fundamentally altered the rules and reorganized a dollar’s path from quite literally thin air to your streets, roads, buses, trains, etc. I pulled out 6 pages of the nearly 300 and marked them up sort of haphazardly below.

The first few pages of a bill are important to read: ISTEA’s front matter states what this bill is doing. Note there’s no Table of Contents, which is odd, but not the end of the world. The Statement of Policy hasn’t made it into many more contemporary bills—but it’d be something I’d like to see more upfront. I’d also like to see a clearer and deeper summary of changes right up front to help comprehension.

If you’re so interested the Federal Code is here.1 It’s also written in Legalese, presumably to hold it up to legal scrutiny. Reminder: this bill—and all subsequent transportation bills affect Titles 23 (Highways) and 49 (Transportation). I’m curious if we’ll see Title 23 folded into 49 in our lifetime(s).

There’s nothing particularly special about the below page, except for the language about CMAQ (Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality) funds that are simply authorized and money appropriated here. CMAQ has proven to be a fundamental program in the development of multimodal projects (since it doesn’t specify the mode CMAQ funds can be used for…so transit projects count) and has been reauthorized and expanded in more recent bills, including IIJA, passed in 2021.

These earmarks2 are very weird and there’s an ongoing exchange about whether these infrastructure bills should pick project winners right up front or if they should be left to the states to pick once they know the money is allocated for projects. By tying up money de jure we leave less flexibility, should the needs or conditions change, but we do have clarity about how the spending authority would or should be used. We do require more accountability and audit to truly ensure the money goes where it should, but earmarks should make that process easier (should we choose to fund and require oversight). See: Bridge To Nowhere.3

There are dozens of pages that simply list projects, including “High Priority Corridors” below. You’ll find that (often, always) every state has at least one project and funding tied to the project as these projects and priorities are traded; that’s a recipe for corruption and very obvious misuse of power. Comment below for a deeper discussion about earmarks.

This is just a fun fact. We love facts.4

Perhaps the single most monumental change in ISTEA and its lasting legacy is the shift mandated for Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), organizations (over 400!) that organize regional transportation planning and spending priorities to be collated with state needs.5 This monumental change was first introduced in Title III, Section 3012, and has had ripple effects that affect all transportation planning efforts across the United States.

MPOs’ original mandate from 1962 shifted to a more rigorous role after ISTEA allocated more Federal money directly to them, and required, for the first time, Transportation Improvement Programs (TIPs) and Long-Range Transportation Plans (LRTPs) in formal collaboration with State DOTs, among other activities laid out in the law.6 Organizations like the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (AMPO) have much more information about the vital role MPOs play in the transportation planning process and priorities for the future of reauthorization, including an even more expanded role in planning efforts.

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A Timeline of Sorts Since 1987.

It’s important to add some additional history to our discussion. When I opine about a specific bill or timeline or talk about modern transportation reauthorization, I’m generally referring to the bills since 1987—the Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act (STURAA) through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) for one reason: the shift away from highways to a broader sense of surface transportation, more generally. This shift made our funding process more complex, more comprehensive, more cooperative (in theory), and more continuous (in general).7

It also gives us 37 years of history, policy, and politics to compare. We’ll have a broad base of bad and less bad to understand how we can meaningfully and, probably more importantly, actually pass a bill that moves us forward in 2026 (probably 2027).

A key component to many/much of the transportation legislation since 1987 is its insistence on responding to new information as if it doesn’t exist. We build policy like a pyramid lottery ticket; our entire Federal Code is based on a scratch-and-rewrite mentality. We do this because it’s a lot less complex than tearing the government apart every time we have a new idea. Over time we’ve slipped pretty deeply out of sync—and we can find a ton of interconnected reasons why this is the case. There’s no easy answer here. We don’t have the unique opportunity or the time to rethink transportation spending all at once, but we have an obligation to do it. Conditions have changed. Our planet depends on it; our people need it. Lives depend on it. Livelihoods rely on it. Why are we so unimaginative?

to be continued with a dive into broad strokes (mode, flexibility, complexity, and geography x relative impact) early next week (or sometime soon).8

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As my loyal readers, literally thousands of you, may have noticed, I’ve been slow to publish anything in the past few months. This is a combination of my actual job getting in the way of the deep thinking expected and required of this newsletter, my total burnout (better now), and a lack of inspiration. So here’s Part 1 of 2 or 3 where I’ll walk us through my thoughts about how we build a better transportation funding paradigm that helps to realign incentives and shift the culture slowly, but still faster than we’re begging for today.

To do this, I’m not going to write an explainer on how Federal Transportation Policy works. We’ve got those and they’re a great stand-in for a lifetime embedded in policy to smarten up. I will, however, do the following:

But first, a disclaimer about me: my political leanings and biases. I’m relatively liberal by nature, but I’m not neoliberal; I believe a strong public sector must wrestle with a demanding private sector, forever, for progress to prevail. Sometimes this means progressive policy (funding transit, somehow), and sometimes this means centrist policy (no, transit should not be blanket-free), but it never means conservative policy (defunding transit). Access to opportunity and dignity in travel guide my positions on transportation and infrastructure; these positions are not necessarily leftist, but how we express them filters through Marxist materialist reality. There will be no magical thinking in these posts.

I also believe that we must work through conditions that currently exist. The current situation (as of early/mid-November) dooms many wish lists for capital reform, but let me counterpoint. That’s all they were—wishlists. And we don’t have time for dream scenarios and solutions to no problem in particular.

