Angie Schmitt

Fast-growing Texas cities have an enormous traffic problem -- that much isn't in dispute. But the response has been myopic: pouring more and more money into widening highways. Even the road engineers at the Texas Transportation Institute recently acknowledged there's no way these cities can fund and build highway lanes fast enough to keep pace with population growth. That's in no small part because widening and expanding highways fuels sprawl that induces more car trips, TTI acknowledged.

The "forgiving highway" approach to traffic engineering holds that wider is safer when it comes to street design. After decades of adherence to these standards, American cities are now criss-crossed by streets with 12-foot wide lanes. As Walkable City author Jeff Speck argued in CityLab last year, this is actually terrible for public safety and the pedestrian environment.

Ohio's cities have been declining, and traffic congestion isn't the problem. The highway system, if anything, is overbuilt.

Warning: This video contains a disturbing moment of violence.

State departments of transportation all over the country use specious traffic projections to justify hugely expensive road widening projects. That's how you end up with the graph on the right -- showing how DOTs continued to forecast traffic growth year after year, even as driving stagnated.

Complaining about traffic is practically a sport in Atlanta. Which makes sense, since traffic in the region is absolutely miserable.

If only more police officials took dangerous driving as seriously as Frank Koss, chief of police in Hinesburg, Vermont. An outraged Koss took to the pages of his local paper this week after a 17-year-old driver killed a local cyclist, saying “this was not an accident.”

If you're behind the wheel of a car, law enforcement will let you get away with just about anything -- even smashing into a house and pulverizing a crib where an infant was sleeping.

This is how it begins: Local leaders in Milwaukee commissioned a study examining whether the city's convention center is up to snuff. Surprise, surprise, reports Bruce Murphy at Urban Milwaukee: Hunden Strategic Partners, a consulting firm that loves convention centers, says Milwaukee really ought to be pumping a bunch of public money into expanding its convention facilities and a new arena for its NBA franchise, the Bucks. Oh, and a large publicly subsidized hotel wouldn't hurt either. This is the same outfit that did the study for Kansas City's Power and Light District, which has turned into a notorious money pit for the city.

Can anything spur Congress to overhaul a federal transportation policy that lets states run amok building highway expansions while the rest of our infrastructure goes to seed? Don't hold your breath -- the cycle of extending the status quo transportation bill is starting all over again.