Recent Streetsblog TEXAS posts about Highway Expansion

Highway Boondoggles: Texas State Highway 45 Southwest

By Jeff Inglis | Jan 21, 2016 | No Comments

The water pollution control plans for SH 45 allow for oil, grease, and other pollutants resulting from construction and use of the highway to enter the area’s surface water and groundwater. Image: TxDOT 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 [...]

Highway Boondoggles: Widening I-95 Across Connecticut

By Jeff Inglis | Jan 19, 2016 | No Comments

Bucking the state’s longstanding recommendations, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy says widening I-95 will fix congestion. Photo: Doug Kerr/Flickr via U.S. PIRG 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 [...]

Lobbyist Holds Up Spectacular Example of the Futility of Widening Highways

By Joe Cortright | Dec 17, 2015 | No 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 wasting 25 [...]

The High Price of Cheap Gas

By Joe Cortright | Nov 19, 2015 | No 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. [...]

Dallas Council Member: Texas Poised to “Compound Errors of the Past”

By Angie Schmitt | Oct 21, 2015 | No Comments

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 [...]

Will Texas Voters Enshrine Failed Transpo Policy in the State’s Constitution?

By Angie Schmitt | Oct 20, 2015 | No Comments

When Texas voters go to the polls this November they will decide an issue of enormous consequence to the future of the state. Adding more lanes isn’t going to fix Texas’s transportation problems. Photo: TxDOT via Houston Matters A proposed amendment to the state constitution — on the ballot as Proposition 7 — would shift about $2.5 billion in [...]

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