New report: Bringing transportation spending into the 21st century

The Trinity Parkway is just one of many proposals for massive highway construction or expansion that defy logic and common-sense and threaten to sap resources that could be used for other urgent transportation priorities. Our new report, Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future, highlights 11 examples – including Dallas’s Trinity Parkway – where officials should reevaluate the needs and costs of major highway construction projects in light of current data and modern public priorities. If projects that once appeared necessary are no longer needed, they should be canceled or delayed.

Jeff Inglis

Policy Analyst

In the late 1990s, officials, businesspeople and community leaders in Dallas declared they had a way to solve the problem of congestion in the downtown area. They would build a six-lane highway along the Trinity River, which runs between levees just south of the city center.

Plans for the Trinity Parkway always sat uneasily alongside another vision for the Trinity River: making it a natural and recreational resource for Dallas residents.

Over the intervening years, the latter vision for the Trinity has advanced by leaps and bounds. City leaders started restoring the natural environment along the river by freeing its flow from concrete channels, restoring wetlands and wildlife habitat, and enhancing public enjoyment of the waterway.

But plans for plowing the toll road through the area – at a cost of $1.5 billion – remain alive, despite the inherent conflict between highway construction and a modern vision for Dallas that emphasizes downtown revitalization and a more balanced transportation system.  The concept of the highway is now so out of step with that new vision that proponents, including one of its designers, have publicly declared changes of heart and joined forces with community members who have opposed the highway for years.

And yet, the Trinity Parkway lives on. The data do not support official claims that it will improve mobility for city residents. Traffic at the crucial the Mixmaster interchange was projected to increase at an annual rate of 0.6 percent, but it actually dropped an average of 4 percent per year from 2007 to 2012. Those who dreamed it up no longer support its construction. But Texas officials press forward nonetheless.

The Trinity Parkway is just one of many proposals for massive highway construction or expansion that defy logic and common-sense and threaten to sap resources that could be used for other urgent transportation priorities. Our new report, Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future, highlights 11 examples – including Dallas’s Trinity Parkway – where officials should reevaluate the needs and costs of major highway construction projects in light of current data and modern public priorities. If projects that once appeared necessary are no longer needed, they should be canceled or delayed.

Authors

Jeff Inglis

Policy Analyst