In communities throughout the United States, transportation infrastructure is in dire need of maintenance, congestion costs people hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars a year spent in traffic, and people in most communities are reliant on expensive, polluting cars to get around. Federal transportation funding can address many of these problems, but these funds are often distributed according to presidential priorities. Recent Urban Institute research demonstrates that the U.S. Department of Transportation, for example, focused investment on road construction during the first Trump administration, rather than on pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure, as was common during the Biden administration.
A memo signed by DOT Secretary Sean Duffy has indicated how the second Trump administration will prioritize DOT funds. Among other elements, the memo notes that the DOT “shall prioritize projects and goals that … give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
Although many questions remain around the likelihood and potential mechanics of the memo’s implementation, we find this prioritization lacks evidence of how it will meet the memo’s stated purpose to “bolster the American economy and benefit the American people.” But we do find evidence that this change would likely deprive historically underfunded urban neighborhoods of the funding necessary to support a diversity of transportation options. We also find that a disproportionate share of grants would be redirected to areas where funding is most likely to be invested in highways and major arterials, furthering sprawling development despite the fiscal benefits of dense development, the contributions of highway investment to climate change, and sprawl’s association with ecological degradation. Thus, the memo’s benefits for the American economy are questionable.
Moreover, the DOT’s proposed prioritization would not benefit the American people as a whole. We find that the winners of such a policy would be higher-income areas and those with larger white populations. As such, the policy would reinforce many of the nation’s existing demographic inequities and fail to support the US residents most in need of expanded transportation investment.
Areas where public transit, walking, and biking are more common would receive fewer funds under the DOT memo
Federal grants can help improve accessibility and quality of life by funding public transit, cycling, or pedestrian infrastructure. These projects not only make it easier and more affordable for people to get around but also increase employment access and reduce pollution. However, prioritizing funding for neighborhoods with high marriage and high birth rates could reinforce automobile dependence while limiting support for areas where car use is less common.
By comparing marriage and birth characteristics against data about how people get around at the state, county, and tract levels, we find that prioritizing high marriage and birth rates could have consequential effects on what sorts of investments are emphasized.
Our analysis shows that tracts with high marriage and high birth rates have more households with access to a car than households nationally. These areas also feature a much higher share of residents who commute to work while driving alone and a much lower share of workers who walk, bike, or take transit to work. Tracts with high marriage and high birth rates house just 14 percent of the nation’s transit commuters, compared with 30 percent of those who drive alone to work.
We find these trends play out at the local level similarly to the nation overall. In Cook County, Illinois, neighborhoods with a high share of commuters who travel by walking, biking, or taking transit to work—mostly in Chicago—would be least likely to receive federal funding if preference went to neighborhoods with high marriage and birth rates. This prioritization would limit these communities’ ability to improve commuting options. At the same time, exurban communities where automobile use is obligatory and where dense, mixed-use development is impossible would be prioritized.
These data suggest that the administration’s priorities for DOT grant funding could undermine community efforts to make neighborhoods healthier and safer by reducing their dependence on cars and expanding mobility options. This approach could also undermine the administration’s goal of expanding the economy by failing to invest in the densest neighborhoods, where economic growth through agglomeration effects is most likely. Investment in exurban communities, meanwhile, would likely prioritize congestion-inducing, polluting highways, rather than a mix of pedestrian, cycling, and transit infrastructure in urban areas. That is not to say it’s impossible for these communities to dedicate their funding to expansion of sustainable travel modes. However, historically, and with great consistency, that has not been the case.
Prioritizing funding by high birth and marriage rates would disproportionately benefit high-income and white residents
The choice to prioritize marriage and birth characteristics would also have a major effect on the demographics of who wins out, and who loses, from transportation investments.
Tracts with above-median marriage and birth rates (roughly a quarter of all tracts nationwide) have average median household incomes 20 percent higher than the national average. These communities also have a substantially higher share of residents who own their homes, and their poverty rates are almost 36 percent lower than the nation overall. In other words, prioritizing these areas would mean directing more per capita transportation funding to wealthier, more financially secure residents.
Further, residents of areas with high marriage and birth rates are much more likely to be white and much less likely to be Black or Hispanic. These gaps are even larger when compared with the roughly quarter of tracts with low marriage and low birth rates. (About half of all tracts have either high marriage rates or high birth rates but not both.)
In Cook County, we find that high–marriage, high–birth rate tracts have about half the poverty rate of the county overall and a much higher share of residents who are white. Those neighborhoods are home to just 5 percent of the county’s Black population—and 28 percent of its white residents. Prioritizing funding in these neighborhoods would mean wealthier communities, whose stronger tax bases comparatively increase their ability to fund local transportation projects, would also receive higher per capita transportation grants than low-income areas.
Looking at Georgia, we find a similar story. Across counties with both high marriage and birth rates, Black residents account for 18 percent of the population. However, among counties with low marriage and low birth rates, they make up 44 percent of residents. Homeownership also is unevenly distributed across these areas, with 80 percent of households owning their home in tracts that would be prioritized under the DOT memo. In deprioritized areas, just 50 percent of households own their homes. Prioritization of marriages and birth rates could mean substantially less per capita funding for the state’s largest cities of Atlanta, Columbus, Augusta, Macon, and Savannah—while exurban counties, whose populations do not reflect the state’s diversity and who generally have wealthier tax bases, receive more.
The net outcome of this policy, then, would be providing more funding to people with higher incomes, hardly a benefit to the American people as a whole.
Strategically allocating transportation grants is key to improving mobility
At the moment, it’s unclear if and how the administration will prioritize communities with high marriage and birth rates. The DOT may make choices based on state-level demographic information instead of neighborhood- or county-level data.
Even so, the outcomes would remain the same—more densely populated, more racially diverse states with more people who take transit, walk, or bike to work would receive less funding. We find that the states that perform best on these marriage and birth rate criteria are North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Kansas—states with some of the highest white population shares, high rates of car access, and generally higher-than-average existing transportation funding.
Ultimately, a prioritization framework based on marriage and birth rates does not relate funding choices to demonstrated need. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, which evaluates the nation’s infrastructure quality, scores Puerto Rico’s infrastructure at a D–, the single lowest score, speaking to the island’s need for financial support. Puerto Rico—not a state, but nonetheless a recipient of federal transportation funds—performs worst on the proposed funding prioritization approach.
No matter the community level the DOT chooses for its funding allocations, the resulting disparities are likely to perpetuate present and historical conditions of infrastructural injustice, even as they fail to spark economic development or benefits for the American people as a whole. American infrastructure needs investment; that holds true nationwide. But the proposed funding allocation framework would deepen generations of infrastructural inequities along lines of race, wealth, and travel type.
This piece was originally published on Urban Wire, the blog of the Urban Institute.
