This week, we’re joined by Corrigan Salerno of Transportation For America for an exclusive look at why America keeps freakin' building highways, how President Trump is targeting transit and how we can all get a better federal transportation bill if we want it.
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Jeff Wood: What are you finding?
Corrigan Salerno: States are spending a lot of money still on highway expansion. Meanwhile, we have barely spent even like 5 percent of the federal rail dollars, despite being like 40, 50 percent of the way through the actual authorization.
The good stuff tends to take time. It really revealed itself in that, and the bad stuff was very quick to be obligated, In this analysis, we found that the good stuff that we really tend to love is the exact kind of projects that have really been targeted by the Trump administration now in terms of what grants are being frozen and what grants are not really having any of their funding outlaid at this stage now.
Jeff Wood: What kind of information would you want to see easier access to? Like what if the feds set up something inside that allowed you to like pull information easier? Is there something like that that exists?
Corrigan Salerno: Yeah, one ask that's kind of relatively subtle is just simply put the State Transportation Improvement Program, which people sometimes call STIPs, in a tabular format, so that whenever members of the public want to see what their tax dollars are actually going to, it would be nice to simply have a list of projects in a region divided in an actual spreadsheet with some level of default categorization and actual real descriptions of what's being done on the project.
So it's like, "OK, is this a shoulder-widening or is this an actual new lane based on the physical characteristics of this infrastructure that you're describing here?" That would be incredibly useful to have.
Jeff Wood: What could you do with that?
Corrigan Salerno: You could do cross-references between what a state DOT is saying and what they're actually doing — I'm thinking of California and obviously the really famous crazy example is from 2023 with Jeannie Ward Waller blowing the whistle on expansions in the state when it was supposed to be limited to repair dollars.
Having the actual physical infrastructure work reported on the STIP would be super helpful. One, you can determine how many lane miles is the state adding per year based on the STIP vs bike lanes, say. And two, you would know if there is any new dedicated transit right of way that's being slept on maybe in certain states, like Complete Streets policies.
