Skip to main content

US DOT announces recipients of $1.5 billion in TIGER Grants

The US Department of Transportation today announced the recipients of $1.5 billion in TIGER Grant funding. Of nearly 1400 requests for funding that was a combined total of $56.5 billion, 51 projects - or 3.7% of those submitted - received TIGER funding.  The awards ranged from a maximum of $105 million to a minimum of $3.15 million.

To see the list of grant winners - go here.

Only four of the 51 awarded projects will be fully funded with TIGER financing.  They include a $14 million project that will improve the infrastructure at three Maine seaports, $45 million for a new 1.5 mile New Orleans Streetcar line from Union Station to Canal St. along Loyola Ave., $35 million to complete 3.7 miles of a US 395 freeway in Spokane (the money will build two missing southbound lanes), and $3.5 million for improvements to US 93 in Whitefish, MT.

Specific of interest to this blog, $10 million each was awarded to the I-85 Yadkin River Bridge project and the eventual construction of I-73 in Dillon County, SC.  (More on those later in separate entries).

It appears that the best way to have won these grants is to have been a multi-modal project.  One of the bigger projects was a total rebuild of an I-244 bridge in Tulsa, OK.  The new bridge will handle Interstate highway traffic, passenger rail, and have a pedestrian and bike trail access.  The project received nearly $50 million in TIGER Grant money.  The project is estimated to cost $86.7 million.

USDOT's selection criteria included - Long-Term Implications (end project life, economic impact, quality of living improvements, environmental sustainability, and safety), immediate economic impact, innovation, and financial partnerships.

As a result nearly half of the winning projects (22 of 51 - 43%) were transit and street scape based projects. $20 million was awarded to Revere, MA for a project that "...will reconfigure acres of dilapidated and aging surface parking lots into a vertical multi-modal transit facility and plaza, linking automobiles, transit, pedestrians and bicyclists in a hospitable environment that encourages alternative transportation options. The project will also construct a multi-modal, pedestrian-focused streetscape along Ocean Avenue..."  $23 million was allocated to repair, reconstruct, and improve 16.3 miles of pedestrian and bicycle paths in Metropolitan Philadelphia. 

As predicted, the states, cities, and other projects did not receive any grant funding were very disappointed.  A streetcar transit project for Cincinnati was not included.  As was a streetcar project along Peachtree St. in Atlanta.  Disappointment made it as far as Guam as a request for $49.7 million to improve the port there was rejected.

I'm going to take a look at the North Carolina and South Carolina awards in another blog entry.  You may see other members of the blog comment on grants given in their states.  If you are looking for some details on other projects winning TIGER Grant money - follow some of these links:
  • Kevin Flynn's Inside Lane covers the $10 million awarded to Colorado for a US 36 managed lanes/bus rapid transit project between Boulder and Denver
  • The Navajo Nation received $31 million for widening and improvements of the dangerous US 491 corridor in Northwestern New Mexico.  The project site is here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

  There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population.  The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third