As emissions rise, some environmentalists are turning their attention to widening roads as well as pipelines
By Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, Feb. 15, 2024
For decades, the United States has built and expanded a 220,000-mile network of state and interstate highways, easing cross-country travel while dividing cities and boosting suburban sprawl.
But as the planet warms, some activists are fighting back — citing the future emissions of adding lanes and the devastation faced by communities razed to make way for them. Their push against giant multilane highways represents an emerging frontier for the environmental movement, which has historically been more focused on fossil fuel projects than seven-lane roads.
“We don’t often think of it in those terms, but expanding highways is essentially like building new oil pipelines,” said Ben Crowther, the policy director for America Walks. “It increases emissions in the same way.”
Last week, a coalition of almost 200 groups called for a nationwide moratorium on expanding highways — citing their environmental harm and the forced relocation of nearby low-income communities of color. A new national group called the Freeway Fighters is uniting local ones under one umbrella, helping activists learn from each other on how to slow expansion — from an almost $10 billion project to widen Interstate 45 around downtown Houston to a plan to enlarge Interstate 5 around Portland, Ore.
It might seem to be an improbable fight for a country long known for its “love affair” with the car. But with the United States aiming to cut emissions to zero by 2050 — and less than 1 percent of cars on the road electric — activists say America’s main transportation system has to change.
Historically, much of America’s public money spent on transportation has gone to highways. In 2017, $177 billion in public money went to highways, according to the Congressional Budget Office, more than double the $75 billion spent on mass transit and rail infrastructure. Even now, with many of the nation’s highways in disrepair, about 20 to 30 percent of all public highway spending goes to expansion, rather than programs to fix and repair existing roads.
State and local transportation officials say highway expansions can help relieve traffic jams, improve road safety and boost economic development. If planned correctly, they also argue that such projects can boost bus movement and ride-sharing.
Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said in a statement that each state transportation department “uses a wide variety of strategies to advance safety, mobility, and access across the state and in every community.”
But experts argue that expansion projects do little to reduce traffic congestion — and add to the country’s climate problems. Almost 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from transportation — most of it from cars and trucks. While interstate highways make up only around 1 percent of the nation’s roads, they carry around a quarter of its traffic.
“We continue to spend significant amounts of money at the federal level and at the state level expanding our highway networks,” said Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst with Frontier Group. “Given the climate issues that we are already facing — and the fact that we are already building out a massive highway network around the country — I think it’s legitimate to ask whether that’s the right set of priorities.”
One of the arguments against such expansions is the theory that adding more lanes just leads to more traffic — what economists call “induced demand.” Sitting in traffic on a highway during rush hour may seem like an advertisement for expanding the highway — after all, more lanes allow a greater flow of traffic. Under that logic, traffic operates a bit like water through a pipe: The larger the pipe, the more water can get through.
But economists and traffic engineers say that’s not a good analogy. When lanes are added to a highway — or any road, for that matter — more cars arrive to fill the available space. People might decide to drive more, or the expansion might further develop an area and encourage people to move in.
“Induced demand is just what happens when you increase supply,” said Matthew Turner, a professor of economics at Brown University. In 2009, Turner and his colleague Gilles Duranton published a paper showing that vehicle miles traveled in U.S. cities increased “in exact proportion” to highways. The result has since been replicated in Japan, China and many countries around the world, including in Europe. “It looks like this is a fact about the world,” Turner said.
Turner says that this doesn’t mean building a highway is always the wrong choice — but that building a highway to reduce congestion is not effective. “If you are trying to build to reduce road congestion, you should stop,” he said. “If you are trying to add road congestion to facilitate people moving around, that’s a whole different thing.”
But anti-highway activists say this link between bigger roads and more highway traffic — combined with the heavy pollution burden on communities — should take expansions off the table.
Some environmentalists also say they feel betrayed that the Biden administration is not spending all of the approximately $350 billion in highway funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on repairing existing highways.
According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, more than 20 percent of the funding, which is spread out over five years, so far has gone to expanding or widening roads. An additional 6 percent has funded new construction. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, 17 of the 20 largest highway projects supported by the infrastructure law include expansions.
“This money could have been used to change the status quo,” Crowther of America Walks said. “Instead, we’ve seen a doubling down on new highway projects.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration has taken the strongest actions of any Administration in history to reduce carbon pollution in transportation,” Samantha Keitt, a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration, said in an email. She pointed to funding in the infrastructure law for electric buses, public transit, EV charging stations, and bicycle and pedestrian projects.
President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act also included money to tear down highways that divided communities. But that program only has $1 billion in dedicated funds — a tiny sliver of the tens of billions of dollars going to expanding existing highways. The infrastructure law also included approximately $3 billion in a program that could remove roads dividing neighborhoods.
The Biden administration has encouraged the adoption of electric cars as a path to meeting climate goals. But it will be difficult to deploy EVs fast enough to completely remove emissions from transportation. According to one study in the journal Nature Climate Change, 90 percent of vehicles would need to be electric by 2050 to meet climate goals. And even if EV adoption accelerates dramatically, many gas-powered cars will still be on the road by mid-century.
Beyond the climate impact, activists argue that highways displace communities of color and expose neighborhoods to deadly air pollution. According to one analysis of data from the National Air Toxics Assessment, the risk of respiratory illness is 3.4 times higher for people living less than one mile from a highway than for those living more than 10 miles away.
“We’re thinking about air quality and what it does to people’s bodies,” said Ally Smither, a singer and an organizer for Stop TxDOT I-45, a group opposing the Houston highway expansion.
Coalitions resisting highway expansions can include a range of different groups — community efforts, environmental groups and other civic organizations. In the push to stop the widening of I-45, neighborhood groups are joined by public health advocates, bike organizations and the local chapter of the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
Kendra London, a Houston activist and the founder of Our Afrikan Family, learned about the expansion project four years ago. Since then, she has hosted community meetings and scheduled bike tours to show the houses and residents who will be displaced if the project, which is estimated to demolish over 1,000 homes, goes through. “We’re left out of too many vital conversations,” London said.
Activists have rallied hundreds of highway opponents at public meetings and protested outside of state transportation offices. Other groups file civil rights lawsuits or complaints under the National Environmental Policy Act, which triggers stringent reviews for many major projects.
“Turn out as many people as you possibly can and put up a show of force,” Crowther said.
Some states are challenging the status quo outright. The Colorado Department of Transportation has set strict emissions targets in response to a 2019 law. The new rules require the state to analyze how highway expansions would increase emissions — including induced demand — and offset those increases with transit, bike or pedestrian projects elsewhere.
Matt Frommer, a senior transportation associate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said the rules had helped block an expansion of Interstate 25 after the state realized that the project would exceed new pollution limits.
The state plans to spend some of the hundreds of millions of dollars saved on bus and transit projects.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/02/15/will-america-ever-stop-building-more-highways/