is one of the reasons that there isn't even a subway industry in the US.  With boom and bust cycles of spending, depending on who gets a burst of money when, it's impossible for an American company to keep their assembly lines running.  An infrastructure bank would probably help, but that would need to happen within a larger plan to upgrade the entire national infrastructure, much of which also gets the shaft.

federal transportation dollars continue to be distributed to its grantees based on archaic funding and distributional formulas. There is no reward for reducing the demand for driving, nor overall spending. In fact at the same time Americans are seeking to drive less due to energy and climate concerns, federal formulas actually reward consumption and penalize conservation.

This sounds like the same problem as with the utility price structure, and how politically difficult it is to move away from the model setting return based on gross production and toward a negawatt efficiency pricing model.

I imagine the ideological and venal objections are the same in both cases, so a similar reform framing and plan of attack should be used.

Hmm, what could be a companion term for "negawatt"? No-dometer, retro-dometer (those are pretty stupid, but you get the point - something to convey less vehicle miles, less gasoline burning).

Puentes uses a bunch of words. I don't think he seems to want the general public to pay attention.  Couldn't he just say the Federal Government needs to pay for it, instead of all this "empower the states" and "optimize" the performance of it's partners gobbldygook?   It's just a payoff. Geeez.  When our 'company" in Chicago optimizes the performance of it's partners, we call that payday.