I am not asking to have it both ways and nothing I said implied I was.
On the other hand, there is no such as “federal” dollars and EVERY federal fuel tax dollar that federal agencies have was dragged, by taxation, from every local village, town, city, county state and region, so other than some equitable apportion of it, why should it have any other federal strings to it. It shouldn’t. Either get rid of the unnecessary strings (as well as the non-transportation expenditures from the federal “transportation ‘trust fund’ “), or qet rid of the federal fuel taxes completely and leave the money in the states.
It is only state corruption and lack of state spending priorities that creates the fiction that federal transportation funds are a “gift” from the federal government. Every dime came from legalized theft FROM THE STATES & the sole purpose of it IS federal meddling.
You can cut the Federal government completely out of the loop by eliminating the whole concept of a national transportation system. Good luck with that. There's actually a move among some members of Congress to legislate a "devolution" process that would do exactly that. The most vocal opponents of this process are Republican senators from landlocked states that would be absolutely screwed in this process.
The first national road was legislated by Congress in the very early 1800s during the Jefferson administration. There was quite a debate about the roles of the Federal and state governments in roads back then, and the Federal government won out simply because the establishment of a National Road from Baltimore to the Ohio River valley was one of the conditions under which Ohio was admitted to the Union. Even an anti-Federalist like Thomas Jefferson recognized that without road connections between the interior of North America to the cities and ports in the U.S. along the Atlantic seaboard, there was a serious danger that most of the continent would end up under the control of Great Britain.