Drawing from its Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) discretionary grant program, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has proposed $855,950,000 in grants for projects throughout the country.
With new evaluation criteria in place, the program focuses more heavily than before on public-private partnerships and incentivization to meet national and regional economic vitality goals. It divvies up its funds between large and small projects, each with their own criteria. Large projects must require grants of at least $25 million, while small projects must be at least $5 million. The lion’s share of funds goes to large projects, with 10 percent of funds set aside for small projects.
The largest projects so awarded include the Alabama Department of Transportation, which will be awarded $125 million to construct a new six-lane cable-stayed bridge with more than 215 feet of vertical clearance to carry I-10 across the Mobile River channel.
The Arizona Department of Transportation will be awarded $90 million to add capacity on a rural, mountainous stretch of I-17 north of Phoenix.
Space Florida will be awarded $90 million to replace the Cape Canaveral Spaceport Indian River Bridge with new twin high-level bridges, to allow transportation of oversized vehicles to launch sites.
The Maryland Department of Transportation will be awarded $125 million to raise the vertical clearance of the Howard Street Tunnel, Baltimore, to facilitate the movement of double-stack trains on an important freight rail corridor.
Other large projects included awards to the Maine DOT for replacement of the Madawaska International Bridge to Canada and for upgrades to I-70, as well as the Oregon DOT for roadway improvements, among others. On the smaller end of things, projects included things like the addition of 12 miles of passing lanes in rural southeastern Colorado, rehabilitation of a 91.3-mile shortline railroad in Arkansas, capacity upgrades for PortMiami and rehabilitation of riverbank infrastructure in Northeast Ohio.