News Release

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 – “President Obama was right to call for bold new investments in our outdated transportation infrastructure. Fixing our roads and building new railways won’t just put thousands of unemployed construction workers back to work now; it will allow America to meet the demands of a competitive 21st century economy.

“The president rightly highlighted the need to fix our decaying roads. Road and bridge repair projects should come before expensive new highway projects. Fixing what we already have creates 16 percent more jobs per dollar spent than building new capacity, while making our roads safer and saving money down the line.

“To get the most bang for our buck, infrastructure investments must prioritize transit and rail, which create 31 percent more jobs per dollar spent than building highways, while lessening our costly dependence on oil and taking cars off our overcrowded roads.

“Congress should act right now to answer the president’s call to put people to work fixing our roads and expanding our railways so that America can once again have world class infrastructure.”

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U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest advocacy organization.

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