“This new $8.5 million grant program will improve mobility in underserved communities, including rural areas,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao.
The HOPE program will provide funding for planning, engineering and technical studies and financial plans that will result in improved public transportation, new transit routes and facilities, and innovative technologies in communities experiencing persistent poverty. It will also support coordinated human service transportation planning to improve transit service or provide new services such as rides to opioid abuse recovery and treatment.
“The HOPE Program is designed to help communities succeed,” said FTA Acting Administrator K. Jane Williams. “We want to ensure that transportation connects people to jobs, school and healthcare and is not a barrier for people seeking substance abuse treatment and recovery services.”
Eligible applicants must come from counties with more than 20 percent of the population living in poverty for 30 years or more, as measured by the U.S. Census, or the 2013-2017 American Community Survey. Many of the communities are in rural areas, which experience unique challenges in providing public transportation, ensuring safety and keeping transit assets in a state of good repair. Applicants are encouraged to partner with nonprofit organizations engaged in public transportation and anti-poverty issues.
The NOFO encourages applicants to demonstrate how their proposed projects are consistent with the Department’s Rural Opportunities to Use Transportation for Economic Success (R.O.U.T.E.S.) initiative, which seeks to address disparities in rural transportation infrastructure, and FTA’s Accelerating Innovative Mobility (AIM) program, which promotes innovative approaches to improve financing, system design and service.
Projects will be evaluated by criteria outlined in the NOFO. Applications will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on May 4, 2020.
More information is available online.
— From a U.S. Department of Transportation news release. March 3, 2020.
WILLIAM – This is the kind of micromanagement federal program that never works. Huge administrative costs to accomplish nothing while elected officials lobby for the share of the pie. The responsibility of the government isn’t to dole out cash in hundreds of useless programs. The purpose of the government is to increase the overall prosperity of the nation. Then the states, the counties and the cities will see an increase in tax collection so that they can take care of their own.
Some of us knew half a century ago that the federal government sprinkling along salt-shakers full of cash (to use your analogy) accomplished nothing except the employment of otherwise unemployable bureaucrats.
For those of you playing along at home, this is a laughably microscopic boost to transit of any kind. While prying any amount of money loose for real transit is great, that $8.5 million amounts to a whole 0.009% of the amount spent on U.S. roads every year. About the same change for transit as the change in salinity of throwing a tablespoon of salt into an olympic-sized swimming pool.