Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Highway Expansion

Caption Contest: TxDOT’s Shiny Happy People Sucking in Highway Exhaust

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 22, 2016 | 22 Comments

This rendering of State Highway 45 Southwest in Austin — one of 12 highway boondoggles singled out by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group this year — inspired some mockery on Twitter: @StreetsblogNet @StreetsblogUSA @uspirg “Hey mom, I’m going to go ride bikes in the ditch!” — Andy Howard (@ahow628) January 21, 2016 @StreetsblogNet @uspirg “Just […]

Highway Boondoggles: Texas State Highway 45 Southwest

By Jeff Inglis and John Olivieri | Jan 21, 2016 | 1 Comment

In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the original came out in 2014), U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group teamed up to profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. Streetsblog will be serializing the case studies in the report. Today, we focus on a road project that risks contaminating the water supply in and around Austin, […]

Highway Boondoggles: Widening I-95 Across Connecticut

By Jeff Inglis and John Olivieri | Jan 19, 2016 | 21 Comments

Last year Congress passed a multi-year transportation bill. Like previous bills, it gives tens of billions of dollars to states every year to spend with almost no strings attached. How much of this federal funding will state DOTs devote to expensive, traffic-inducing highway projects that further entrench car dependence and sprawl? In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the […]

Lobbyist Holds Up Spectacular Example of the Futility of Widening Highways

By Joe Cortright | Dec 16, 2015 | 14 Comments

Crossposted from City Observatory. Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation […]

The High Price of Cheap Gas

By Joe Cortright | Nov 19, 2015 | 11 Comments

At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap gas has serious hidden costs—more pollution, more energy consumption, more crashes and greater traffic congestion. […]

Community Pushing Back Against Plan to Widen Interstate Through Asheville

By Angie Schmitt | Nov 13, 2015 | No Comments

Will the state of North Carolina and the Federal Highway Administration insist on widening an interstate highway through west Asheville to eight lanes? Right now, it looks like there’s a very good chance of that — and that’s what frightens a lot of locals. Highway builders want to complete the “missing link” of Interstate 26 running […]

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