“It’s ludicrous to me that with such a perfect case of induced demand sitting right in front of them, they’d come back to the same idea and think that would work better,” says Bay Scoggin, a member of Texas PIRG.
#Local houston traffic drivers#
The $2.2 billion widening of the Katy Freeway, making it one of the biggest in the world, ended up increasing average commute times for roughly 85 percent of drivers who used the 23-lane road. Houston recently became a poster child for what’s called induced demand-a transportation planner term that basically means if you add more roads, cars will fill them. Additionally, since it doesn’t include right-of-way costs (paying property owners for the right to travel through or above their land), the $7 billion price tag is simply a best-case scenario. This highway project will not only not solve the problems it claims to solve, the group claims. The Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG, a nationwide nonprofit declared the project one of its annual “ highway boondoggles,” projects that define needless and wasteful spending. Transit and community activists have painted the project as a symbol of all that’s wrong with transportation planning, and a sign of how focusing on cars instead of more efficient, affordable ways to move residents across the Houston area, will cost the city in terms of air pollution, congestion, affordability, and even resiliency. Why a “highway boondoggle” is business as usual Why would more urban highways and lanes of traffic-especially at a time when many cities are actively removing or capping their highways-be a foregone conclusion in any effort to mitigate Houston’s serious congestion problem? To critics, the I-45 project, named after the main highway that will be impacted, is an urban renewal reboot, a modern version of the freeway expansion projects that wrecked neighborhoods and divided cities in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Houstonians still recall how highways became channels of water that cut off neighborhoods from aid during the worst of the flooding. Resilience is a serious concern post-Harvey, and as flood maps are updated as flood risks evolve, the addition of concrete to the landscape could make the next storm’s impact worse.
#Local houston traffic plus#
It would add more impermeable concrete and asphalt infrastructure, plus future maintenance costs, to a city that is still recovering from some of the worst floods in recent memory. In addition to years of construction, the “ Texas-sized” expansion would displace four houses of worship, two schools, 168 homes, 1,067 multifamily units, and 331 businesses that account for just under 25,000 employees, impacting mostly people of color in low-income neighborhoods. This isn’t a small upgrade: in the name of accelerating commutes, the North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP) will widen and rebuild nearly 25 miles of highways in the city’s downtown, expanding some to be as wide as the length of two football fields. The annual death toll, according to the Houston Chronicle, is equivalent to “three fully-loaded 737s crashing each year at Houston’s airports, killing all aboard.”Īccording to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), the solution is more roads, specifically, a multiyear, multibillion dollar project to widen and expand the city’s highway infrastructure in an attempt to ease persistent bottlenecks that clog downtown traffic. It’s consistently ranked as a top city for traffic congestion, ninth-worst for ozone pollution according to the American Lung Association, and a tragic nexus for deaths from car crashes. Like many American cities, Houston is encircled by rings of highways-nine major radial freeways, three ring freeways, and a 180-mile fourth outer ring on the way.īut Houston isn’t just encircled by roads, it’s symbolically, and literally, being choked by cars.
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