The U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has been keeping track of how states are spending the stimulus funds allocated for roads. On September 2 the committee released a report ranking the states according to how much of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding for highways and bridges had been put to work as of July 31. This pdf file contains the state rankings. For each state, the chart shows the percentage of allocated funds for highway and bridge projects that had been put out to bid, were under contract, or were underway by the end of July. The top five states were Wyoming, Iowa, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Oklahoma.

The national average was to have about 40 percent of the stimulus road money under contract and 32 percent funding construction that had already begun by the end of the July. Only 11 states had put even 50 percent of their stimulus road funds to work by that time.

Yesterday's report from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee doesn't explain why some states have allocated their stimulus money faster than others. The states near the bottom of the list (Hawaii, Virginia, Delaware, Ohio and Massachusetts) hadn't even spent 20 percent of their stimulus road funds as of July 31. Perhaps they are slow to approve projects and bids, or hoarding the cash to help support their 2010 budgets. Whatever the reason, the point of the stimulus bill was to get money into the economy quickly.