This week, the Biden-Harris administration announced more than $480 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has been dedicated so far to specific projects and awards across the country. This includes improvements and repairs to more than 175,000 miles of roadways; nearly 1,400 communities supported with improvements to enhance roadway safety for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians; and nearly 11,200 public transit projects to expand, improve, or modernize operations.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, also known as the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act (IIJA), is nearly three years old, and it has shaped some of the projects currently being undertaken by East-West Gateway Council of Governments and many partner agencies. Enacted in November 2021, IIJA dedicated more than $571 billion in federal funding to:
- Repair and rebuild roads and bridges.
- Eliminate lead service water lines to households.
- Increase access to high-speed internet.
- Invest in public transit.
- Upgrade airports and ports.
- Upgrade passenger rail service.
- Build a national network of electric vehicle chargers (EVs).
- Upgrade national power infrastructure while decreasing greenhouse emissions.
- Build resilience to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks to protect against droughts, heat, floods, wildfires, hacks, and outages.
- Clean up Superfund and brownfield sites.
What does this look like in the St. Louis region? Here are just a few examples.
- At EWG, it enabled the agency’s transportation team to complete a Comprehensive Safety Action Plan covering the seven counties and the city of St. Louis. Entitled Gateway to Safer Roadways, the plan identified key strategies to reduce crashes in our region by 50% by the year 2050. The plan also paves the way for local and regional jurisdictions to apply for funding from a roughly $1 billion pool for safety improvements to the region’s most hazardous roadways as well as mitigation initiatives and strategies to save lives. Those projects could include infrastructure upgrades on roadways and intersections identified as high-risk areas for crashes; resources for smart technology in vehicles to ensure drivers and passengers buckle up and drive the speed limit; and a variety of other mitigation efforts.
- The region further received about $10 million in Transportation Alternatives funds through the infrastructure act – nearly triple the funding previously available. This sparked considerable pedestrian and biking trail improvements, including the Grant’s Trail extension to Kirkwood, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) improvements to Metro bus stops within the city of St. Louis, and the emerging Brickline Greenway, also in St. Louis.
- A new Carbon Reduction Program funded by the infrastructure act enabled the purchase of electric public transit buses to replace aging vehicles; the installation of traffic monitoring cameras in Missouri for better traffic flow that reduces idling times; and road improvement projects throughout the region, such as a new traffic safety highway circle in Maryville.
- School districts throughout the region have also obtained funding to replace gas powered school buses with clean energy electric buses. Districts include Affton, Breckenridge Hills, Edwardsville CUSD 7, Ferguson-Florissant, Lemay, New Haven, and Normandy.
- As it gears up for expansion with a new terminal concourse, Lambert International Airport has also benefitted from the funding with five years of grants totaling more than $94 million, with the most recent $49 million announced earlier this month. It was further announced this month that MidAmerica St. Louis Airport in St. Clair County will receive more than $3.5 million from the FAA to expand its aircraft apron.
- These are in addition to millions of dollars in investment to replace lead water lines into homes and offices in areas with aging infrastructure, including subdivisions and neighborhoods built before the 1940s.
This is not a complete list, but explains many of the reasons the region is seeing considerable construction on its roadways, headlines about electric buses in our schools, and increased focus on clean energy in our region. There may be more to come. There’s still another $91 billion left to allocate under the law.