FRAME for Mobility
A surface
transportation act
for the
21st century.
We wrote the legislation — all of it, a from-scratch rewrite of the federal surface transportation law. Doing the writing taught us what it takes. Fix what we have first. This site carries the Act, the policy behind it, and what we learned writing it.
Why
Why we built it.
The mid-20th-century settlement — expand the highways, pay for them from the gas tax, and let the rest follow — has collapsed. The five figures below moved the wrong way together.
Scroll sideways for all five figures.
-
63 hours of annual traffic delay per commuter in 2024
Growth in annual traffic delays since 1990
Annual traffic delay per commuter grew from 28 hours in 1990 to 63 hours in 2024 (TTI) — nearly eight full workdays lost. Congestion now costs a record $269 billion a year in wasted time and fuel.
Source: Texas A&M Transportation Institute, 2025 Urban Mobility Report
-
minus 29 percent
Transit ridership’s fall from its 2014 peak of 10.8 billion trips
Transit ridership’s fall from its 2014 peak of 10.8 billion trips to 7.7 billion in 2024 (APTA) — even as transit service vehicle-miles increased 18% since 2000.
Source: American Public Transportation Association, 2024 Fact Book
-
plus 57 percent
The rise in pedestrian deaths since 2000
The rise in pedestrian deaths since 2000, from 4,763 in 2000 to about 7,500 in 2022 (GHSA), while the overall roadway death toll has plateaued.
Source: NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (2000 data); Governors Highway Safety Association, Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2022 Preliminary Data (2023)
-
140.2 billion dollars
The transit state-of-good-repair backlog
The transit state-of-good-repair backlog grew from $101.4 billion in 2018 to $140.2 billion in 2022, ten percent of the $1,338.4 billion replacement value of all transit assets.
Source: Federal Transit Administration and Volpe Center, Transit State of Good Repair National Backlog Analysis (January 2025). 2022 dollars.
-
275 billion dollars
In General Fund bailouts since the Highway Trust Fund was exhausted in 2008
In General Fund bailouts since the Highway Trust Fund was exhausted in 2008, ending its 52-year run as a self-sustaining program. Its main revenue source, the gas tax, has not been adjusted since 1993 and has lost over half its purchasing power since 2000.
Source: Congressional Budget Office (CBO), The Status of the Highway Trust Fund: 2023 Update (Oct 2023)
Graphics are drawn to scale from the figures shown, except the fuel gauge, which is symbolic.
A settlement failing on every measure cannot be patched. So we wrote a new law. The FRAME Act is written and ready. Its official draft is dated December 15, 2025.
The Architecture of Reform
The three block grants.
FRAME repeals the tangle of legacy programs and consolidates formula funding into three block grants — flexible money, under strict performance targets.
Section 203
State of Good Repair & Resiliency
Maintenance and rehabilitation of existing pavement, bridges, tunnels, and transit assets — declared the highest national priority, with resilience retrofits against extreme weather.
Section 207
National Commerce & Freight
The efficiency of the national supply chain: freight bottlenecks relieved, and surface connections to ports and intermodal facilities improved.
Section 211
Community Access & Mobility
Connecting people to jobs and services: public transportation operations, active transportation, and on-demand microtransit.
The variable federal cost-share
The old 80/20 split paid the same federal share for every kind of project. Under the Act, the share varies with the kind of work (Sec. 106).
90%
Maintenance premium. Federal share for projects that bring existing assets into a state of good repair.
Section 106
100%
Safety and innovation bonus. Full federal cost for proven safety countermeasures and qualified digital infrastructure.
Section 106
50%
Capacity penalty. Reduced federal share for new general-purpose lanes on the National Highway System.
Section 106
Strategic Infrastructure Investment Program
For the projects too large for formula funding — new high-capacity transit systems, nationally significant bridge replacements — funded on their merits.
Technology as infrastructure
Software, data systems, and digital twins are legally construed as infrastructure under the Act (Sec. 107). Agencies can fund them across every program.
Performance over Pavement
Funding follows the targets.
Federal transportation money still moves by historic formulas. Under the Act, it is paid against published performance targets. States set the targets and the Secretary approves them; the results are then published. Beat the target and the state draws a bonus. Miss on safety three years running, and it costs money. Nothing else carries a penalty: a state that misses its congestion or condition targets loses no money.
