highway expansion

There's a lot riding on Texas DOT's $7 billion plan for downtown Houston freeways.

Most people still think of Tampa as a sprawling, car-centric town, but that is starting to change. In 2014, Smart Growth America [PDF] found that Tampa is shifting toward a more walkable development pattern. The city is starting to build out a bicycle network, and its Riverwalk project is bringing people out to stroll downtown.

This video from Vox provides an excellent overview of how the Interstate Highway System wiped out whole city neighborhoods in the post-war era.

It's not enough for highway builders to carve out land at great public expense so they can jam more cars into cities. Now they want you to believe their projects are great for the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of the added traffic and pollution.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is offering a surprisingly honest appraisal of America's history of road construction this week, with a high-profile speaking tour that focuses on the damage that highways caused in black urban neighborhoods.

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:

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, Texas. 

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?

The entire Texas highway machine -- suburban real estate moguls, the construction industry, the governor, and the legislature -- is pushing voters to approve Prop 7, a constitutional amendment that would mandate spending $2.5 billion in state sales tax revenue on un-tolled roads. The highway interests are telling Texas voters in unison that this measure, if approved in November, will fix congestion and not cost them any extra money -- claims that don't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.