The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund and Frontier Group released a report this week that identified nine wasteful highway expansion projects throughout the country that could collectively cost at least $30 billion.
The report specifically focused on how the majority of highway expansion projects fail to solve congestion and only create crippling debt for the governing state. These issues then lead to the reduction of funds for road, bridge and public transit repairs, the report stated. While $27.2 billion was spent on expanding highways in 2012, PIRG said these projects were set on top of a $500 billion backlog of road and bridge repair needs and a $90 billion backlog of more basic transit repair needs.
“From 2008 to 2015, state highway debt more than doubled to $217 billion,” Gideon Weissman, a Frontier Group analyst and report co-author, said. “We keep building new highways we don’t need, and that hurts our ability to move toward a smart 21st-century transportation system that works for all of us.”
The report made specific mention of Maryland’s traffic relief plan — a $9 billion project meant to create new highways as it struggles to fix the Baltimore Metro, which was forced to close for urgent repairs in February 2018. It also criticized the expansion of U.S. Highway 101 in California, for approving a $534 million widening effort that PIRG said will bring more cars into an already congested area and increase global warming. Further, they recognized an expansion of Austin, Texas’s I-35, an $8.1 billion endeavor the report said will take away from transit and street improvements and add to an already bloated highway debt.
In all cases, the report calls on states to reexamine their highway expansions and focus on transportation needs. Repair, they stress, not expand.
“We need to be smarter about how we spend our transportation dollars. Now and in the future, America should have less pollution, less gridlock and more public transit,” Matt Casale, U.S. PIRG’s transportation program director, said. “ We have the tools to build a better transportation system. We just need to use them.”