Dive Brief:
- The Department of Transportation awarded $5 billion in federal funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to fix or replace more than a dozen of the biggest and most economically critical bridges around the country, officials announced Wednesday.
- A $1.4 billion grant to replace an Interstate 5 bridge between Oregon and Washington is the largest of the 13 projects receiving funding in the latest round.
- “These bridges affect whole regions and ultimately impact the entire U.S. economy,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on a press call Tuesday afternoon. “What they all have in common is that their condition means they need major urgent investment to help keep people safe and to keep our supply chains running smoothly.”
Source: Department of Transportation
Dive Insight:
The bridge funding announcement, part of the DOT’s infrastructure tour ahead of the presidential election this fall, seeks to address some of the biggest sources of trucking and supply chain bottlenecks.
Buttigieg will travel Wednesday to Pennsylvania for a news conference announcing the I-83 South bridge funding at one of the region’s most notorious highway interchanges.
“It's in poor condition, and it creates bottlenecks that makes drivers less safe,” Buttigieg said. “It costs people time. It makes it more expensive to ship goods through this critical corridor.”
The Pennsylvania bridge replacement is expected to lead to 117 fewer crashes per year and save truck drivers 66 million hours over its lifetime, he said.
The bridge grant funding program received 33 applications from states requesting a combined $10 billion, according to the department. Some of the funded projects, including the Cape Cod project in Massachusetts, will require federal funding commitments in 2025 and 2026, Federal Highway Administrator Shailen Bhatt said on the press call.
Another $525 million in bridge funding is expected to be awarded through the Bridge Investment Program later this year, according to the DOT.
The grants do not include money for the replacement of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which President Joe Biden’s budget intends to fully fund through a federal Emergency Relief Program, Bhatt said.
