Public Transportation and Road Repair Investments Create More Jobs/$ than New Road Construction
March 24th, 2011 by Important Media Cross-Post
In 2009, the U.S. government launched an economic stimulus and allocated $26.6 billion in infrastructure funds to state budgets with the goal of creating jobs. In February 2011, Smart Growth America (SGA) released a report analyzing the effects of the program after two years. They found that states who used the funds to repair roads and bridges and invested in public transportation projects created the most jobs. States who primarily used the funds to build new roads fell to the bottom of the rankings for job creation.
The funds were divided the following way:
- $15.7 billion on repairing and maintaining roads and bridges
- $8.9 billion on building new roads and bridges
- $1 billion on bike projects
- $462.8 million on public transportation projects
The projects that received the least amount of money (public transportation projects) were the frontrunning job creators. Historically they created 31 percent more jobs per dollar than building new roads, but during the last two years, the stimulus dollars spent on public transportation project generated 70 percent more jobs than road creation.
Photo via karmablue
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Important Media Cross-Post -- CleanTechnica is one of 18 blogs in the Important Media blog network. With a bit of overlap in coverage, we sometimes repost some of the great content published by our sister sites.
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