These towns got millions for safer roads

Rural towns plagued by deadly roads have won nearly $350 million this year to make them safer, a dramatic turnaround for communities that a USA TODAY investigation found had been left out of earlier rounds of federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grants.
That’s according to a USA TODAY analysis of more than $1 billion in new grants the U.S. Department of Transportation announced last month.
It’s a sharp departure from the first two years of the program, during which most of the cash awarded in the Safe Streets program landed in more affluent counties with lower fatality rates, the investigation found. What’s more, the agency had struggled to gather enough applications to use all the grant money it had on hand.
So far this year, department staff have awarded grants for traffic safety projects to over 200 rural communities, including:
“The nature of the program is ‘Safe Streets for All,'” said Mark Willrett, emphasizing the last word. He’s director of public works in rural Klamath Falls, Oregon, which won $2 million. “All should be smaller communities as well as larger communities. And that seems to be panning out a little bit.”
Despite an administration-wide push to direct infrastructure money toward disadvantaged communities, transportation department officials didn’t reach out directly to struggling places with high fatality rates to drum up interest during the first two years of the program. That changed earlier this year, when USA TODAY began asking for records showing the department’s efforts to reach needy communities.
Now, in the program’s third year, the federal transportation department has awarded about the same amount of cash to rural places as it did in the previous two years combined, according to records the department published in September.
The increase is even more pronounced among so-called “disadvantaged” or “underserved” communities – places the federal agency says struggle more with housing and transportation costs, among other factors.
Awards to fix streets in underserved rural places have soared nearly 600% since the program’s first year. Compare that to underserved urban areas, where the increase has barely cracked the double digits – at 13% above 2022’s total.
Overall, a much larger portion of the money – 32% – is going to rural communities, up sharply from 21% last year, according to the agency records USA TODAY reviewed. With one more round of funding expected in November, those figures aren’t yet final for 2024.
Throughout the program’s three years, most of the urban funding has landed in underserved places, the department’s records show, but that hasn’t been the case for rural areas.
Only one-third of the rural funding benefited people living in underserved places in the program’s first year. Instead, much of it landed in more-affluent gateways to outdoor recreation like Missoula, Montana, or vacation destinations such as Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida.
The transportation department reversed that ratio this year, after USA TODAY published its investigation in February. For 2024, agency calculations show over two-thirds of rural funding is going to underserved communities – about double the portion these types of places won in previous years.
An increase in direct outreach, a reallocation of the money and more widespread recognition of the program help explain why underserved rural places won so much more funding this year, transportation officials said.
“It wasn’t one thing; it was lots of things. We really tried to take a holistic approach and a really strategic approach to thinking about how can we better reach these communities?” said Mariia Zimmerman, the agency’s principal deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy.
One reason is the agency’s targeted outreach to metropolitan planning organizations – regional collaborations that can help small towns work together when planning traffic safety projects.
Department staff identified high-fatality places in states with fewer grants over the first two years of the program, Zimmerman said. They contacted over 750 communities throughout 2024 and met personally with over 120 to encourage Safe Streets applications. She said over 50 of those received grants this round.
This type of targeted, direct outreach wasn’t happening before last fall, when USA TODAY first requested records showing how the agency promotes the program. Instead, agency staff had been relying largely on newsletters, webinars and outside organizations to get the word out.
Second, the department was able to put unused planning dollars toward building more traffic-safety projects.
From its conception in 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Safe Streets program was divided into two pots of money: planning grants and implementation grants. Implementation grants are often multimillion-dollar awards that put shovels in the ground and allow cities to fix dangerous streets. The much smaller “planning and demonstration” grants are used to study problem areas and test out quick-build strategies to make roads safer.
Congress chose to allocate 40% of the money to planning and the remaining 60% for implementation, which Zimmerman called a “design challenge for the program.”
“We had concerns from the get-go of that was a pretty high percentage to put for planning, and we had wanted to see more implementation,” Zimmerman said.
Through the program’s first two years, the agency couldn’t gather enough applications to award all the planning dollars, meaning about $200 million was sitting unused at the start of this year. In March, Congress allowed the agency to shift that pot over to fund implementation projects instead. Zimmerman said they’re waiting to see if Congress will repeat that for 2025’s awards.
As for why just a third of rural dollars were awarded to underserved communities in the program’s first year, Zimmerman said that likely came from how Congress wrote the program. It requires places that apply for implementation dollars to have an existing traffic safety action plan in place.
