H.R. 3449: Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act

H.R. 3449 would create a new grant program at the Department of Transportation with one purpose: paying the bills that come with actually operating a transit system. Drivers, dispatchers, fuel, the hours a vehicle spends in service. Federal dollars would go toward how long a bus is on the road, not just toward the bus.

The authorization is $20 billion a year for fiscal years 2025 through 2028, or $80 billion in total. Each urbanized area, state, and Tribe would start with an amount equal to half its average annual operating costs over the previous three years, and whatever is left over would be split in proportion to operating costs reported nationally. No recipient could draw more than 80 percent of its own three-year average out of the program in any one year.

The list of what the money can buy reads like a list of rider complaints. Shorter waits between vehicles. New or expanded service areas, hours, or days. Reliability and travel-time improvements, including giving transit priority on the road. Real-time arrival information. Fare coordination and payment that works across systems. Signage that tells you where to go. Service planning aimed at reaching jobs, health care, child care, education, food, and banking. Extra cleaning. Hiring and training the workers needed to keep service running.

A preponderance of every grant would have to go to projects benefiting underserved communities or areas of persistent poverty. Persistent poverty means a county that has stayed at or above a 20 percent poverty rate across the most recent 30-year period, or a census tract at 20 percent in the 2014 through 2018 Census survey data. Underserved is broader — six separate definitions covering median income at or below 80 percent of the area median, census tracts with a minority population of at least 30 percent, families in disaster-affected areas, and communities the Secretary finds have low access to jobs and essential services. What "preponderance" means in practice is left to the Department, which would have a year after enactment to write that rule.

The strings attached are mostly about not backsliding. Each year an agency would have to certify what it spends on transit operations from every source other than this program. An agency that lets its own transit spending slip loses a third of the next year's federal grant. The money is meant to add service, not to swap out a local budget line. Agencies would also have to survey both riders and non-riders in the target communities at least every two years and publish the results online, report service frequency and job access to the national transit database, and, in the case of states, file an annual list of rural communities that have no reported transit service at all or sit in the bottom fifth of the country for rural transit availability.

Two pieces sit outside the main program. Tribal recipients would owe no local match at all — the federal share for them is the full 100 percent. And a separate provision raises the federal share for rural operating assistance to 80 percent of net operating costs. The bill also records a sense of Congress that transit capital funding should increase, positioning operating money as something that sits alongside construction dollars rather than replacing them.