Congress is preparing to reauthorize federal surface transportation programs for another five years. The American Public Transportation Association and some members of Congress advocate increasing federal transit funding from $108 billion to $138 billion in the reauthorization bill.
Before lawmakers consider raising federal transit funding again, especially after the significant increase from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which set aside up to $108 billion for federal public transportation over five years, Congress should first ask if this funding is being directed to the projects that best improve mobility and job access.
One recent attempt to evaluate that question comes from transportation researcher Wendell Cox in a 2025 report for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which examines whether decades of federal transit investment have delivered meaningful improvements in mobility and access to employment. The report concludes that, even after many years of federal spending on transit infrastructure, ridership remains low. In major cities, transit provides people far less access to jobs than driving does. This result comes from decades of federal transit policy that focused on building new infrastructure.
For more than 60 years, the federal government has invested in new transit infrastructure, especially rail systems, with the hope that this would boost ridership, reduce congestion and air pollution, and expand access to employment. Yet today, fewer people commute by transit than when the federal program began. In the 50 largest metro areas, people can reach, on average, 58.3 times more jobs within 30 minutes by car than by transit.
Even after years of federal investment, more than 90 percent of jobs in big cities are still easier to reach by car than by public transit. Only about 3.8 percent of the 160 million U.S. workers use public transportation for their usual commutes. These outcomes suggest that the challenge may not simply be the amount of money spent on transit, but how federal programs influence the types of projects agencies choose to build.
The Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program illustrates how federal funding rules can shape the types of transit projects agencies pursue. As the federal government’s main program for major transit capital projects, CIG provides enormous funding for new rail lines, extensions, and other large infrastructure investments.
To receive funding, projects are evaluated based on “project justification” and “local financial commitment.” Project justification considers things like mobility improvements, cost-effectiveness, land use, and economic development. Because cost-effectiveness is just one factor in this evaluation, projects that score well in other criteria can still receive funding, even if they are not the most efficient way to improve mobility or access to opportunity. This structure often makes large projects like light rail or subway expansions more competitive for federal funding than lower-cost alternatives such as bus rapid transit (BRT) or service upgrades.
A study by Yadi Wang and David Levinson examined 43 U.S. light rail projects built between 1991 and 2018. The researchers compared the selected projects with alternatives agencies had considered during planning, using projected ridership and cost estimates from planning and environmental review documents. The study found that the alternatives that were not chosen had a median ridership-to-cost ratio about 8.3 times higher than the rail projects that were actually built. This finding suggests that agencies sometimes pursue larger, more expensive projects even when lower-cost options could improve mobility more effectively.
If Congress is going to reject Cox’s subsequent recommendation to end federal funding for transit entirely, policymakers should then examine how to spend existing resources more wisely. Federal transit funds should go to projects that clearly improve mobility and access to more destinations. To make sure federal transit spending meets these goals, policymakers should consider three changes.
First, federal transit programs should prioritize maintaining and improving current systems before funding major expansions. One reason for this priority is the condition of many existing transit assets.
According to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), U.S. transit agencies have a state-of-good-repair backlog exceeding $100 billion, with newer federal estimates putting the total closer to about $140 billion. As a result, many key parts of transit systems, like rail tracks, buses, trains, power systems, and stations, are overdue for repairs or replacement.
In part, this situation reflects how federal transit funding programs are structured. Major federal grant programs such as the Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program are primarily designed to support new or expanded transit infrastructure rather than system maintenance. Given this emphasis, Congress should consider redirecting a portion of federal transit funding toward programs that address maintenance backlogs and improve service reliability before expanding existing systems.
Second, eligibility rules should be revised so that lower-cost projects, such as bus rapid transit and other bus services with dedicated lanes or bus-priority features, can qualify for and compete with rail expansions for federal funding. This means changing how the FTA’s Capital Investment Grants program evaluates projects, especially in the New Starts, Small Starts, and Core Capacity grant categories. The project justification and cost-effectiveness criteria should be updated so that lower-cost bus improvements have a fair chance against rail expansion projects in federal grant competitions.
Finally, agencies should be held accountable for results. The FTA reviews both projected and actual outcomes, including ridership and accessibility. But when projects go over budget or fail to deliver promised benefits, those outcomes should influence future grant ratings and eligibility for federal funding, meaning agencies whose projects consistently experience cost overruns or significantly underperform ridership projections could receive lower grant ratings or reduced eligibility for future federal transit funding.
Congress now has an opportunity to reconsider the purpose of federal transit policy. If the aim is to improve mobility and expand access to jobs and other opportunities, federal funding should go to the projects that produce the largest improvements in those outcomes.