WASHINGTON (LOOTPRESS) – Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced that the Biden-Harris Administration has awarded a $13,480,000 grant in Mercer County, West Virginia from the Rural Surface Transportation Grant Program (Rural) for the Bluefield: Restoring Railroad Roots with an Intermodal Facility project. This is one of 18 projects receiving a total of $645.3 million to help communities around the United States complete transportation projects that will increase mobility, improve safety, and generate regional economic growth in rural areas.
Rural roads face a disproportionally high rate of fatalities, and a significant proportion of rural roads and bridges are in poor condition. Today’s awards will improve the safety and reliability of movement of people and freight, as well as improve quality of life for rural residents, through investment in critical roads, bridges, and other transportation systems.
The Rural Program represents a keystone of the Administration’s commitment to repairing and improving rural transportation systems. President Biden’s infrastructure law made more than $44 billion available to help rural communities repair and improve their roads, bridges, airports, ports, and transit systems.
“Rural communities face some of the toughest transportation challenges, yet are often left out of major federal investments, a pattern that we are changing that under President Biden’s leadership,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “The grants we’re announcing today will make transportation in rural communities better, safer, and more reliable.”
The Bluefield Restoring Railroad project will construct an overpass bridge and make road improvements on the approach to an intermodal facility. This project will replace the underpass of the current 128-year-old Midway Tunnel that passes under eight Norfolk Southern railroad tracks and associated railyard with an overpass. This project will facilitate development of an intermodal facility that accommodate trucks, and reconnect the disadvantaged Midway community located along Old Bramwell Road and the rest of Bluefield, which are separated by the railroad.
More information and a full list of this year’s Rural grant recipients can be found HERE.
This is the second year for the Rural Program, which thanks to President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invests a total of approximately $2 billion through 2026 for projects that improve highways, bridges, and tunnels, address highway safety, increase access to agricultural, commercial, energy, or freight facilities, and bring flexible transit services to rural and Tribal areas. The Rural Program continues to be significantly oversubscribed, with more than $7.4 billion in requests from 174 applicants competing for the $645 million in available funding this round.
Applications were evaluated based on multiple criteria, including project readiness, cost-effectiveness, and whether the project supported critical goals like enhancing safety, increasing mobility and reliability, improving resiliency and restoring infrastructure to a state of good repair.
Applicants for the Rural Program also benefited from a streamlined application process that reduced the burden for applicants by allowing them to submit one application for three different grant programs: Rural, the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA), and the new National Infrastructure Project Assistance Program (Mega). For more information about the Rural Program and the combined Multimodal Project Discretionary Grant funding opportunity, click here. For additional resources for rural applicants, see the Rural EV Toolkit, Rural Grant Applicant Toolkit and the Rural Opportunities to Use Transportation for Economic Success (ROUTES) webpage.
USDOT expects to announce the recipients of this round of INFRA and Mega funding early next year.
