By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black

(WIB) – In 2021, President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law made a whopping $1.2 trillion in federal funds available to states to upgrade everything from roads and bridges (which are often crumbling) to subways and other mass-transit systems. The idea, in part, was that making such a huge pile of money available to local governments would encourage a leap forward in climate-friendly infrastructure.

But while there have been green success stories, like the expansion of electric school bus fleets, according to a new review of infrastructure bill spending, such spending has been the exception to the rule.

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Instead, states have plowed money into the same thing they always do: more roads and highways, or more lanes on existing highways. The policy group Transportation for America calls the future emissions that will come from the spending a “climate time bomb.” It will also create an explosion in pollution for the predominantly Black and brown communities that tend to live alongside the country’s freeways.

The analysis looked at some 57,000 projects and found that $33 billion of funds from the bill are going “toward projects that expand road capacity, doubling down on a strategy that has failed time and time again,” according to Transportation for America (about a quarter of the $130 billion worth of projects that were analyzed). Meanwhile, just a fifth of that money has funded public transportation projects. 

If infrastructure-law funding continues to be spent on car-focused projects at the same rate, it will be “on track to produce an additional 178.5 million tonnes of CO2e GHG over baseline emissions by 2040,” the report on the analysis says. “According to the EPA, this is the emissions equivalent of running 48 coal-fired power plants for a full year.”

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“You have to essentially walk down this giant cliff of emissions that we’re creating into the future because once these highways are built, there’s not really an easy way back from that,” Corrigan Solerno, a policy associate at Transportation for America, told The Guardian.

What Transportation for America’s report doesn’t mention is that those theoretical coal power plants will be polluting Black neighborhoods, too. When the freeway system was built in the 1950s, planners deliberately placed the roads where Black and Latinx people live — and that’s done lasting harm to the health of those who live alongside them. And even in car-centric cities like Los Angeles, research has found that communities that are exposed to the most air pollution from vehicles (which tend to be poor and non-white) and the ones that actually drive the least.

The spending bill gave a lot of leeway to states to decide how the money should be spent, which is partly why a law that was couched as being green has funded so many highway projects. But the flip side of that flexibility is that states can choose to invest what is still left on the kind of green transit infrastructure that will benefit both local communities and the climate on the whole. Judging by their track record on the infrastructure bill thus far, however, they may need some pushing in order to do so.