Because I am driven by a deep fear of climate death and I’m faced with a conundrum: can we (the transportation-industrial complex) build our way out of certain heat death or must we (Moloch’s willing lemmings) drastically pull back our consumption and excesses? There’s a half-measure here and the right answer, as always, lives somewhere between the musts and must-nots. But infrastructure is different from General Consumption for one single reason: it is definitionally binary. You cannot build half a bridge. Rail only works as a network. Even roads and cars, impermeable, impenetrable as they are, require building vast networks of asphalt. Much of this, despite our best attempts, kills our climate. And in turn will kill us.

So we have to build—but what?

So those are my beliefs, strongly reasoned and loosely held. I’m willing to be wrong. I’m not willing to entertain hyperbole and policy positions based on wavering flair or fancy. This, and the following entries, will not attempt to scale or score a bill and I’m hopeful to keep the reactivity to a minimum as these reforms must outlast eternally shrinking political tenure and need to coincide instead with nonmagical incentive thinking.

I. We must begin to begin.

When Congress next floats a transportation bill we’ll likely have gone 5 years since the last one, a large spending package that included “reauthorization” of Federal spending on transportation and infrastructure. We colloquially refer to this bill—a law passed by both chambers and signed by President Biden—as the IIJA (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) or BIL (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law). We, and I, call the process of allowing the administrative state to direct tax dollars and project specifications reauthorization because, in 2026 (or so), Congress will allow USDOT to again do this.

The general concept of transportation is not new and rather than writing new law from scratch, transportation law simply realigns and expands or contracts depending on the guts of the Bill. As it stands, when the next surface transportation bill passes, it will be the 45th version of a Federal law that ultimately funds transportation:

Since the first law—The Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916—Congress and the Executive have signed a bill to extend its tenure, on average, every 2.5 years. Since 1978, 62 years after the kick-off bill, Congress expanded the law’s purview to enshrine funding over multiple years, ostensibly to match the time and complexity of projects and extend clarity to the agencies and partners that plan and build our roads, tunnels, bridges, rail, and more.

Over a century, name changes and reshapings, implicitly and explicitly the bills have transformed from roads and highway spending to transportation spending that includes more generally surface transportation, including rail and bikes and pedestrian goals. The “2.5” is peculiar because it’s shorter than a presidential term but longer than an annual re-up—though many early bills were reintroduced every year or two.

As our surface system has gotten more complicated, both by expanding its profile and as technology has careened into a morass of capacity and maintenance tradeoffs, and as our politics/policy discussions have frayed beyond belief (truly), this next bill will lead us off a glass cliff, either way.

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II. To begin we must understand administrative process

As we slip off the viscous, fragile edge we have a chance to hit the brakes and spin out.1 But we have to understand how the brakes work and how they connect to the drivetrain, to the wheels, etc. if we’re going to dismantle and remantle our transportation policy. Let’s dive in:

The bill process starts way, way, way before Congress gets involved. If there’s one takeaway from this series of articles it’s this. You have a voice in your system; people who write laws respond to constituents and constituents have power in blocs.2 With a clear approach to problems, defined in an actionable way, sub-national groups can make a serious argument for what should and should not be in a Federal transportation bill.

Beyond organizing, which is ongoing, evergreen, and exhausting, reauthorization will reconcile ideas borne from hundreds, if not thousands, of meetings with eventual recipients of public funds and organizations that fight on their behalf (AMPO, AASHTO, NLC, NACO, NCSL…every acronym under the sun) for reform and retooling of ideas that reflect modern project development and delivery.3

The process continues (in theory) as a typical bill would, through Congressional Committee origination and reconciliation over many months.4 The Senate and the House will run parallel processes outlining each’s concerns and will eventually bring a single reauthorization bill and corresponding appropriations bill to fund it to the President to sign (or not). That’s it, folks. That’s how babies are made.

As a very serious aside, it’s important to understand the origins of the big ideas and who gets to say which about what. Any member of either house is free to weigh in and submit their own ideas to these committees, but eventually, it’s the responsibility of these committees to write the damn bill. Both chambers are organized into committees and subcommittees (beyond transportation, even)5, which oversee different factions of the DOT (for now). The table below clarifies the relationship between Senate/House committee assignments and their oversight provision:

A few things you’ll notice: there is not always a 1-to-1 relationship and many committees (and subcommittees) might share oversight, which means they have to get their house in order (or not) to put forth a clear vision for reauthorization—and more often than not how and why this happens is based on personal relationships AND who occupies what seat—the assigned chair (by House/Senate leadership) of each of these committees is a launch pad and/or a roadblock.6 There are infinite ways that this can go wrong, but only a few that it can go right.

This is why your voice is essential. It (or your collective voices) may not fully override a stupid-off because of something so unbelievably innocuous7, but there’s at least hope that a return to meeting civility might at least reflect the will of an organized bloc of voters, if not the will of the people.

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III. The neverending march toward entropy and the heat death of the universe.

This is a lengthy, but non unending process: there are key dates that matter and ensuring that deadlines exist allows people to organize and coalesce around a project.

Two important dates to keep in mind: the IIJA’s authority8 expires September 30, 2026 and the heat death of the universe, when the last atom stops shivering and Congestion Pricing still is on pause, is October 1, 2026.

I would almost guarantee that Congress does not pass (and the President does not sign) the next reauthorization before that deadline; not doing so is not an option because this part of the government would come to screeching halt. So what do we do? Instead, as apathy outweighs entropy, Congress will pass a bandage bill that continues, on deadline, current spending levels until such a time when a bill can be passed, if Congress does that still.9 It’s called a Continuing Resolution and I bet there will be many of them before we move onto the next transportation Federal-Aid bill’s iteration.

Friends, readers: this baseline is essential to our broader understanding of how we can move the needle. If we don’t understand the process we can’t hope to affect to change it with our Big Ideas.10

Next time: a dive into the best and most underwhelming parts of Federal transportation policy since 1987.