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World Cup Mania is taking over the North American continent and the Cityfi team is cheering on our favorite countries and players. A couple of Cityfiers have attended a match or two. Others are locked in watching matches and highlights whenever they get the chance.

Cities around the world are preparing for the next generation of mobility and infrastructure challenges much like teams preparing for the World Cup: success requires the right strategy, the right tools, and the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing field. In this edition, we explore the evolving playbooks cities have at their disposal. We are leaning into the Beautiful Game and the quadrennial World Cup to tie together federal funding debates shaping transportation investment and new tools cities can use to manage emerging mobility services. And, just as every winning team relies on strong institutions and thoughtful planning, we close with reflections on how civic infrastructure like libraries can help cities stay resilient for the long game.

In case you were wondering, rumor has it that Merlin is an avid reader of this newsletter!

Future of Federal Transportation Funding: BUILD America 2050 Act

By Bridget Gilmore (with Marla Westervelt)

In the U.S., the federal government funds and sets policy for surface transportation through multi-year authorizations. The current surface transportation law, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), will expire on September 30th, 2026. It is expected that the current law will be extended through a continuing resolution (CR) until at least after the November mid-term elections.

In recent months, Congress has begun the process of drafting the next surface transportation reauthorization. Most recently, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (T&I) passed its proposed new legislation authorizing $580 billion – known as the Building Unrivaled Infrastructure and Long-term Development (BUILD) for America’s 250th Act. While this bill will be subjected to many rounds of editing before a reconciled version is potentially adopted, it reflects the initial perspectives of the committee.

As we see how the BUILD America 2050 Act continues to take shape, here are five Cityfi perspectives:

1. We Need to be Spending More Money on Transportation — Especially Public Transit

Transportation is certainly not receiving the time, energy, or federal funding it deserves. While people have been pleasantly surprised that the funding levels were not slashed as much as they had feared, the BUILD Act decreases transportation funding compared to IIJA by half all the while increasing highway funding by 8% (+$28 billion) and decreasing transit and rail funding by 20% (-$43 billion). In the meantime, everything has gotten more expensive in the last five years. Transportation drives our nation’s economy and public transit is critical for our nation’s economic engines – our cities. With 20-50% of commuters in our largest cities relying on public transit, this continual disinvestment will make travel times longer, more dangerous, and more expensive. Transportation deserves better and a “less-slashed-budget-than-anticipated” is not what we should be striving for.

2. Uneven User Fees Won’t Fix the Highway Trust Fund’s Structural Problems

The proposed text creating EV federal fees, which has been touted as the first new revenue stream for the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) in decades, have been highly polarized. Aside from the pain of making states collect annual registration fees that then must somehow be funneled into the federal coffers, the real issue is that the HTF is woefully inadequate for robustly funding the transportation system this country desperately needs. While there is language for a national road-user charge/mileage-based fee pilot — which could be a great avenue for everyone to sustainably pay their fair share – we need a broader reimagining of the HTF if we are committed to this outdated funding mechanism.

3. Expanded Access to Innovative Digital Tools Is a Good Thing

It is great for Congress to contemplate its role in expanding transportation innovation by providing greater access to enhanced tolling tools, funding predictive data models that could save lives, and embracing its leadership role in creating a future for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Cityfi will be keeping a close eye on how this federal focus on establishing national safety rules for commercial AVs takes shape. It is critical for the federal government to be thoughtful on when and how to preempt states. This conversation needs to be quite clear on how states and cities can retain certain powers to manage their own roads while also creating a national framework to allow AVs to safely cross state lines.

4. A New, and One of the Few Remaining, Discretionary Grant Programs: The Surface Transportation Accelerator Grant Program (STAGP)

The STAGP is to be a new, “hyperflexible” $12 billion ($2.4 billion allocated per fiscal year) competitive grant program that funds surface transportation projects in local and regional (50%), rural (25%), and urban communities (25%). It is both encouraging and also worthy of some skepticism that public transportation is an eligible project. Federal capital grants are the key mechanism to build public transit in this country. As transit is a huge need, it should not have to compete for money that will likely be prioritized for highway expansion dollars. As one of few competitive grant programs remaining, and one of the only new ones, this program may harbor many hopes that might meet few “highly recommended” scoring criteria.

5. Expanded Use of Categorical Exclusions: What the Buzzword “Streamlining Permitting” Actually Looks Like

The broadening use of categorical exclusions, which I saw firsthand with the inclusion in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program for EV charging projects, allows projects to enter the promised stream of faster permitting, bypassing the bulk of the NEPA process. Categorical exclusions can be applied for projects being constructed on already disturbed lands (like parking lots), and this proposed language targets smaller projects with federal funding contributing less than $12 million or total project costs not exceeding $70 million. The collective disdain for needless paperwork feels like one of the truest places of bipartisan agreement we have.

