Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act
federal highway legislation
The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA, ) is a United States federal law that posed a major change to transportation planning and policy, as the first U.S. federal legislation on the subject in the post-Interstate Highway System era.
The act was signed into law on December 18, 1991, by President George H. W. Bush and codified as Pub. L. 102–240 and 105 Stat. 1914.
Objective
The act presented an overall intermodal approach to highway and transit funding with collaborative planning requirements, giving significant additional powers to metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs).
ISTEA also provided funds for the conversion of dormant railroad corridors into rail trails; the first rail trail to be funded was the Cedar Lake Regional Rail Trail, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The bill was preceded by the Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act in 1987 and followed by the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) in 1998, the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) in 2005, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) in 2012, the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (FAST) in 2015, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.
High priority corridors
Section 1105 of the act also defines a number of High Priority Corridors, to be part of the National Highway System. After various amendments in subsequent transportation bills and other legislation, this is a list of the corridors:
High-speed rail corridors
The legislation also called for the designation of up to five high-speed rail corridors. The options were studied for several months, and announced in October 1992.
The public source identifies “Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act” as federal highway legislation. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Intermodal, Surface and Transportation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q800184. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1914, 1987 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.