Report: 16% of roads that received federal funds remain in poor condition

In 2024, Congress allocated $56.8 billion to state transportation departments — well above the $43.2 billion figure that experts estimate it would take to take all of the nation's roads from "poor" to "acceptable" condition, reports Kea Wilson in Streetsblog USA.

Yet 16.34% of U.S. streets that were eligible for federal funding were still in poor condition in 2024, according to Transportation for America. This is largely because state DOTs are spending most of that money on highway expansions instead of repair and maintenance work. And "Because increasingly lax reporting standards conceal broken roads from public view, and DOTs routinely mis-categorize expensive expansion projects as simple 'maintenance' or lump them into a mysterious 'other' category, Transportation for America suspects the national highway network is actually even more drastically overbuilt than it appears on paper."

According to Mehr Mukhtar of T4A, "We’re still seeing inconsistencies and a lack of transparency in reporting standards. And all of this just leads us to the conclusion that until we see a meaningful shift in our priorities, and in how we’re tying our spending to our outcomes, the backlog of roads in poor conditions is going to persist — and likely it’s going to worsen."