What's happened in recent decades is that the process for earmarking Federal funds for local projects has eliminated under a Congressional mandate. In its place, the Federal government has adopted a system of allocating Federal money for projects based on various measures of needs, priorities, etc. So the new game in town is to find state and local projects that could easily be financed through traditional funding measures, and look for ways to turn them into projects of "national importance" in order to get a large Federal match for them.
One issue is that what constitutes "national importance" changes over time. Highway safety is a big issue now, so any project that can be considered a safety improvement gets pushed up a project priority list. The same goes for something like "sustainability" and "resiliency," whatever the hell those are supposed to mean.
The basic problem here is that transportation is one of those areas of government where it's not practical to come up with a funding mechanism where the users pay directly for their use of the system. Tolls and transit fares are the closest you can get, and there are challenges and shortcomings with both of them.
“Resiliency”???
Does that mean a new meaningless buzzword is going to replace the meaningless “Sustainability”? Has “Sustainability hit its apogee and is finally going to crash back into Earth? One can only hope.
OT — I took my daughter out to dinner a few weeks back and our waitress (excuse me, “wait person”) was blathering on and on about how all the menu items were sustainable. I casually observed that the human race has managed to sustain itself before “sustainability” became all the rage. I pointed out that we’ve sustained ourselves pretty well before anybody taught us how to do so.
Boy, did she get all hot, huffy and indignant! She erupted with a “This means a lot to me. I studied it extensively at school.” It was all I could do to keep from busting a gut laughing at this clueless young dolt — but I kept my composure so my daughter wouldn’t think I’m the old curmudgeon that I really am.
Needless to say, her tip was minuscule. And my daughter probably thinks I’m a curmudgeon anyway.