RAISE Grants Announced: U.S. DOT Shifts to a Greener Vision for Transportation

The U.S. Department of Transportation has announced the first round of funding for the RAISE grant funding program. The grant allocations are available in a pdf document available online, but no press release or fact sheet has been published alongside the document. Planetizen will update this story as more information becomes available.

As noted when Planetizen reported on the creation of the RAISE program in April 2021, the new RAISE grants replace the BUILD grant program of the Trump administration, which, in turn, replaced the TIGER grants of the Obama administration. 

Yonah Freemark, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, quickly this morning Tweeted calculations about how the RAISE grant program compares, so far, to the previous discretionary grant funding program at the U.S. Department of Transportation. According to Freemark's early estimations, the RAISE grant program will fund far fewer road capacity expansion projects and fund far more greenway and complete streets projects than the BUILD program.

"If these RAISE grants are an indication of how the administration plans to distribute funds under the infrastructure bill, they're a good sign: The administration clearly gets it: Prioritize pedestrians, bikes, and transit over roadway expansion," writes Freemark.

Planetizen will update this story as more facts become available.