How the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program Supports Transportation Equity

The Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program introduced by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) puts a long overdue spotlight on transportation equity — by addressing the negative impact of existing infrastructure.

As transportation experts, we like to think that new infrastructure improves lives. But as history has all too often shown, without a holistic understanding of transportation infrastructure’s impact, projects can sometimes do more harm than good — especially when they reinforce or create social inequities.

That’s why the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) specifically established the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which sets aside up to $1 billion in grant funding over 5 years for transportation projects aimed at redressing the impact of prior infrastructure decisions that left populations segregated and disconnected from local resources.

To ensure that Reconnecting Communities Pilot (RCP) grant funding goes to projects that align with this goal, grant administrators will be looking for evidence that proposed projects will close connectivity gaps and positively impact disadvantaged communities. That means grant applicants will need to pair comprehensive multimodal transportation Metrics on how people travel with demographic insights in order to quantify the impact of their projects on disconnected communities.

Planning and Capital Construction grant proposals for the 2022 fiscal year are due by October 13th but it’s not too late to put together a compelling application.

Our Guide to Building a Data-Driven Reconnecting Communities Pilot Application shows how demographics tied to multimodal insights can uplevel grant proposals and examples in Miami and Baltimore of how StreetLight’s Metrics can help quantify connectivity gaps for Planning and Capital Construction grants.