Recent Streetsblog USA posts about State DOTs

State DOTs to Feds: We Don’t Want to Reveal Our Impact on Climate Change

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 18, 2016 | 6 Comments

Every year state DOTs receive tens of billions of dollars in transportation funds from the federal government. By and large, they can do whatever they want with the money, which in most states means wasting enormous sums on pork-laden highway projects. Now that U.S. DOT might impose some measure of accountability on how states use these […]

4 Ways Road Builders Game the Numbers to Justify Highways

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 23, 2016 | 15 Comments

The people who make the case for highways often present themselves as unbiased technicians, simply providing evidence to an audience subject to irrational bias. But traffic forecasting is not a neutral, dispassionate exercise. It is subject to all sorts of incentives, beliefs, and assumptions that can skew the results in a particular direction. Intentionally or not, forecasters frequently exaggerate predicted […]

U.S. DOT Wants States to Disclose Climate Impact of Transportation Projects

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 18, 2016 | 9 Comments

The Obama administration wants state DOTs to report on the climate impact of their transportation policies, reports Michael Grunwald at Politico, and the road lobby is dead set against it. As part of the implementation of the MAP-21 federal transportation bill, U.S. DOT officials are preparing a new rule that would require states to set goals […]

The Complete Case Against Highway Widening in Detroit

By Angie Schmitt | Mar 1, 2016 | 3 Comments

Michigan DOT wants to spend $1 billion rebuilding and widening I-75 to Detroit’s sprawling northern suburbs, at the expense of the city and close-in suburbs. Royal Oak, a walkable suburb that borders the city, is not having it. The City Council passed a resolution unanimously this week officially opposing the widening of I-75 as well as […]

Houston Mayor Calls for “Paradigm Shift” Away From Highway Widening

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 29, 2016 | 17 Comments

Newly elected Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner gave a remarkable speech yesterday in Austin [PDF], calling on the state to change its transportation priorities and stop pouring billions into widening highways. Turner told the Texas Transportation Commission, the appointed board that leads Texas DOT, that the state needs a totally new transportation paradigm. The speech is phenomenal, and Texas […]

Highway Boondoggles: New Mexico’s Paseo del Volcan Extension

By John Olivieri and Jeff Inglis | Jan 29, 2016 | 1 Comment

In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2, U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. The proposed Paseo del Volcan Extension, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a textbook example of a project intended to induce and subsidize suburban sprawl. The idea of building a road through […]

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