“It was, like, probably more-resourced communities that had already had an opportunity to develop an action plan, and more-resourced communities who knew about the infrastructure law; maybe had lobbyists and grant writers and folks who could kind of be tracking this, right?” Zimmerman said.
Three years into the program, the agency is now seeing repeat grant winners, Zimmerman added, including rural places that first won planning dollars that are then eligible to come back and win implementation money. She named Bluefield, West Virginia, as one such place, and said that’s another reason for this year’s big increase in rural funding.
The transportation department doesn’t set a specific threshold for dividing money between rural and urban winners in this program, Zimmerman said. Department records show rural places won about 20 cents of every dollar awarded through the first two years, but that leapt to about 32 cents this year.
“It’s a stretch goal, but our goal is zero roadway deaths in every community,” Zimmerman said, noting the department’s data show a disproportionately higher fatality rate in rural places. “We’re seeing a much more even split between urban and rural to just kind of really reflect the safety needs that we have in our community and meet that goal for zero fatalities.”
“Rural applicants not getting fair shake. Counties not getting fair shake. Would like to speak further,” a transportation department staffer noted in an internal log USA TODAY obtained through a public records request late last year.
The staffer was describing a meeting with Nicholas Stallings, the roads engineer for rural Henderson County, Kentucky, after the department rejected his application for Safe Streets money in 2022.
Two years and two applications later, Stallings finally won more than $3 million to fix roughly a third of the roads in his entire county.
“Without the glitz and glamour that I can’t do by myself, versus having a team of editors, I put that one together,” Stallings told USA TODAY, estimating that he spent at least 300 hours – many on nights and weekends – reading hundreds of other towns’ road safety plans and singlehandedly writing the application three years in a row.
“Some cities have 10 or 15 engineers working on the process,” Stallings said. “You shouldn’t disadvantage the ones who don’t have that much money up front to put together in a big package, you know, a glow-and-show package, right?”
This lower capacity Stallings is describing among disadvantaged and rural communities was a key finding of USA TODAY’s investigation earlier this year. The lack of grant writing staff and their expertise is a major reason small towns often win less money while cities rake in multiple awards: Detroit, for example, boasts an 18-member grant writing staff and has won about $60 million in Safe Streets grants.
Stallings said inattention causes most wrecks around Henderson, when a driver veers off the road and hits something or sideswipes another car on narrow roads. About 22 of every 100,000 county residents die in traffic wrecks annually, according to a USA TODAY analysis of recent transportation department data. That’s nearly double the national rate, at 12 deaths per every 100,000 people.
“I’m trying not to be sentimental, but I’ve got kids that are growing up. At some point in time, they’re going to be drivers,” Stallings said. “Just because somebody has a moment of lapse in judgment, they shouldn’t die, right?”
This grant will help fund “easy, systematic approaches” to give drivers more time to recover when things go wrong on the road – removing trees, ditches and other roadside obstacles and widening shoulders to give drivers more leeway should they veer off-course.
Demonstrating his county’s readiness to manage a multimillion-dollar award was key, Stallings said. His application had to prove “that you’re not going to get this money and just freeze and not know what to do with it.”
“A lot of these little cities and counties, you know, you fund them with a couple million dollars they can get a lot done versus somebody that’s in a bigger city that’s got higher wages and higher construction costs,” Stallings said.
Throughout three years of the program, the largest grants have typically gone to major cities – places with more people and, generally, more traffic deaths.
Cities like New York, Houston, Atlanta and Seattle have been more likely to pull in awards topping $25 million than an Appalachian coal town like Bluefield, West Virginia.
That made Bluefield’s $25.5 million grant – the largest Safe Streets grant ever awarded to a rural recipient – even sweeter when City Manager Cecil Marson got the news during a call from his senator’s office.
“The world kind of stopped for a second. And once the mayor and I got up off the floor in shock, you know, we’re pretty happy,” Marson said.
“We haven’t had a lot of investment like this,” added Mayor Ron Martin. “For the folks that are left that are trying to make this place livable, workable and a place people want to be, it’s thrilling.”
As coal boomed in the late-1800s, road planning in Bluefield was “utilitarian,” Martin said – workers carved narrow passes through mountains without much concern for safety or erosion from heavy rains. Department records show eight people have died in traffic crashes in the small town in just the past few years.
“All of a sudden we’ve got this money, and we’re going to be able to change that to where it is a safe pass through,” he said.
