highway expansion

The umbrella group for America's state DOTs, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, has started a major new push for, you guessed it, more highways. The new campaign argues for highway expansion in urban areas as if fifty years of similar policies hadn't led to a dead end of sprawl, pollution, and oil dependence.

Earlier this week, Streetsblog waded back into the debate over two controversial development projects sponsored by NBC Universal in North Hollywood.  One of those projects, which NBC is calling "Evolution" will redevelop a 391 acre parcel and will include a theme park, business and entertainment industry center, more than 2,900 new apartments and condos, 35 acres of open space, a 500-room hotel and a refurbished amphitheater.  Residents are complaining about a coming traffic crush. 

Sometimes, the news comes to you from several directions at once, and you have to pull the pieces together to see the bigger picture. Such a thing happened yesterday, when three seemingly unrelated story created the perfect tapestry of cause, symptom and effect.

Hmm. If I knew that my census form was going to help determine how much sprawl-inducing highway expansion funding my community was going to get, I would have told them there were -4,000,000 in my house.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the trade group representing state DOTs in Washington, yesterday unveiled a website and report billed as a one-year "progress report" on the White House's $34.3 billion in formula-based transportation stimulus spending.

The Transportation Enhancements program, which requires states to set aside 10 percent of their federal transport money for new bicycle and pedestrian facilities, among other projects, turns 19 years old this year. But you'd almost never know it after reading Saturday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in which the paper tallies -- with no shortage of alarm -- the federal money not being spent on new roads.

I was somewhat heartened last week when coverage of the massive I-405 Sepulveda Pass Widening Project actually mentioned the amazing amount of highway vehicle congestion that will be created by the project over its estimated three year construction phase.  However, I waited to write about the press coverage because I was hopeful that some writer would actually make the connection that the this project could actually create more congestion over the course of the construction than will be "relieved"before induced demand helps fill those new travel lanes back up.  Unfortunately, there is no such luck.  The news coverage ranges from, "traffic is going to be awful but at least everything is going to be so much better when it's done" to "traffic is going to be worse than they're saying because the government is always wrong about these sort of thing."  Unfortunately, nobody is taking on the government's claim that the project is going to permanently reduce congestion in the corridor.

News website The Daily Beast crunches the numbers from the most congested areas in America and finds, to nobody's surprise, that the worst driving commute in America is right here in Los Angeles.    The Hollywood Freeway ranks as the worst place to commute in the entire country based on rush hour congestion, the worst bottleneck, and the average amount of congestion per week at the worst bottleneck.