This week, the Federal Transit Administration apportioned $9.9 billion in federal grant funding to local transit agencies and state governments to fulfill the bulk of the fiscal year 2020 funding promised by the FAST Act of 2015.

The full-year apportionment tables (downloadable Excel spreadsheets for each formula program showing every grant to every agency and government) are here. The overall apportioned funding, by program, breaks down like so:

Most of the money apportioned this week comes from the Highway Trust Fund in the form of contract authority, but $40 million of the urbanized area formula grant money, $40 million of the rural formula grant money, and $167 million of the bus and bus facilities formula money came from the general fund of the Treasury, apportioned by the FY 2020 DOT Appropriations Act “on top” of the Trust Fund moneys.

The FY 2020 budget process also provided another $2.9 billion in competitive transit grants that local transit agencies and other partners must apply for. Those are:

(Feb. 7 addendum: FTA sent out the funding notices soliciting applications for the $454.6 million in bus grants and for the $30 million in ferry grants on January 30. Applications for both are due March 30.)

The apportioned funds are given out via a variety of formulas. The urbanized area (UZA) grant program is by far the largest – its formula is complicated, but about 91 percent of the total is reserved for UZAs over 200,000 in population, and then of that 91 percent, two-thirds is allocated based on an amalgam of population, population density, and bus vehicle-miles, while the other third is based on fixed guideway (rail and BRT) vehicle revenue-miles and route-miles. Grant money can go towards capital costs of rail, bus, or van transit, or (for some smaller agencies) operating costs.

The 15 largest UZAs in the country got about 53 percent of the total UZA grant money in 2020, because they have the population and (in most cases) the transit systems and ridership. We used 2018 Census and National Transit Database data to rank the 15 largest urbanized areas by population and then correlated with total number of mass transit unlinked passenger trips in that UZA in 2018. This data was then compared with the total UZA formula program apportionments to each area so we could see how much the federal government is paying through this program per capita, and per trip.

The next-biggest grant program is the state of good repair program. This is descended from a former program called “fixed guideway modernization” (or “railmod” to insiders) which was just what it sounded like – modernizing existing subway and light rail systems. Now, bus rapid transit and a few “high intensity bus” routes that give buses priority in HOV lanes are eligible as well.

But, in any case, you have to have existing fixed guideway mass transit infrastructure in order to modernize said infrastructure, so this program is even more concentrated in the top 15 UZAs – they got 73 percent of the total spending.  And large urban areas that have a lot of bus transit but minimal rail transit miss out on this program. (We did not collate by trip because the NTD data we had did not distinguish between rail trips, bus trips, and mixed bus-rail trips.)

Focusing on the largest urbanized areas means that we are leaving the third-largest formula grant program, the rural area grants, out of this analysis. But the fourth-biggest grant program is the bus and bus facilities formula program, and its formula is not nearly as biased towards the largest metro areas – the 15 largest UZAs only got 32 percent of the FY20 formula grants (and they had 33 percent of the 2018 population, so the per capita distribution is almost identical across the board).

Just for fun, we then re-ranked the top 15 UZAs in descending order of their 2018 per capita transit trips. The bottom 5 are interesting, for different reasons. Phoenix, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth are all Sun Belt areas where most building and expansion was fairly recent, and they have only just begun to embrace rail transit (some have better bus ridership than others). Detroit’s transit missteps over the last 50 years are legendary (Gerald Ford tried his hardest to give them a rail transit system, but it never got built). And the Riverside-San Bernadino-Ontario metro area is so much larger than the others (about 27,300 square miles of land area for 4.6 million people, whereas San Francisco-Oakland crams 4.7 million people into just 2,500 square miles of MSA) that it’s hard to compare their transit numbers to other metro areas.