Hundreds of cities get federal help to make streets safer

With road deaths still stubbornly high following the pandemic, the Biden administration announced Thursday more than $1 billion in funding to help make the nation's streets safer. The grants to local governments will help fund 354 safety projects around the country.

“We’ve been making a lot of announcements that make a lot of news at the Department of Transportation, but few could be as important as this one, because this really goes to the single main reason why our department exists, which is safety,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a call with reporters.

The list of projects funded through the grants include nearly $10 million to provide telemedicine services to emergency responders in rural Minnesota, $8.1 million for a new roundabout near the campus of Mississippi State University, and $25 million to add “complete streets” features—such as separated bike lanes, curb extensions, raised intersections and extra time for pedestrians to cross—to a major thoroughfare in Milwaukee.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young said a $13 million grant the Tennessee city is getting will help redesign the city’s most dangerous intersection in the Orange Mound neighborhood, a historically Black area. It is near a 15-acre park with a playground, ball fields, basketball courts, pavilions and a fitness trail. The six-way intersection “has a confusing array of signals leading to disjointed pedestrian activity and little guidance on appropriate movements,” Young said.

The city, which is contributing another $3 million to the project, will close one of the roads leading into the intersection. It will also upgrade traffic signals, pedestrian facilities and green spaces.

“This is a really big deal for the people of Memphis,” Young said, noting that Memphis was ranked the third-worst city in the country for pedestrian deaths in a 2022 analysis. “That, to me, is unacceptable. But we don’t have the funding that we need to make some of the more permanent changes to adapt the older street designs to comply with today’s safety standards.”

About 70 of the local governments receiving awards that were announced Thursday received money for construction and implementation. The rest received help for planning future projects.

“Many communities need support to get some of these projects onto the drawing board so that it's possible for them to go to construction in the future,” Buttigieg explained. “So a lot of communities are now receiving federal funding to write the safety plans that will help to identify and address their most pressing needs, and as they do that, build out that pipeline of projects for the years ahead.”

The federal grant money comes through the Safe Streets for All grant program, which was created as part of the 2021 infrastructure law. The grants announced Thursday were the second round of funding distributed this year through the program; the next awards are expected to be announced in November.

The Biden administration has touted the reach of the program. In three years of Safe Streets for All grants, the U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded a total of $2.7 billion to more than 1,400 communities in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Forty-eight tribal governments have received funding too. About half of the money has gone to rural areas.

According to the administration, the communities that have received the money account for 73% of the country’s population.

For more than half of the local governments receiving safe streets grants, the awards were their first direct transportation grants from the federal government. The Transportation Department provided technical assistance for many of them, including reaching out to 1,000 communities to help them fill out missing parts of their application. The agency also reached out to unsuccessful applicants from last year to help them better prepare for future submissions.

Traditionally, the federal government paid for road improvements by distributing money to state transportation agencies, which then decided how best to spend it. But Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said grant programs like the safe streets initiative allow local leaders to have a bigger say on improving their road networks.

“We’ve heard time and again how important it is to local communities to have direct access to federal funding,” he said. “I wish when I was mayor that we had had a way to fund safety improvements like this with federal dollars. … No one knows better what a community’s needs are than the local leadership and the membership of that community.”

“None of the projects we fund were invented at the DOT headquarters in Washington; they emerged from the communities,” he added. “The ideas don’t come from us, but the funding needs to. We think that direct line to local communities is especially important for getting visions done that just wouldn’t make the cut through any other funding source.”