Engineers Gave America's Roads an Almost Failing Grade — Why Aren't We Fixing Them?

Is “Fix It First” at the heart of your transportation department’s strategy? In the first of a series of blog posts titled ‘Rethinking Authorization,’ Transportation for America argues that the federal government should direct transportation funding in ways that prioritize maintenance and repair over new roadways and capacity-expanding projects.

A new approach is urgently needed—one that makes fixing existing infrastructure a prerequisite before building anything new. How are we going to do that?

T4A’s proposal “focuses on the changes required to prioritize existing maintenance needs before building new things: require grantees of federal funding to maintain their infrastructure by setting targets for improving road and bridge conditions, and then hold them accountable for doing so.” They also call for assisting states that fail to hit their targets by directing funds to repair projects only.

T4A suggests that all states should set progressive targets for improving their roadways and bridges, including those that are not currently under federal oversight, create more transparency in their processes, and enact incentives for prioritizing repair and maintenance. To do this, T4A recommends changing federal matching rates to 80 percent for repair and maintenance projects and only 50 percent for capacity-expanding projects. “If you can’t improve the condition of your existing infrastructure, you should not be building more.”