USDOT adds members to Regional Infrastructure Accelerator program

The U.S Department of Transportation this week announced five new recipients of funding under the Regional Infrastructure Accelerators (RIA) program, bringing the total number of grant recipients to 10 regions. 

The RIA program is designed to accelerate project delivery through project planning, studies and analysis and preliminary engineering and design work.

The selected RIAs that include rail are:

• Resilient State Route 37 Program in California, which will receive $1.5 million. The Metropolitan Planning Commission will lead an effort to address congestion, flood protection, sea-level rising issues and connections to transit and rail options along the 20-mile SR37. The route traverses a rural area that is vital to rural and disadvantaged communities in Sonoma and Napa counties;

• Suffolk County, New York, Midway Crossing project, which will receive $1 million in funding. The project calls for construction of a multimodal transportation hub — including connections between air and rail service — in a mixed-use commercial development space. This will include a biotech/life science office complex, 300-room hotel and 300,000 square-foot convention center; and

• Panhandle Regional Planning Commission in Texas, which will receive $454,842 in funding. The commission proposes to establish an RIA to identify project-specific outcomes and delivery methods. This includes a rail revitalization project and road modernization project directly linked to economic and social growth opportunities in more than 40 rural Texas panhandle counties.

"The new awards expand our geographic reach and increase the diversity of projects in the pipeline," said USDOT Build America Bureau Executive Director Morteza Farajian in a press release. "We look forward to building on this program even more later this year with another round of available funding."

The RIA program was created in the federal Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act and funded through the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020.