While the 2024 presidential campaign focuses on hot-button issues like reproductive rights, the war in Gaza, immigration and democracy, transportation remains overlooked, as neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump have mentioned transportation in their policy platforms. Even if overlooked, transportation policies — including where and how infrastructures are built and how funding is distributed to pay for them — significantly impact our daily lives, shape the way we move and define our cities.
To underscore the important — albeit sometimes unseen — ways in which transportation shapes electoral issues, politicians and advocates should frame the discussion in terms that resonate with voters’ existing concerns. To build momentum for meaningful reforms in the 2026 federal transportation bill — which the next president will directly shape — politicians and advocates must show voters how transportation policy and funding directly impact their core concerns about the economy, climate and equity.
What Do Presidents Do for Transportation, Anyway?
Transportation may seem like a state and local issue, but federal funding and posture greatly shape outcomes in Minnesota and around the country.
One of the Biden/Harris administration’s biggest policies was the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, known as IIJA. The bill, among other things, provided around $643 billion in new federal funding for surface transportation infrastructure projects around the country. This included $432 billion for highways, $109 billion for transit and $102 billion for rail, significantly growing funding compared with what was allocated in the 2015 FAST Act, which IIJA replaced.
Minnesota, too, has seen its share of IIJA infrastructure projects. The Hennepin Avenue reconstruction in Minneapolis, a street project that ended in controversy after advocates and Mayor Jacob Frey abandoned 24/7 bus lanes, is one such example.
Program-to-program priorities remain relatively similar in the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) whether Democrats or Republicans control the White House. But the president can define the kind of projects that get funded and whether federal spending directs states to invest in multimodal transportation or cars.
The Urban Institute recently analyzed grants made to cities and states under the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) program (formally known as TIGER). These competitive grants could be awarded to any type of transportation project at the discretion of the president and his (or her) administration. The Urban Institute found that this led the Obama administration to prioritize transit projects, the Trump administration to prioritize highway expansions, and the Biden administration to prioritize more bike and pedestrian projects.
Given this trend, it is safe to assume that Trump would refocus federal transportation spending on highway expansion, especially considering that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for eliminating federal spending on transit, biking and walking in its transportation chapter. (Trump officially maintains no affiliation with the ultra-conservative 2025 plan, but it seems likely this platform would be integrated into his work.) In contrast, Harris would likely push for additional multi-modal transportation funding in the 2026 federal transportation bill, consistent with recent Democrat administrations.
This upcoming 2026 federal transportation bill deserves greater public attention, as it will shape not just how Americans move, but also impact jobs, housing costs, climate action and historical inequities in infrastructure development. By connecting candidates’ transportation policy to these everyday concerns, we can build support for meaningful reforms that expand mobility options for all communities and hold elected officials accountable for taking action.
On the Economy, Housing and Jobs
Many voters’ top issue remains the economy, and transportation policies have an outsized role in defining it. Transportation is the second largest household expenditure after housing. Transportation costs consumed 17% of household budgets in 2023 — rising 7.1% from 2022 — which surpassed expenses for more politically prominent issues like food (12.9%), insurance and pensions (12.4%), and education (2.1%).
More broadly, housing and transportation — the top two household spending categories — are inextricably linked. Truly affordable housing requires access to affordable transportation options. When residents must own vehicles and drive long distances to access cheaper housing, high transportation costs offset any housing savings. Investing in transit, bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and eliminating mandatory parking requirements can make communities more affordable in two ways: by reducing residents’ reliance on expensive car ownership and by making it cheaper to build new housing.
Reductions in car dependency also help reduce household costs and broader climate impacts. The cost of owning a car, the primary way many Americans get around, has ballooned in recent years. Fixed ownership costs including insurance, taxes, depreciation and financing as well as variable operations costs like maintenance and gas have made the annual cost of car ownership soar to over $12,000 per vehicle, per year. This, along with inflation and other increasing costs, is a pain point for voters.
Beyond households’ bottom line, transportation access directly impacts economic mobility, particularly for low-income, transit-dependent residents who can reach fewer jobs than car owners due to longer commute times. Better connecting voters to job opportunities through improved transit and active transportation infrastructure should be a key policy priority.
Transit investments and related policies that reduce the need to drive should be better articulated in national, state and local campaigns focused on economic issues, as they hold the potential to reduce household transportation expenses.
We need to better articulate the benefits of transit, bike and pedestrian projects and begin to build political will to support them.
On Climate and the Environment
Climate change and the environment remain a key issue, especially for young voters. The transportation sector is one of the largest emitters of climate-worsening carbon dioxide, accounting for over a third of the U.S.’s total emissions. Any meaningful climate change mitigation measures must center the transportation sector, further reflected in the U.S. National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization, an interagency roadmap for reducing the transportation sector’s impacts.
These policies must go beyond electrification and the cars we drive, which itself is not a silver bullet, to incentivize behavioral changes to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Policies also must create climate resilience as our infrastructures face the threat of climate change impacts like flooding and other extreme weather.
Despite transportation’s major role in driving climate change, both issues remain largely absent from campaign discussions, leaving critical policy gaps unaddressed.
Minnesota received billions in IIJA funding through the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), but much of this money is allocated to expanding car infrastructure, including highways and bridges. Rather than addressing climate concerns, these investments — such as highway expansions along I-94, the 252/I-94 project in Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center, and I-494 through Edina and Richfield — will increase pollution and environmental impacts.
But it’s not just emissions that we should be worried about. Transportation policies were one of the biggest forces that divided communities by building harmful infrastructures like highways, leading to persisting inequalities and environmental justice concerns. While current programs attempt to address this damage, the next president must prioritize more comprehensive solutions to repair these environmental and social impacts.
Back to the Basics
On the most fundamental level, transportation policies are the underpinning to something so fundamental for all people in this country: the way we move. This extends far beyond systems and infrastructures but to more broadly what these systems enable us to do or force us not to do.
Mobility is at the intersection of deeply personal and systematic processes. Indeed, transportation shapes the way we move through our cities, access jobs and education, see our family and friends, and reach daily necessities. On a systemic level, mobility and accessibility is shaped by the geography of where we live: city, suburb, small town, rural area. It’s shaped by our ability or disabilities. It’s shaped by our class, age and gender. The way we move is deeply meaningful.
Perhaps transportation policies don’t play more of a role in political discourse because they are perceived more as local, missing the link between federal policy and funding and making these perceivable public investments come to life. More local candidates seem to include transportation and infrastructure as policy positions, notably former legislator Ann Johnson Stewart, whose race in Minnesota Senate District 45 will shape control of the Minnesota State Senate and more broadly the DFL’s trifecta.
But I think it’s time policymakers underscore the importance of these policies on the everyday lives of Minnesotans and others across the country — shaping the jobs we have, the communities and cities we live in, the air we breathe, our safety and our wallets. Raising this awareness will allow constituents around the country to mobilize more around transportation issues and hold politicians, including whoever wins the presidential election, to be accountable for forward-thinking reforms.
Editor’s note: Streets.mn reminds our readers to vote on or before Tuesday, Nov. 5. Learn more about what’s on your ballot at the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office: mnvotes.gov or mnvotes.org.