The Biden infrastructure plan pledges a rethink of federal transportation priorities. But the government agencies that build and maintain U.S. highways might not all be along for the ride. Bloomberg CityLab By Laura Bliss April 15, 2021 The last time an American president launched a major infrastructure campaign, the politics of federalism aligned to support it. State highway departments worked in lockstep with federal officials in the 1950s and ’60s to lay down 41,000 miles of “straightaways, cloverleaf turns, bridges, and elongated parkways,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would later write of the Interstate Highway System, his vision to boost domestic defenses and the economy. The federal government picked up 90% of the tab, but it largely fell to the states to decide where to put these ribbons of asphalt, and to their highway commissions to build them. These agencies, the forerunners to today’s state departments of transportation, comprised a formidable freeway-making machine in the interstate era, and they remain the country’s primary road builders. The infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden now seeks congressional support for arrives in a very different political landscape, and it has a different mission. The American Jobs Plan — which Biden has called the single largest investment in jobs since World War II — promises to lay a “blueprint for infrastructure needed for tomorrow” through a $2 trillion, 8-year investment in transportation, water systems, energy grids, schools, housing, climate adaptation, health care and workforce development. High on that list is a pledge to “modernize 20,000 miles of highways, roads, and main streets, not only ‘fixing them first’ but ‘fixing them right,’ with safety, resilience, and all users in mind.”
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