In Henderson County, Kentucky, Stallings’ persistence nabbed a grant without a team of engineers or pricey consultants, but Bluefield used about $100,000 of leftover COVID relief funds to pay an engineering firm to help craft its application, Marson said.
They had a “massively talented staff,” Marson said, but it’s always a bit of a gamble.
“You take $100,000 that we were given, and now that has turned into $31 million,” Marson said, adding in a $6 million matching grant from the state. “So, we’re spiking a football on the end zone. So, we won the game.”
The flip side of that wager is that paying for consultants doesn’t always lead to a payoff. They just as easily could have gotten a response of “Better luck next year, and keep trying,” which Marson said happens all the time in this type of federal grant program.
Klamath Falls, a town of 22,000 east of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, also took that bet – and won $2 million to upgrade a handful of intersections that have seen dozens of crashes over the past several years. USA TODAY’s investigation earlier this year identified several of the spots where Klamath Falls now plans to spend its Safe Streets money as a crash hotspot corridor that could use investment.
Adding hardened curbs between lanes should slow down drivers as they turn, extending sidewalk curbs further into the street and adding timers will protect pedestrians, and removing plants and relocating parking will clear up blocked lines of sight.
Oregon’s transportation department sponsored Klamath Falls with a $100,000 grant to put together the safety plan required to compete for federal dollars, according to Willrett, the city’s public works director. They also had a lobbying firm review their application and gather letters of support from senators.
“We don’t have the resources in terms of traffic engineering. It’s kind of a specialty field,” Willrett said, noting the city has just a handful of planning staff. He said the consulting firm they used is “very familiar with our town,” since they’ve worked together on traffic safety issues for almost two decades.
Through three years of the Safe Streets program, Oregon communities have won over $43 million, but three-quarters of that money has landed in and around Portland, the state’s largest city. This newly announced multimillion-dollar grant to Klamath Falls easily triples what had previously been the state’s largest Safe Streets grant to a rural town.
The data show a rosier situation for this year’s rural grant applicants.
So far this year, rural funding totals nearly $350 million – without counting the additional grants expected to be announced in November. That’s almost exactly how much rural places received in the last two years combined, with about $160 million awarded in 2022 and $190 million in 2023.
Most Safe Streets funding is concentrated in implementation grants, and this is where the transportation department has most dramatically shifted how it doles out awards.
According to a USA TODAY analysis of transportation department records, the agency calculated that $31 million of implementation grants to rural towns benefited underserved communities in the program’s first year.
This year, that soared to $211 million – an increase of nearly 600%. Meanwhile, implementation grants to underserved communities in urban places increased by a modest 13%.
The transportation department defines “rural” as places with fewer than 200,000 residents, so even Georgia’s fourth largest city, Macon, falls into the rural bucket.
On the outskirts of Macon, pedestrians have worn “desire” trails through the grass, marking the half-mile route they take to Walmart after sidewalks end on Gray Highway. They’re walking mere feet from six lanes of cars that “treat Gray Hwy like Formula 1,” according to a resident’s Facebook comment submitted as part of Macon’s grant application this year.
Fewer people own cars in this low-income neighborhood, according to Macon Traffic Safety Manager Weston Stroud, which makes the lack of sidewalks, crosswalks and streetlights even more dangerous. The pedestrian death rate here is several times higher than the national average.
Despite these statistics making Macon a strong contender for grants – internal records obtained through a records request show federal employees rated Macon’s first application in 2022 as “highly recommended” – the transportation department passed them over.
The federal agency advised local officials to get Macon residents more involved in the process, Stroud said, so they conducted open houses and surveys to learn what concerned neighbors the most.
Stroud thinks that public input helped push Macon over the edge to win $5.6 million this month, in its third attempt. He said his first instinct upon finding out the city won a Safe Streets grant was to go back to the residents to get them involved in the next steps.
“A lot of times in historically disadvantaged communities, they feel like something’s happening to them instead of with them,” Stroud said. “The community wants to feel like they’re as much in charge of this as us (city employees).”
Local leaders hired Stroud as Macon’s first traffic safety manager at the start of the year, and they’ve budgeted over $1 million for pedestrian safety over the past few years, Stroud said. He believes these efforts proved how serious they are about traffic safety, making Macon’s application more competitive this year.
“They’re able to see that, you know, we’ve been making consistent effort,” Stroud said. “They can see that we’re investing in this issue. And so, you know, it was time for the feds to do the same with us.”