Report: Revenue-Related Tools for New Mobility

‍By Team Cityfi

As the article above suggests, transportation funding systems have been built for a world of privately owned vehicles and fuel taxes, but mobility is rapidly changing. New services such as ride‑hail, scooters, bike share, delivery platforms, autonomous vehicles, and electrified fleets are:

Increasing use of streets, curbs, and public infrastructure
Reducing traditional revenue sources like fuel taxes
Creating new externalities (curb congestion, delivery traffic, VMT growth)
Introducing new service models that do not fit existing policy or fee structures

We are proud to announce that two weeks ago, years’ worth of research and work by Senior Principal Evan Costagliola and Associate Principal Monique Ho was published by the National Academy of Sciences and Transportation Research Board addressing these issues. Together with their partners at ECOnorthwest and Urban Freight Lab, the report creates a structured toolkit for governments to rethink how transportation systems are funded and managed in this new mobility landscape. The report helps agencies answer three strategic questions:

Who should pay for new mobility services’ impacts on public infrastructure?
How should pricing influence behavior (congestion, emissions, curb use)?
How can transportation policy goals align with revenue strategies?

The toolkit links four elements that are usually addressed separately: transportation policy goals, mobility service types, revenue tools, and implementation considerations. This allows agencies to systematically evaluate pricing tools instead of reacting to each new mobility technology individually.

A core tenant of this report is the principle that transportation services should be evaluated based on their impact, not their mode or ownership. This is important because policies often treat private vehicles, ride-hail, delivery services, and micromobility as separate regulatory domains. The report instead encourages mode-neutral policy design.

Additionally, most transportation policy focuses on people moving, but this report integrates freight, e-commerce delivery, and crowd shipping into that lens out of the recognition that delivery vehicles dominate curb use, logistics are rapidly growing, and pricing framework must apply to both passenger and goods mobility.

As the curb becomes one of the most contested pieces of urban infrastructure, pricing tools and management strategies are key to not only throttling over-indexing of curb space, but also raising revenue for cash strapped cities. Curb loading, delivery zones, micromobility parking, and ride-hailing pickup areas should all be in play.

Another innovative feature of this report is the revenue calculator tool, which is a quantitative calculator used to estimate revenue from tools such as: per-trip fees, delivery surcharges, vehicle-mile fees, and congestion pricing. This tool allows agencies to test policies before implementation.

We highly encourage you to read the report in its entirety and reach out to Evan or Monique if you have any questions or want to work with us on using this toolkit. Congratulations to all who had a part in creating this report!

The Library is the Plan: Bridging Strategic Vision and Civic Design

Reflections on the Library Journal Design Institute 2026

By Camron Bridgford

Last month, the Library Journal Design Institute (LJDI) brought together architects, library leaders, planners, and designers in Washington, D.C. to discuss the future of library facilities. While the conference focused on library design, many of the conversations pointed toward a much larger question that extends beyond libraries and speaks to how cities think about resilience, civic infrastructure, and institutional adaptation.

In May, Cityfi became part of CannonDesign, situated under the firm’s consultancy arm, Blue Cottage. As a result, our Cityfi team has been thinking more about the natural continuation of our policy, innovation, and governance work within cities into the actual development and design of the built environment. Cityfi has also recently undertaken multiple projects developing strategic plans for public library systems as a natural progression of our work. As such, the LJDI was a great opportunity for me as an urban planning and policy practitioner to reflect on the convergence of these two worlds, and where both tensions and opportunities to better meet city outcomes arise.

At first glance, strategic planning and facility design appear to be separate exercises. One focuses on organizational priorities and outcomes, the other on physical space. One typically operates on a three-to-five-year horizon, the other may shape a community for half a century or more. However, treating them as separate processes creates a fundamental challenge, as organizations are expected to evolve while the buildings that house them remain fixed.

A library strategic plan may (should!) be updated every few years in response to changing community needs, new technologies, shifting demographics, or emerging priorities. Better yet, it should be designed from its original conception as a flexible and nimble framework that can adapt to a city’s inevitable changing circumstances that come its way. A building, meanwhile, is expected to support those changes over decades. Therefore, the question is not whether an institution will change, but whether its physical environment can change with it.

This tension was one of the most intriguing themes that emerged for me from the discussions at LJDI, and one perhaps architects and designers in the room were thinking less about. At the conference, the most forward-looking architectural projects were not designed around today’s programming model, but around uncertainty itself, which showed up in the forms of flexible spaces, modular furniture, adaptable infrastructure, and rooms capable of serving multiple purposes over time.

However, I would argue that while these features are often discussed as architectural decisions, they are better understood as institutional decisions. Flexibility is not primarily about space; it is about capacity. A flexible building expands an institution’s ability to respond to changing conditions. It creates room for experimentation, new partnerships, evolving services, and emerging community needs.

In this sense, flexibility is a form of resilience.

Read more about why libraries are key to understanding this shift in today’s changing landscape of challenges in cities in my full article posted to the Cityfi blog.