Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding targets high-crash sites in cities and counties; also supports the U.S. Department of Transportation’s comprehensive strategy to reduce roadway deaths, a crisis claiming more than 40,000 lives each year
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced a historic $800 million in grant awards for 510 projects through the new Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Grant Program, including eight grants for communities in Arizona. The competitive grant program, established by President Biden’s historic infrastructure law, provides $5 billion over five years for regional, local, and Tribal initiatives — from redesigned roads to better sidewalks and crosswalks — to prevent deaths and serious injuries on the nation’s roadways. The Department also launched a data visualization tool that shows crash hotspots that can help target needed resources.
The SS4A awards fund improved safety planning for over half the nation’s population and will fundamentally change how roadway safety is addressed in communities through local and regional efforts that are comprehensive and data driven. This investment comes at an important junction as traffic fatalities reached a 16-year high in 2021 and preliminary data indicates will remain near those levels in 2022, even getting worse for people walking, biking, or rolling as well as incidents involving trucks. In addition, traffic crashes are costly to American society. A new report shows the economic impact of traffic crashes was $340 billion in 2019 alone.
“Every year, crashes cost tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to our economy; we face a national emergency on our roadways, and it demands urgent action,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “We are proud that these grants will directly support hundreds of communities as they prepare steps that are proven to make roadways safer and save lives.”
The Safe Streets and Roads for All program grants being announced today support the Department’s vision of zero roadway deaths and its National Roadway Safety Strategy: a comprehensive approach launched in January 2022 to make our nation’s roadways safer for everyone, including drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and emergency and construction workers by stressing responsible driving, safer roadway designs, appropriate speed-limit setting, and improved post-crash care, among other strategies.
As part of SS4A, the Department is awarding grants for both planning and implementation projects. Action plan grants assist communities that do not currently have a roadway safety plan in place to reduce roadway fatalities, laying the groundwork for a comprehensive set of actions. Implementation grants provide funding for communities to implement strategies and projects that will reduce or eliminate transportation-related fatalities and serious injuries.
The Department is awarding eight action planning grants to help improve roadway safety in Arizona. The applicants receiving awards are:
- City of Glendale
- City of Mesa
- City of Phoenix
- City of Scottsdale
- City of Tolleson
- MetroPlan (Flagstaff Metropolitan Planning Organization)
- Pima County
- Town of Prescott Valley
The full list of awards can be viewed HERE. The next funding opportunity of $1.1 billion is expected to be released in April of this year.
In addition to SS4A grants, tomorrow the Federal Highways Administration will award a total of $21 million to 70 Tribes to improve road safety on Tribal lands, addressing issues such as roadway departures and the need for better pedestrian crossings.
For more information about SS4A, including additional resources and information for interested applicants and stakeholders, click HERE.
To read more about the Department’s National Roadway Safety Strategy, including the Safe Systems Approach, click HERE.
3 thoughts on “Biden-Harris Administration Announces Over $4.7 Million for Arizona to Improve Roads at the Local Level and Tackle National Traffic Fatalities – U.S. DoT”
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First of all, this is a self-serving propaganda article written by the Biden-Harris regime that was created using our taxpayer dollars. Are we supposed to be grateful for the magnanimity of the Biden-Harris regime for returning some of our own money to us? After all, it is not like the Biden-Harris regime magically created this bounty and is bestowing it to the grateful citizens of Arizona. This was our money in the first place.
The federal government in general, and in this case the Biden-Harris regime in particular, takes money from the taxpayers and then doles it back out to the states, usually with strings attached. This creates a master-servant relationship between the federal government and the states. It is all about the Washington, D.C. bureaucracies exerting control over the states. The federal government can use this leverage to coerce the states into doing their bidding. The feds are saying, “If you want your money back you must comply with our demands.”
Here is a better idea: Let the states keep their own money. The states don’t need a domineering, paternalistic federal overseer to tell them how best to spend their own money. Eliminate or downsize the often wasteful, autocratic federal bureaucracies and let the states handle their own finances.
Irv is right on. A 1million per year grant to Prescott Valley with matching funding and a lot of paperwork will offer little in the way of safety. Software to block cell phone use by drivers in vehicles would do more and much easier.
Better roads – sidewalks -signals is not the answer. Neither is a wasteful federal government that has to take money away from us before it can grant it back to us through the local government who also has no money unless and until it takes it from us in the form of taxes or fees.
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