Status of the Nation's Highways, Bridges, and Transit: Conditions & Performance Report to Congress

NHTSA · 2021 · ROSA P / United States. Federal Highway Administration

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

Get this paper ↗ (full text — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)

Summary

This document is the 24th edition of the "Status of the Nation’s Highways, Bridges, and Transit: Conditions & Performance Report to Congress," published in 2021 by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration. The report fulfills statutory requirements under the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) and the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act by providing a comprehensive assessment of the nation’s transportation infrastructure. It addresses the condition, performance, and funding of highway, bridge, and transit systems, while analyzing travel behavior, safety, and mobility metrics. The report also projects future capital investment needs to maintain or improve system conditions, offering scenarios for policymakers to evaluate the economic and operational impacts of various funding levels. The analysis relies on extensive data collection and modeling frameworks. For highways and bridges, the report utilizes the Highway Economic Requirements System (HERS) and the National Bridge Investment Analysis System (NBIAS) to model pavement conditions, bridge states, and travel performance. Transit analysis employs the Transit Economic Requirements Model (TERM) to assess asset preservation and expansion needs. Data sources include the National Household Travel Survey for travel behavior, federal and state expenditure records for funding trends, and infrastructure inventories for condition assessments. The report examines three primary investment scenarios: sustaining recent spending levels, maintaining current conditions and performance, and improving conditions and performance. It also includes sensitivity analyses regarding traffic growth, discount rates, and asset replacement timing to account for uncertainty in long-term projections. Key findings indicate that the nation’s transportation infrastructure faces significant challenges in maintaining a state of good repair. The report details current pavement and bridge conditions, noting trends in deterioration and the impact of vehicle weight and age on infrastructure performance. Safety data reveals ongoing concerns regarding fatalities and injuries on both highways and transit systems, with specific focus on roadway departures, intersections, and vulnerable road users. Mobility metrics, including the Travel Time Index and Planning Time Index, highlight congestion patterns in metropolitan areas and reliability issues. Funding analysis shows that current expenditures are insufficient to meet the full capital investment requirements for preservation and expansion. The report identifies substantial investment backlogs for both highways and transit, demonstrating that sustaining recent spending levels leads to a decline in infrastructure conditions, whereas higher investment levels are necessary to improve performance and reduce user costs. The significance of this report lies in its role as a critical tool for transportation policy and budgeting. By quantifying the gap between current funding and required investment, it provides Congress and state agencies with evidence-based recommendations for prioritizing infrastructure spending. The findings underscore the economic benefits of investment, including reduced vehicle operating costs, improved travel times, and enhanced safety. The report also addresses emerging trends such as the impact of transformative technologies, freight network conditions, and rural transportation needs. Ultimately, it serves as a benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of federal transportation programs and guides strategic decisions aimed at ensuring the long-term sustainability and efficiency of the nation’s transportation network.

Key finding

The document serves as a comprehensive statistical report detailing the conditions, performance, funding, and investment scenarios for U.S. highways, bridges, and transit systems as of 2021.

Methodology

dataset

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via bulk_ingest_rosap on 2026-05-23 (7 acquisition events logged).

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.

• incidence prevalence