The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill awaiting the president’s signature is notable both for Congress’ most significant commitment yet to address climate change, and its general failure to do anything to fundamentally change the sources of the problem and reach the level of ambition required.
When it comes to transportation, we’d direct you to our Transportation for America program’s extensive coverage of the IIJA for more detail. Join their email list and read their coverage on their blog.
Because Congress ignored the House’s superior five-year INVEST Act proposal and used the Senate’s inferior five-year proposals as the starting point to include in the IIJA, the IIJA failed to make any significant changes to the core transportation programs that are responsible for the problems we see in transportation now. The bill has a lot of exciting wheelbarrows of new money, but unfortunately it also includes a lot of excavators for the status quo, as shown in this excellent cartoon at right from Transportation for America:
More money for safety? Far more $$ for the status quo approach of more unsafe roads.
First-ever money for climate in a transportation bill? Historic amounts for new highways that produce more driving & emissions.
$1 billion to tear down divisive highways? Offset by $300+ billion to build new ones—like Louisiana’s current $750 million plan to bulldoze a Black neighborhood in Shreveport.
Historic amounts for public transit? Offset by equally historic levels of highway funding that will undermine the transit investments.
“As we have stated before, the transportation portion of the infrastructure bill spends a lot of money but fails to target it to the needs of the day: building strong economic centers, providing equitable access to opportunity, addressing catastrophic climate change, improving safety, or repairing infrastructure in poor condition,” said T4America Director Beth Osborne after the bill’s passage.
“The administration is confident they can make substantial progress on all of these goals despite those deficiencies. Most states are promising to use the flexibility they fought for to make marked improvements across these priorities. To make that happen, both the administration and the states will need to make major changes to how they approach transportation, but we know they can do it,” she said.
Smart Growth America celebrates some of the notable precedents and incremental improvements contained in this bill and the overall commitment to invest in infrastructure, but we lament the failure to truly put our country’s status quo approach to transportation in the rearview mirror—where it belongs.