There are two lines in America’s transportation financing program.
One is long, slow, and uncertain. Cities stand in that line with projects that would make daily life better: fixing a dangerous street, reconnecting a neighborhood, repairing a corridor so people can walk or bike safely. These projects must compete for small pots of money through complex grant programs. Cities hire consultants, prepare applications, wait months—or years—and hope they win. This line has been called different things: TIGER, BUILD, RAISE.
The other line doesn’t really look like a line at all.
It’s the one expansion projects use.
If you’ve ever been to a theme park, you know how this works. For example, at Disney there’s the regular line everyone waits in, and then there’s the Lightning Lane, the fast track that lets certain guests skip the wait and go straight to the ride.
In transportation funding, the Lightning Lane exists too. It’s just hidden backstage.
Projects that expand highways—adding lanes, building new interchanges, extending major roads—move through a system designed to fund them quickly and reliably. The amount of money is larger -- by vast amounts -- the path is clearer, and the friction is minimal compared to the competitive grant programs cities must navigate for smaller projects.
The difference isn’t subtle.
The highway expansion line moves fast and is backed by enormous pots of money. The line for everything else is slow, uncertain, and dramatically smaller.
The Illusion of Reform
Every few years, Congress reauthorizes the federal transportation program. With each new bill comes a promise of reform.
There will be funding for innovation. There will be funding for safety. There will be funding for reconnecting neighborhoods or building safer streets.
And those programs do fund real projects. Cities celebrate when they win one of these grants, and rightly so. Local staff often spend years navigating the process, and the projects themselves can sometimes be transformative.
But the existence of these programs can create an illusion about how the system actually works. In fact, one could say that creating that illusion is a feature of the programs, not a flaw.
The competitive grants that cities chase are the long line. The expansion program is the Lightning Lane. “Innovation” is the small marketing budget for the underlying expansion effort.
The grant programs are small and difficult to access. The expansion programs are large and routine. If a state DOT wants to widen a highway or add capacity, the path to funding is straightforward. If a city wants to redesign a dangerous corridor or make a neighborhood street safer, it may spend years preparing a grant application and still come away empty-handed.
In other words, the system is not neutral. It is structurally biased toward expansion.
The Cost of Standing in Line
You can see the consequences everywhere.
Cities identify dangerous streets that need redesign. They conduct studies, gather data, and build public support. But the projects often stall while local leaders search for funding sources that fit the right federal program.
Meanwhile, expansion projects continue moving forward through streamlined funding channels.
This creates a strange dynamic where the projects most likely to improve safety and strengthen local communities face the greatest barriers, while the projects most likely to add long-term costs move most easily through the system.
None of this is the result of bad intentions. The system was designed to build highways, and it still functions that way today.
When local leaders celebrate a competitive grant for a six-block street improvement, it’s worth remembering that the broader program has simultaneously funded dozens of expansion projects with far less scrutiny and far more money.
Cities are celebrating a victory after waiting in the long line while the Lightning Lane keeps expansion projects moving.
The Question We Should Be Asking
The problem isn’t that federal programs occasionally fund good projects. The problem is that the structure of the system overwhelmingly favors one kind of project over another.
If we genuinely care about safety, fiscal responsibility, and productive public investment, we should ask a simple question: Why is expansion the easy project to fund?
Why is it easier to add a new lane to a highway than to repair a dangerous street? Why does the system reward the largest projects while the smaller, higher-return investments must compete for limited scraps?
These aren’t technical questions. They’re structural ones.
And until we address the structure of the program, we shouldn’t be surprised that the outcomes remain the same.
The Lightning Lane will keep moving. And cities will keep standing in line.
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Learn more about the Strong Towns approach to reforming America’s transportation system by grabbing a copy of Mission Accomplished, a fresh vision for the post-expansion era.
