At a speech Tuesday at the Charlotte Rotary Club, Foxx will launch an effort to push federal, state, and local transportation decision-makers to make transportation projects more inclusive. He wants local decision-makers to agree to “connect people to opportunity” when they make decisions about building transportation. He’s gotten the governors of Virginia, Nevada, and Washington State to sign on, as well as Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

To do this, Foxx wants decisions-makers to keep in mind three principles as they make these decisions. Principle one: While transportation needs to connect people to opportunities, it should also “invigorate opportunities within communities.” Two: Projects need to take into account communities that “have been on the wrong side of transportation decisions,” and figure out ways to make them stronger. And three: The projects should be built for and by the communities they go through.

These principles are completely voluntary, and there is no enforcement mechanism. Those governors who have signed on are merely expressing their agreement with the principles, and not committing to spending money in any particular way. But Foxx is trying to change the culture of the department, which he hopes will change the way its money is used.

“If we wonder how this set of problems was created, it was a combination of federal money and state and local decision-making,” he will say, according to prepared remarks provided to The Atlantic in advance of the speech. “The same federal, state, and local governments that created these problems have an equally powerful ability to solve them.”

Foxx already created the department’s first Chief Opportunities Officer, who is trying to make sure “opportunity” is taken into account in transportation policy, a department spokesperson said. And in 2014, Foxx changed the criteria for federal TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grants by adding “opportunity” as a criteria the government should take into account when awarding grants (Part of that effort is related to the Obama Administration’s agency-wide “Ladders of Opportunity” program, which seeks to help people reach the middle class).

Through the TIGER grants in 2014 and 2015, the department has invested $235 million in 19 projects that tried to “restore” communities by creating bus rapid transit and streetcar lines and building bridges and corridors to connect disenfranchised neighborhoods.

And even without TIGER grants, some cities are already trying to incorporate these principles, Foxx says. Charlotte is completing a streetcar system; Ohio is building a bridge over a highway to help locals get around it; Los Angeles is employing locals to build a light-rail connector line in Crenshaw.