BTS Releases State-Level Transportation Public Finance Statistics data for the first time

BTS 85-25

Today, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) released the 2023 State-Level Transportation Public Finance Statistics (TPFS) in addition to the 2023 Aggregate State data. TPFS provides information on transportation-related revenue and expenditures for all levels of government, including Federal, state, and local, and for all modes of transportation.

With this release of the TPFS, BTS now also provides a new set of State-Level TPFS tabulations of transportation revenue and expenditures for the highways, transit, and air modes at the state and local level of Government. This is in addition to the nationally aggregated tabulations of the TPFS data, now referred to as the Aggregate State TPFS.

As seen in the chart below, expenditures when adjusted for inflation hit a peak in 2020 and declined after that. While inflation-adjusted expenditures increased from 2022 to 2023 by nearly $25 billion, they are still $33 billion below the 2020 peak. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) added to transportation spending, but not enough to make up for high inflation. Annual inflation, as measured by the National Highway Cost Construction Index (NHCCI), was 17.3% in 2021, 27.6% in 2022 and 11.9% in 2023.

The TPFS now includes state-level revenue and expenditures for 2023 (transit and air) and for 2020 - 2022 (highways, transit, and air). Below summarizes the 2023 top 5 state and local expenditures for air:

• California $6.9 Billion
• Florida $3.6 Billion
• Texas $3.6 Billion
• Illinois $2.5 Billion
• New York $2.4 Billion

BTS also includes per capita expenditures for the state-level data. Below summarizes the 2023 top 5 state and local per capita expenditures for air:

• Hawaii $453
• Alaska $440
• Colorado $319
• Utah $248
• Wyoming $217

The State-Level TPFS includes 2020 - 2022 data for the highways, transit, and air modes, and 2023 data for the transit and air modes. FHWA did not release the local highway revenue and expenditures data for 2023, thus BTS omitted the highways mode in the 2023 state-level data. The aggregate state data does include the highways mode for 2023, and BTS continues to use the preliminary estimates for the local line items with missing data.

What's new about TPFS?

With this release of the TPFS, BTS now also provides a new set of State-Level TPFS tabulations of transportation revenue and expenditures for the highways, transit, and air modes at the state and local level of government. The introduction of the new State-Level TPFS tabulations fulfills a long-standing desire by both BTS and its stakeholders for transportation public finance statistics at a sub-national level of geographic granularity which will support a range of additional use cases for the TPFS data series, such as enabling users to examine trends in particular states, and to compare those to national trends in transportation public finance.

BTS continues to release preliminary statistics each June, and the final data in December, increasing the timeliness of the statistics by six months. In addition to reporting preliminary estimates 18 months after the one-year reference period (e.g., data for the 2023 reference period is published in June 2025), BTS releases final data 24 months after the one-year reference period (e.g., data for the 2023 reference period is published December 2025). Going forward, for the state-level TPFS the preliminary release will omit the highways mode but will include the transit and air modes.

TPFS expands upon the existing revenue and expenditures data of the previous Government Transportation Finance Statistics (GTFS) by including new data sources such as the full Amtrak financials. TPFS includes additional categories to address policy questions - including expenditures broken down between capital and non-capital, while revenue now shows user-based revenue (i.e., transit fares). TPFS also differentiates between Federal cash flows from transportation trust funds separately from general funds.

TPFS Products:

• Homepage
• Aggregate State Dataset
• Aggregate State Data Tabulation Tool
• State-Level Dataset
• State-Level Data Tabulation Tool
• TPFS User Guide
• TPFS Technical Documentation

TPFS Visualizations:

• Revenue
• Expenditures
• Revenue and Expenditures
• Archived data

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