Highway Expansion
Does Detroit Need Another $1.8 Billion of Freeway? MDOT Thinks So
If there's a city that could serve as a cautionary tale for overbuilding highways, that city is Detroit. So it's fascinating -- and encouraging -- to see this city going through an internal tussle over the wisdom of building a highway.
January 17, 2013
Will Transportation Investments Keep Up With the Way Americans Travel?
Phineas Baxandall is a senior analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
October 22, 2012
The Coming Infrastructure Crisis in Texas
The way Texas throws around money for highways -- $5.2 billion for a third outer-belt for Houston, $2 billion for Dallas' eighth downtown highway -- you would think TxDOT was running over with cheddar. This is a state, need we remind you, that "found" $350 million for a stalled highway project local leaders freely admit was designed to encourage sprawl, not solve any pressing mobility problems.
October 4, 2012
Scandalous Video: Obama Talks Sense About Road Building
You all excited to watch the presidential debate tonight? Here's a glimpse back to 2007, when the old Barack Obama was getting us all hyped up on a sugar rush of hope and change. Check out this video, care of the conservative Daily Caller, which is making a lot of hay about some racially-charged remarks Obama made on the campaign trail back then.
October 3, 2012
Louisville Doubles Down on Disruptive Downtown Highway
Louisville, Kentucky, is, by all accounts, a city with a lot of potential. An old river city, it has a wealth of beautiful, historic architecture. It's mid-sized, but large enough to have some good urban amenities. It's affordable, with a downtown waterfront and some unique cultural charms. As the New York Times said in its article about the city earlier this week, "Louisville has good bones."
September 27, 2012
NRDC Poll: Americans Support New Transit Twice as Much as New Roads
When asked what would solve traffic problems in their community, 42 percent of Americans say more transit. Only 20 percent say more roads. And 21 percent would like to see communities developed that don’t require so much driving. Two-thirds support local planning that guides new development into existing cities and near public transportation.
September 12, 2012
How Highway Spending Could Become as Transparent as Bike/Ped Spending
“There’s an inverse proportion of the size of a transportation program to the amount of transparency,” says Deron Lovaas of the Natural Resources Defense Council. While anyone can easily find in granular detail anything they would ever want to know about where bike/ped money goes, and they can get a pretty good idea of what's going on with transit capital investments, highway spending is a black box -- and that's 80 percent of U.S. transportation dollars.
September 11, 2012
Tennessee DOT Moves Past Road-Widening as a Congestion Reduction Strategy
In the late eighties and nineties, every traffic issue the Tennessee Department of Transportation faced was assigned the same solution: a bypass. But over the years, the department has come around to a new way of doing things, according to 40-year TDOT veteran Ralph Comer. Comer says the current commissioner, John Schroer, wants to become known as the “no-bypass commissioner.” He simply believes there are usually more cost-effective ways of solving transportation problems.
August 30, 2012
Highway Builders to Party Leaders: The Future Is “More Than Just Roadways”
Over the past two weeks, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association has sent letters to the Republican National Committee [PDF] and the Democratic National Committee [PDF], asking them to consider inserting a plank in their platforms about transportation. And they were clear in their letter that, despite being major cheerleaders for road-building, the future they see is multi-modal.
July 26, 2012