Highway Expansion
Streetsblog Basics
Americans Are Driving Less, But Road Expansion Is Accelerating
Americans drive fewer miles today than in 2005, but since that time the nation has built 317,000 lane-miles of new roads -- or about 40,000 miles per year. Maybe that helps explain why America's infrastructure is falling apart.
February 20, 2015
More Money Won’t Fix U.S. Infrastructure If We Don’t Change How It’s Spent
"America's infrastructure is slowly falling apart" went the headline of a recent Vice Magazine story that epitomizes a certain line of thinking about how to fix the nation's "infrastructure crisis." The post showed a series of structurally deficient bridges and traffic-clogged interchanges intended to jolt readers into thinking we need to spend more on infrastructure.
February 5, 2015
Washington Republicans: Put Seattle’s Highway-Borer Out of Its Misery
If nothing else, the politics of Seattle's deep-bore highway tunnel fiasco keep getting more interesting. With Bertha the tunnel-boring machine stuck underground and "rescue" efforts literally destabilizing city neighborhoods, a pair of Republicans in the Washington State Senate introduced a bill to scrap the project before any more money is wasted.
January 30, 2015
Can Seattle Stop Its Highway Tunnel Boondoggle Before It’s Too Late?
It's been one year since the world's largest tunnel boring machine, "Bertha," got stuck 120 feet beneath Seattle. Before it broke down, the colossal machine had excavated just 1,000 feet of the two-mile tube that's supposed to house a new, $3.1 billion underground highway to replace an aging elevated road called the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
January 5, 2015
The Great Traffic Projection Swindle
This is the final piece in a three-part series about privately-financed roads. In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the Indiana Toll Road as an example of the growth in privately financed highways, and how financial firms can turn these assets into profits, even if the road itself is a big money loser. In this piece, we examine the shaky assumptions that toll road investments are based on, and how that is putting the public at risk.
November 20, 2014
How Macquarie Makes Money By Losing Money on Toll Roads
This is the second post in a three-part series about the Indiana Toll Road and privately financed highways. Read part one.
November 19, 2014
The Indiana Toll Road and the Dark Side of Privately Financed Highways
This is the first post in a three-part series on the Indiana Toll Road and the use of private finance to build and maintain highways.
November 18, 2014
Not Just a Phase: Young Americans Won’t Start Motoring Like Their Parents
A raft of recent research indicates that young adults just aren't as into driving as their parents were. Young people today are walking, biking, and riding transit more while driving less than previous generations did at the same age. But the vast majority of state DOTs have been loathe to respond by changing their highway-centric ways.
October 14, 2014
To Destabilize Detroit’s Fragile Renaissance, Go Ahead and Widen I-94
A recent report by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future,” examines 11 of the most wasteful, least justifiable road projects underway in America right now. Here’s the latest installment in our series profiling the various bad decisions that funnel so much money to infrastructure that does no good.
September 30, 2014
Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct: King of the Highway Boondoggles
A recent report by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future,” examines 11 of the most wasteful, least justifiable road projects underway in America right now. Here’s the latest installment in our series profiling the various bad decisions that funnel so much money to infrastructure that does no good.
September 26, 2014