Report: Cities losing out on stimulus money for roads

A New York Times analysis found that the largest U.S. metro areas aren’t getting their share of federal stimulus money for transportation projects. The newspaper notes that the 100 largest U.S. cities are getting less than half the money from the biggest pool of stimulus money set aside for road projects. States ended up with the discretion to determine how to spend the transportation money, and there’s a long history of highway spending being doled out in rural areas instead of cities. Economists say any effort to jumpstart the U.S. economy should be targeted in big cities. “If we’re trying to recover the nation’s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,” says Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. Read the story here.