Key Findings
Voters in Florida approved far more funding for transportation at the ballot box this year than voters in every other state combined. The vast majority of the $24.411 billion approved by Florida voters came in the form of two penny sales tax increases passed in Broward County ($15.63 billion) and Hillsborough County ($8.28 billion). Together, those account for about 98 percent of transportation funding approved by Florida voters this year. (Much of that money will go toward transit and multimodal projects; click here to see how different transportation modes fared at the ballot box this year.)
California came in a distant second place, with just over $8.6 billion approved for transportation. The largest chunk of this was passed not on Election Day, but back in June, when a nine-county region in the Bay Area approved Measure 3 to raise $4.5 billion in tolls for traffic relief and public transit. San Mateo County’s Measure W also scraped by with a win (receiving 66.85 percent approval, just above the two-thirds threshold), which will raise the sales tax to invest $2.4 billion in general transportation improvements.
Looking at the map of where voters supported raising money for transportation shows no real pattern, with voters in just about every region approving transportation ballot measures. One exception is the north-central United States, where no funding was approved. There was only one measure each in North Dakota and Idaho – both sales tax increases that failed – and none in South Dakota, Montana, or Idaho. The Northeast, where voter initiatives are not as commonplace as they have historically been out West, also did not see many transportation ballot measures this year, though Maine voters approved a $106 million bond measure and Connecticut voted to put its Special Transportation Fund in a lockbox.