WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation has received 585 applications seeking $9.3 billion of Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants – almost 19 times more than the $500 that is to be awarded later this year.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced the applications on Tuesday in this eighth year of the TIGER program, which was first authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He said that 337 of the applications came from urban areas and 248 from rural ones.
"Communities across the country know that if we want a strong, multimodal transportation system that will meet our needs in the future, we need to make meaningful investments today," Foxx said in a release. "As we have seen year after year, there are far more worthy projects than we can fund through TIGER, demonstrating the need for a serious, long-term investment in transportation funding."
TIGER grants are used to fund road, transit and other surface transportation projects that generate economic development and improve access to reliable, safe and affordable transportation for urban and rural communities. They are awarded on a competitive basis for projects that will have a significant impact on the nation, a metropolitan area, or a region.
The grant program is especially interested in innovative projects, including those that are multi-modal and multi-jurisdictional. The federal grants leverage money from state and local governments, private partners, metropolitan planning organizations, ports and transit agencies.
Last year, the program enabled communities to leverage $500 million in federal investment to support $1.4 billion in overall transportation investments, according to the DOT.
Since 2009, the TIGER program has provided nearly $4.6 billion to 381 projects in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. About 134 of those projects were to support rural and tribal communities.
