5 Reasons Why We Should End Highway Expansion
(Source: Pexels/Deva Darshan, with edits.)
North America is addicted to highway expansion. Under the false pretense that more new highways are an asset (purportedly better connecting places and people), billions of dollars are wasted on these long stretches of pavement each year.
Instead of creating growth, highways destroy homes and businesses. When a highway barrels right through downtowns and neighborhoods, it divides communities, destroys the wealth of surrounding places, and creates car-dependent environments. In many ways, highways are a grim reaper to the things we love in our cities.
We need to end highway expansion and focus on projects that actually build wealth in our cities. Still not convinced? Listed below, you’ll find five reasons for why we should stop building highways.
1. We don't have the money to maintain what we've already built.
In the Growth Ponzi Scheme, local governments receive an immediate increase in revenue when building a new highway. This helps with the current budget cycle, and it’s an incentive to not think about how years later, the liabilities will come due.
For decades, cities have been continuously building new infrastructure with no budget to upkeep their investment. Local governments tend to gobble up federal dollars in the effort to partially fund an expansion project worth more than their annual budget—including staff pay. And as millions of dollars are spent on employee time and construction for the shiny new highway, already built infrastructure rots.
As an example: four years ago, Shreveport, Louisiana, learned they had a $1 million wastewater maintenance bill coming due. It’s a bill they cannot afford, not even by raising local rates. But that hasn’t stopped them from planning an additional $6 million highway.
Hard to believe? Do the math for your own town.
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2. The high-returning projects have long been done.
In 1956, Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act with the promise to partially fund the interstate highway system. With the proven demonstration that it would take 62 days for a military convoy to travel from the White House to San Francisco, establishing a highway system became an act of national security.
To build the interstate system would be to embark on the largest infrastructure project in U.S. History; a great feat that would not only create a secure path for the military, but also establish better commerce distribution and make independent travel easier.
When these initial highways were built, American cities (despite the mass destruction it caused) also experienced capital gains. Never before was travel so easy, and our entire country changed because of it.
But now, after all our cities have been connected, we insist on building more—to where, exactly? Nowhere new. In Bangor, Maine, for instance, they’ve been insisting on a redundant highway expansion for years. Not only is the project unaffordable, the highway is literally parallel to the one that already exists.
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3. More lanes don’t actually solve traffic congestion.
By 1970, the United States had dedicated more dollars to transportation to California than going to the moon. With the interstate highway system two-thirds of the way complete, $33 billion had already been spent on the project.
The biggest selling point for these new roads was the romanticized idea of fast-moving traffic. You could get into the city and out of the city almost instantaneously. Governments even cited ideas like highways being useful if a war broke out and residents needed to evacuate their city at a moment's notice.
But, even during this moment in history, it was evident that building highways does not make traffic move faster. In Superhighway — Superhoax (published in 1970), Helen Leavitt criticized the interstate program for selling lies to the public. “‘The largest public works program ever undertaken by man,’ with all its expense and destruction of city and countryside, has not accomplished its one objective: to keep traffic moving. The more highways we build, the more automobiles pour onto them and clog them,” a New York Times article summarized from Leavitt’s book.
You would think that 40 years later, we’d be smarter in recognizing induced demand, and that we’d create other transit opportunities to balance out the need for driving (like, buses, biking, or walking). But despite endless amounts of modern-day evidence proving that more lanes equals more traffic, engineers still insist that building highways is the solution to easing traffic congestion. Such is the case with TxDOT, which is pushing for a 22-lane mega highway to barrel through the core of Austin. And even though they have direct, recent experience with the failure of easing traffic congestion on the Houston Katy Freeway, TxDOT refuses to learn from its mistakes, blatantly ignores other options, and still plans to build.
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4. Highway projects sap time and energy from other local priorities.
When a local government is awarded grant funding for a highway, the project becomes center focus. The planning, announcing, and pushing for these projects (especially in communities that reject them) take up a lot of time. It drains employee hours, people’s taxes, and takes away from the ability to do smaller, needed projects.
Our current system rewards local bureaucracies when they focus on gaining top-down funding. It’s understandable why a community would want grants, but if the grants are to build more highways we don’t need and can’t afford to maintain, then it’s not worth it.
Read more in:
“Widening a Highway is Like Swallowing a Spider to Eat a Fly.”
“It’s Always Too Late: How Freeway Fighters Are Kept out of the Conversation.”
5. When we put our money into highway expansions, we get highway investment.
When billions of dollars are continuously poured into highways, we neglect other transportation options, and cities become places primarily focused on moving cars.
When there are more roads to drive on, more people will drive. This induced demand creates a domino effect for more parking lots, big box stores on the fringes of town, and more infrastructure we can’t afford.
If we want our towns to be strong and prosperous, then we need to offer multiple modes of transportation. We already have enough opportunities to drive a car: we don’t need any more. Instead, we need to realign our priorities, stop building highways, and create more of a balance to give people options to bus, bike, or walk.
Seairra Jones serves as the Lead Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.