Pay for Performance
Every state sets data-driven targets for its own system — safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction, system reliability — coordinated with metropolitan planning organizations and transit providers, and approved by the Secretary.
The bonus pool
States that significantly exceed their targets draw from a performance bonus pool of five percent of total block grant funds.
The safety forfeiture
Fail to make significant progress on safety for three consecutive years, and one percent of formula funds is forfeited. It does not return to the Treasury: it is reinvested as competitive grants to local safety projects in that same state.
What gets published.
FRAME requires the numbers in public, in one standard form: each state’s results published as a report card, the carbon and VMT figures kept in a scorecard, and the underlying data held to a single national standard and published through one portal.
Infrastructure Health Report Card
Carbon & VMT Scorecard
National Transportation Data Standard
National Infrastructure Data Portal
Part V · The fiscal honesty
Say what the road costs.
For decades the country has avoided saying what roads and rails cost. The gas tax has not been raised since 1993. The Highway Trust Fund has been effectively dead since 2008, patched with general-fund bailouts. Part V prices the system honestly.
Section 702
Steel revenue for the Trust Fund
Revenue from tariffs and duties on imported steel and iron flows directly into the Highway Trust Fund. The Act sets no rate: the stream is whatever the duties produce, and it is not claimed to close the Trust Fund’s gap by itself.
Sections 704–705
Fair Share for Fair Roads
As the fleet electrifies, the link between using the road and buying fuel is severed. A transitional fee on battery electric vehicles bridges the gap — subject to an Equity Cap, so no EV owner pays more than the average gas-tax contribution of a comparable gasoline vehicle.
Sections 708–709
The American VMT Choice
A five-year nationwide pilot of a fee on vehicle miles traveled. Two choices: a privacy-first Simple Odometer System at a flat rate, or an opt-in Smart VMT System with variable rates. Congestion surcharge revenue returns to the metro area that generated it.
Section 710 · Privacy as a prerequisite
Pilot data is barred from law enforcement or surveillance use without a court-ordered warrant. Data minimization, encryption, and anonymization are mandated.
Section 711 · The destination
The pilot ends in a report to Congress with a legislative framework for conversion: from a tax on consumption to a fee for access.
Part IV · The innovation frontier
Changing how agencies work.
Part IV is about whether agencies can change how they work. A state that has the capacity takes over federal environmental review; paratransit runs on demand instead of by day-ahead booking; and the roads themselves are built so that connected vehicles can read them. FRAME writes those changes into law.
Sections 501–502
The years lost to review
Years are lost to bureaucratic inertia and repetitive reviews. The Environmental Review Assignment Program becomes permanent, so states with the capacity can assume federal review responsibilities — cutting timelines by years in some cases. Capacity-Building Grants help every state DOT hire the experts to carry that responsibility. The environmental standards themselves stay exactly as they are; only the reviewer changes.
Sections 601–604
Paratransit, modernized
For riders with disabilities, the status quo means day-ahead booking and long, unpredictable waits. The Paratransit Modernization Pilot offers waivers to agencies that commit to a quantifiably superior service under a binding performance contract: shorter waits, on-demand dispatching, wider service areas, higher reliability.
Section 607
AV-ready infrastructure
Vehicles are becoming connected and autonomous; the infrastructure is still dumb. AV-Ready standards require machine-readable pavement markings, digitally readable traffic control devices, and digital twins of the highway system.
Section 608
Vehicles that talk
A national Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) deployment strategy puts roadside units on the network so cars can see around blind corners and talk to traffic signals. NHTSA estimates that V2X could help address up to 80% of crash scenarios involving unimpaired drivers (NHTSA).
Part VI · A legacy of mobility
Keeping the existing system.
Our greatest assets are the ones we have already built. FRAME puts them first: state of good repair as the highest national priority, safety managed under the Safe System Approach, and the funding gap priced in the open.
That record is visible from any interstate: bridges past their design life, and a death toll that has stopped falling. The FRAME Act sets the whole law against it, written out in full.
A project supported by
The Institute for Civic Service