RAISE grant announcement

USA: The Department of Transportation has announced the award of $2·2bn of grants for 166 projects to modernise transport infrastructure under the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability & Equity programme.

RAISE grant Florida

The grants include $25m for the Florida East Coast Corridor Trespassing & Intrusion Mitigation Project

Project proposals were evaluated on criteria including safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, economic competitiveness and opportunity, partnership and collaboration, innovation, state of good repair, and mobility and community connectivity.

Rail projects in the funding package announced on August 11 include:

  • $25m for the 22nd Street Revitalization Project in Tucson, Arizona, replacing a bridge over Union Pacific to remove a road bottleneck and provide more vertical clearance for the railway;
  • $25m to cover more than half the cost of designing the Madera – Merced extension of the California high speed rail project;
  • $20·5m for the New Carrollton Multi-Modal Transportation Station Project in Maryland, which includes a new building and works to improve access;
  • $15m for the Inglewood Transit Connector, a planned 2·6 km three-station elevated automated peoplemover linking event and entertainment facilities with Los Angeles MTA’s Crenshaw/LAX light rail line;
  • $20m to build Baton Rouge and Gonzales stations for the planned Baton Rouge – New Orleans passenger service;
  • $6m for construction of multi-modal access improvements at Baltimore Penn station;
  • $1·3m for the Northern Michigan Rail Planning Phase II Study & Service Development Plan, looking at new train services through 15 counties between southeast and northern lower Michigan;
  • $25m for the Florida East Coast Corridor Trespassing & Intrusion Mitigation Project to design and install safety measures at targeted locations along the 300 km corridor shared by Florida East Coast Railway freight and Brightline passenger services;
  • funding for various grade separation projects.

‘We are proud to support so many outstanding infrastructure projects in communities large and small, modernising America’s transportation systems to make them safer, more affordable, more accessible, and more sustainable’, said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. ‘Using funds from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, this year we are supporting more projects than ever before.’

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