Year after year, state and local governments propose billions of dollars’ worth of new and expanded highways that often do little to reduce congestion or address real transportation challenges, while diverting scarce funding from infrastructure repairs and key transportation priorities.
An example from our last Highway Bondoggles report shows why the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is so important for understanding the environmental and community impacts of major new infrastructure projects.
Sometimes it might seem as though we need to scrap it all and start over. But while much of America’s current infrastructure is environmentally threatening and inefficient, many parts of it can - and should - provide the groundwork from which we can build a better, cleaner system.
We don’t just need more walkable cities, more efficient vehicles, zero-carbon fuels, or viable alternatives to the one-car-per-adult system. We need all of them. And we need them now.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argues that there are two kinds of people in the world: “foot people” and “car people”. As a "foot person" who managed to reach the age of 33 without ever having had a driver’s license, let alone a car, things took an unlikely turn when I moved to Los Angeles – one of the most unwalkable cities on the planet.
The evidence is clear. So why the disconnect between the climate change-fighting rhetoric of political leaders and their continued love for big highway widening projects?
Associate Director and Senior Policy Analyst, Frontier Group
Policy Analyst, Frontier Group
