Report: California Continues To Spend a Lot of Money on Poor Quality Roads

Despite the enactment of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021, which included $350 billion for federal highway programs, America’s highway quality and spending in recent years haven’t seen major changes.

There’s been a small uptick in spending, a small uptick in highway quality, and a small decrease in congestion. But a revolution on America’s roads this is not.

“Things are pretty much steady,” says Baruch Feigenbaum, the senior managing director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website) and lead author of its latest annual highway report.

The 2025 report ranks state highway systems across a range of metrics, including capital and maintenance spending, rural and urban pavement quality, traffic congestion, bridge quality, and safety.

Similar to reports in recent years, North Carolina and Virginia continue to be top performers, respectively ranking first and fourth on this year’s report. (Virginia was ranked first on last year’s report.)

Both states scored high on pavement quality and relatively low highway spending. Feigenbaum chalks this up to these states using quantitative metrics to select highway projects and having dedicated maintenance units within their departments of transportation.

States like California that rely less on more politicized processes to select projects tend to rank much lower on the report. Despite being one of the highest spending states, it has some of the worst pavement quality, worst traffic congestion, and an uninspiring safety record.

“You can spend above average if everything else in your system is good and still get an excellent ranking,” says Feigenbaum, pointing to Utah (which scored eighth on the report) as an example. The state’s spending is on the high side, but it also ranks highly on pavement quality, safety, and congestion.

States like California and New Jersey both spend a lot of money for no apparent improvement in performance.

Feigenbaum gives a couple of reasons why the infrastructure law passed during the Biden administration has failed to make a noticeable impact on the country’s highways.

The past administration had been relatively slow at spending highway dollars and the data from the 2025 highway report are from 2022. The infrastructure bill was also primarily nonhighway spending.

And as The Economist noted back in 2023, the Biden administration’s profligacy was self-defeating. While the amount of appropriated infrastructure dollars increased a lot, so did inflation (itself largely a result of pandemic-era government spending). The net result was a real decline in infrastructure spending.

Early on in the pandemic, there were fears that a post-COVID return to the office mixed with a collapse in people taking public transit would result in spiking urban congestion.

The Reason report finds that that hasn’t been the case generally.

Transit ridership is down 30 percent from pre-pandemic levels, according to the latest federal report on ridership trends.

But this year’s Reason highway report also shows congestion falling generally, driven by a larger decrease in morning traffic congestion and mitigated slightly by increases in daytime traffic and evening congestion.

The report’s congestion data is from 2022, but more recent measures of national traffic patterns also show a general decline in congestion. The August 2024 report from the Federal Highway Administration on urban congestion trends (which relies on data from 2023) shows congestion falling that year as well—although it has increased in some individual metro areas.

Feigenbaum says this reflects the post-pandemic rise of more remote work and more flexible office hours.

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/03/13/report-california-continues-to-spend-a-lot-of-money-on-poor-quality-roads/