New rail transit construction hasn’t kept pace with the population growth of U.S. cities, an Urban Institute report found. On a per-capita basis, the nation has over 7% fewer miles of metro rail lines than in 1990.
Despite the historic $108 billion in federal funding available from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, public-sector spending on non-highway projects has remained flat since 2021, according to the report. The future doesn’t look much better: Since President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the Federal Transit Administration hasn’t signed a single agreement for a new rail or bus transit project anywhere in the nation, the report states.
“If there's a delay in getting things going now, that delay is going to cascade into the future, and it will mean fewer projects opening in the future,” said Yonah Freemark, principal research associate in the UI Housing and Communities Division and author of the report.
Starting in the 1950s and lasting into the 1970s, urban rail transit systems were proposed, built and put into operation in metro areas including the San Francisco Bay Area, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., but things changed after that.
“In the late 1970s and going into the 1980s, the federal government encouraged cities not to build subway lines and essentially stopped planning systems on a system-wide basis,” Freemark said. “Since then, everything's been a sort-of one-by-one line basis. There has not been a systematic effort to create new metro systems.”
Freemark added that, over time, federal programs have shifted away from heavy rail — such as subways — toward light rail and now toward bus rapid transit. There’s a cost factor involved: Heavy rail costs the most, followed by light rail, according to the Eno Center for Transportation. Bus rapid transit is generally the least expensive option.
But costs for all modes have increased in recent years, Freemark said, “making it such that even cities that did raise new revenues are not able to build as much as they thought.” He said better bus transportation has its place, but is “never going to provide the substantial improvement in speed that we can see from rail lines if they’re done right.”
The absence of public transportation options forces more people to drive, according to the UI report. “U.S. cities will continue to be extremely dominated by cars,” Freemark said.
IIJA funding expires Sept. 30, and Congress has begun work on the next multiyear surface transportation legislation. Cities want to improve their public transit, said Freemark, but “there just isn't a sort-of concerted lobbying effort to do that.”
The upshot is that delays and cutbacks in federal funding, reduced state and local investment in rail transit and rising construction costs will add to “the problems we have in the U.S. with infrastructure projects getting completed on time and on budget,” Freemark said.
