Florida Ranks 14th in the Nation in Highway Performance and Cost-Effectiveness

According to the Annual Highway Report by Reason Foundation, this is a six-spot fall from Florida’s ranking of 8th overall in the last evaluation of the condition, safety, and costs of roads and bridges in all 50 states.

In safety and condition categories, Florida’s highways rank 9th in urban Interstate pavement condition, 4th in rural Interstate pavement condition, 5th in urban arterial pavement condition, 5th in rural arterial pavement condition, 10th in structurally deficient bridges, 48th in urban fatality rate, and 38th in rural fatality rate.

Florida ranks 39th out of the 50 states in traffic congestion, and its drivers spend 45 hours a year stuck in traffic congestion.

In spending and cost-effectiveness, Florida ranks 40th in capital and bridge disbursements, which are the costs of building new roads and bridges and widening existing ones. Florida ranks 25th in maintenance spending, such as the costs of repaving roads and filling in potholes. Florida’s administrative disbursements, including office spending that doesn’t make its way to roads, ranks 23rd nationwide.

The categories in which the state improved the most were rural fatality rate (45th to 38th) and administrative disbursements (28th to 23rd).

Florida worsened the most in urbanized area congestion (18th to 39th).

Compared to neighboring and nearby states, Florida’s overall highway performance is better than Alabama’s (17th) and Mississippi’s (18th) but worse than South Carolina’s (2nd) and Georgia’s (6th).

Comparing its overall performance to similarly populated states, Florida ranks ahead of Texas (25th) and New York (45th).

Florida’s highway system ranks 14th out of 50 states overall this year, ranked 8th in last year’s report, and was 40th in the nation five years ago, in 2019.

“In terms of improving in the road condition and performance categories, Florida should focus on reducing capital-bridge disbursements and reducing traffic congestion. These are the only performance categories in which the state ranks in the bottom 25 states,” said Baruch Feigenbaum, lead author of the 28th Annual Highway Report and senior managing director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation. “The state should also look to lower its urban fatality rate. Florida’s rank of 48th in urban fatality rate makes it one of the worst in the nation for this safety metric.”

*2021 data
The Annual Highway Report is based on spending and performance data submitted by state highway agencies to the federal government and urban congestion data from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute for 2020 as well as bridge condition data from the Better Roads inventory for 2021. For more details on the calculation of each of the 13 performance measures used in the report, as well as the overall performance measure, please refer to the appendix in the main report. The report’s dataset includes Interstate, federal, and state roads, but not county or local roads. All rankings are based on performance measures that are ratios rather than absolute values: the financial measures are disbursements per mile, the fatality rate is fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles of travel, the urban congestion measure is the annual delay per auto commuter, and the others are percentages. For example, the state ranking 1^st in structurally deficient bridges has the smallest percentage of structurally deficient bridges, not the smallest number of structurally deficient bridges.