In Brief:
- A new report surveys state departments of transportation and finds a lack of measures to track progress toward stated goals.
- States share only a fraction of their transportation budgets with local governments.
- State DOTs also provide few opportunities for public input on project selection and design.
The federal government gives most of its money for highways and other transportation projects directly to states, to the tune of a whopping $53 billion in federal highway funding in fiscal year 2023. But states share only a small fraction of that money with local governments, which tend to maintain more than their fair share of road miles, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. And states spend their money in service of a series of goals, the report says — from reducing congestion to promoting safety and environmental sustainability — without, in many cases, tracking any progress toward those goals.
The Brookings researchers surveyed state planning, investment and accountability measures in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Among their findings: Most states make no effort to explain how the projects they build fit into their long-range plans. They share only about 14 percent of their total spending, on average, with local governments. And they provide few opportunities for public input on project selection and design. This lack of transparency and accountability creates potential for friction between the goals that state DOTs claim to be serving and the types of projects they actually invest in, says Adie Tomer, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and lead author of the report. For example, states may claim to want to reduce both traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, but invest public money in highway-widening projects that ultimately do neither.
The report was based on a survey of publicly available plans and data and interviews with transportation officials in nearly every state.
Tomer recently spoke with Governing about the findings of the survey of state DOTs. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you give me an overview: Why is the accountability and transparency of state departments of transportation an important topic?
There were two motivations to do this. One of them is longstanding. We know that state departments of transportation are truly large governing agencies, both in terms of their legal jurisdiction, but also their control over public dollars. And they’re, relatively speaking, unknown. I wouldn’t call them faceless. You know where to find the building. They have websites. You see their workers out there. You see their signs. But actually understanding how they do what they do is not clear to the public.
The second thing is much more contemporary, and why we ended up doing it. The response to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was so focused on the competitive grants side, because that was the new part of the law: Hundreds of competitive grant programs, many of them new, many of them within USDOT. Local governments are now getting a direct throughline in terms of funding to the federal government. But the reality is, the IIJA kept the proportionality between competitive grants and formula grants — states got a big boost in formula funding alongside the new competitive grants for cities. We’re not paying nearly enough attention to the 75 percent of the bill: the continuation of the federal government committing the vast bulk of its resources in a relatively unrestricted manner to these state DOTs. Those two really combine in powerful ways. What are state DOTs doing with their largesse and their authority?
Can you give me an example of a DOT having a goal that doesn’t have any associated accountability measures? What kind of goals do they set that they don’t follow up on?
One of the largest disconnects we found was not in the quality of the long-range planning but the disconnect between long-range planning and the actual project selection processes. You open these long-range plans, and they are glossy, they use typical planning style writing, they make sense. When you read the long-range plans in isolation, they seem fine. It is the follow-through on them where the real questions start to rise. There’s a lack of performance metrics associated with these long-range plans. Roughly 40 states go beyond the federal long-range goals, doing even more than USDOT mandates. The problem is so few of them actually track performance on any one of them. Goals without measurement, without follow-through, they open themselves up to just be happy talk, frankly.
Only nine states have both performance measurement and targets associated with every one of those goals. That should be 50 states plus Washington, D.C. That’s table stakes in governing. You have a goal: What’s the target and what’s the progress and measurement? How are you doing? Only nine states do that.
With the Transportation Improvement Programs, the documents that include actual project selections, there’s no carry forward. They’re not connected. There’s no confirmation that these projects that they’re spending enormous amounts of money on actually advance those goals. That is the element that the public in any given state, and a national audience for Congress, should be most animated about.
What kind of outcomes are associated with a lack of accountability and a lack of transparency at state DOTs?
We are concerned that this lack of accountability creates opportunities for DOT staff to pick projects of their own liking without actual input and buy-in from the communities they’re intended to serve. It also creates opportunities for projects to defy what is growing scientific and economic evidence of the kinds of projects that create the greatest social, industrial and environmental returns. To give one very specific example, the well-researched conversation around induced demand and whether wider highways actually address congestion.
States keep most of the money they get from the federal government and that they collect themselves through gas taxes and other state sources, rather than sharing it with local governments. Why is that bad? What would be the benefit of locals getting a bigger share of the pie?
Roughly speaking, nationally, about 30 percent of vehicle miles traveled, and therefore gas taxes, are generated on locally owned roads. So in a pure fiscal accounting sense, states are keeping more than their share of the gas taxes generated by users of their own roads.
Secondly, how can we be more responsive to what our system users need? That’s where the safety crisis comes in, environmental resilience, real estate development and the competitiveness of corridors — locals and states want all of those. But it’s local stakeholders, particularly officials, who are closer to those constituents who can communicate what they need. So letting localities have greater fiscal control is to the benefit of both localities and states.
Giving localities greater fiscal authority isn’t necessarily about taking project delivery amounts or authority away from states. It’s really about how we can use fiscal authority to lead to the kinds of projects that make good on these long-term goals everyone seems to share. And then still leverage this incredible expertise these states have on delivering transportation projects. States are good at delivering projects. They know how to operate permitting mazes. But it seems like what we really haven’t been doing here is helping localities have a louder voice in the kinds of projects that get built and how they’re designed.
Is there a precedent for state legislatures or governors intervening on these things, trying to push state DOTs to be more accountable or live up to their goals?
I don’t think governors and legislators have been paying as close attention to what their state DOTs are delivering as they could be. That is not to suggest there should be an antagonism towards state DOTs. But the governors and their secretaries are writing these pretty impressive long-range plans, but the actual delivery doesn’t seem as connected to them as it could be. That’s the question that the governors and legislators, the holders of the purse, should be asking: What are our ambitions in the long run, and how can we make sure that these agencies that have a ton of fiscal authority can help deliver it?
