Metropolitan areas are shorted on stimulus money

Get 59% of stimulus funds

Steve Hawley, Feb 24, 10.

The 100 largest US metropolitan areas got a disproportionately small amount of transportation stimulus funds, according to The New Republic. The article notes that those regions contain two-thirds of the country’s population and produce 75 percent of the gross domestic product, but they got just 59 percent of the stimulus money.

Aviation and highway money was particularly skewed, with about 42 percent of aviation funds and just under 50 percent of highway money going to the top 100 metropolitan areas.

Transit, rail, and maritime funds, on the other hand, as well as discretionary grants like the TIGER funds awarded last week, were concentrated in urban areas. Sixty-five percent of maritime money, 82 percent of transit funds, and almost 100 percent of railroad spending went to the largest metropolitan regions, as well as 72 percent of discretionary funds.

A recent analysis also revealed that transit stimulus projects have created about twice as many jobs per dollar as highway projects. The majority of stimulus spending, however, went to highway projects in outlying areas.

The New Republic notes:

There are a few likely reasons for this spatial disconnect. First and foremost is that the table above reports spending through last December. Metropolitan planning organizations have one year to obligate their roadway funds, so the highway figures may change somewhat. Another is the federal government’s guidance to target funds in Economically Distressed Areas which, while laudable, seems to have served to spread money around haphazardly.

Also there is the emphasis on shovel-readiness, and the real consequence that some states would lose a portion of their money if they didn’t spend it quickly. This proved to be a powerful incentive to obligate funds quickly, but created a bias towards “business-as-usual” delivery systems. My colleague Mark Muro points out the many innovations that accompanied ARRA, but for transportation, 60 percent of ARRA’s spending is in the hands of the states which have an uneven record on metropolitan issues.

The article applauds the TIGER grants though, noting that 61 percent of the projects and 71 percent of the funding went to large metropolitan areas. The only two Texas projects that received money were both in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

In his FastLane blog, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wrote, “Folks, this is not just another grant program; this is a new way of recognizing merit, a way that breaks through old formulas and rewards American innovation that serves American communities.”

Other sources have reported that the Obama administration is slowly shifting long-set policies and beginning to invest directly in urban areas.

(Photo credit: sahmeditor)