Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO: (1) provided a final evaluation of the Federal Highway Administration's (FHwA) Combined Road Plan (CRP) Demonstration Program; and (2) reviewed the administration's reauthorization proposal for the Federal-Aid Highway Program.
GAO found that: (1) all five states participating in the CRP demonstration considered the ability to use pooled funds toward their urban and rural highways and bridges and the assumption of additional responsibility for managing federal-aid highway projects as beneficial; (2) two states used the funding flexibility to redirect pooled funds for use on their urban and secondary highway systems, and the remaining three states elected to spend their funds on the programs to which the funds were originally directed; (3) the delegation of administrative responsibilities to all five states resulted in time and paperwork savings; (4) the delegation of responsibility to states did not compromise safety; (5) the FHwA fiscal year (FY) 1990 mapping exercise designating a 150,000-mile national highway system disclosed that many of the 50 states found the system's size too limited, and inappropriate given that specific criteria for defining the system had not yet been established; (6) proposed highway authorizations for the federal-aid program allocated two-thirds of highway funding, $43.5 billion, to the National Highway Program (NHP) and the remaining one-third, $22.2 billion, to the Urban/Rural Program; and (7) during FY 1987 and FY 1990, 35 states spent a higher percentage of highway funds on major roads than the percentage these states would receive under the administration's proposal for NHP in FY 1992 to FY 1996.
