As Politico observed last month, House Democrats sought to include several anti-highway provisions in an infrastructure bill, including a “fix-it-first” requirement that would prevent states from adding new highway capacity if some of the roads in the state were in poor condition. Transit and Amtrak infrastructure is in worse condition than highways and bridges, but the House bill contained no similar provision for them.

The good news is that the Senate infrastructure bill does not contain a similar fix-it-first rule. But it does include several other anti-highway rules that could limit American mobility.

The infrastructure bill that the Senate may vote on later this week is really two different bills. One extends current funding of highways and transit out of the Highway Trust Fund. The other creates new funding for highways, transit, Amtrak, broadband, drinking water, and a variety of other programs.

Historically, the Highway Trust Fund has come entirely out of user fees, including taxes on fuel, tires, and trucks. But, starting in about 2008, Congress began spending more out of the trust fund than was flowing into it. As a result, all discipline that would limit spending to the most important projects and programs has disappeared, which is why even many Republicans in Congress feel comfortable with hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit spending on largely unnecessary programs.

If deficit spending brings with it the threat of inflation, other problems with the bill threaten the economic dynamism Americans count on to eventually repay the national debt. One of the biggest ones is a “carbon reduction program” that directs states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) “to reduce traffic congestion by facilitating the use of alternatives to single-occupant vehicle trips, including public transportation facilities, pedestrian facilities, bicycle facilities, and shared or pooled vehicle trips within the State or an area served by the applicable metropolitan planning organization.”

Congestion wastes fuel so reducing congestion is a good thing. But we have 50 years of experience proving that promoting carpooling, transit, and bicycle and pedestrian facilities doesn’t reduce congestion. If anything, it increases it because one of the most popular ways of promoting transit is to increase congestion. The bill would prevent states from using carbon-reduction funds for new road capacity, which could relieve congestion.

A second anti-mobility provisions is the so-called highway safety improvement program. It would be more accurately titled the highway congestion-increasing program as it provides billions of dollars in funding for projects aimed at slowing traffic and increasing congestion. This includes money for “medians, pedestrian crossing islands, protected bike lanes, and protected intersection features” and other projects “to calm traffic and reduce vehicle speeds” or otherwise “slow or stop a motor vehicle.” Beyond the irony that one federal program seeks to reduce congestion while another seeks to increase it, the reality is that reducing speeds is the wrong tool to use to make roads safer.

A third anti-mobility program is the “reconnecting communities” fund that would be dedicated to “removing, retrofitting, or mitigating” any road “that creates a barrier to community connectivity.” The good news is that funding for this program has been reduced from Biden’s proposed $20 billion to just $1 billion, but it still sets a dangerous precedent that puts some vague definition of “community” above the clear benefits of mobility. Ironically, most of this money is likely to be spent in poor neighborhoods that are most in need of improved mobility.

The mobility that these provisions seek to curtail is economically vital to the cities and America in general. Studies have shown a strong correlation between the average speed of travel in cities and worker productivity: faster speeds give employers a greater pool of workers to choose from and help people find the best jobs for their skills. Slowing speeds will reduce the nation’s economic productivity, which we will need to pay back the money borrowed to pay for these programs.

Beyond this is a huge disparity of funding. In 2019, Americans traveled almost 100 times as many passenger miles on highways and streets as they did on public transit, yet highways get only about three times as much funding as transit (and some of that funding is for anti-highway programs). Americans also traveled more than 800 times as many passenger miles on highways as on Amtrak in 2019, yet highways get only about five times as much funding as Amtrak. These amounts are even more absurd considering that Amtrak and transit ridership is likely to be much lower after the pandemic than it was in 2019.

This bill sends a clear message to Amtrak and the nation’s transit agencies: they don’t have to actually carry riders to be funded by Congress. All they have to do is make grandiose claims about how important they are. In reality, transit hurts the poor more than it helps them and, in all but a few cities, emits far more greenhouse gases than it saves. Amtrak, meanwhile, spends four times as much money moving someone a passenger mile as the airlines and saves very little energy in doing so.

Although the disparities in funding between highways, transit, and Amtrak are large, they are not as bad as those that were in the original White House proposal, and Republican senators should be lauded for reducing those disparities. But members of Congress who care about mobility should work to eliminate the anti-highway, anti-mobility provisions including the so-called carbon-reduction, safety, and reconnecting communities programs.