Boondoggles
Basics
Highway Boondoggles: Tampa Bay Express Lanes
In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the original came out in 2014), U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group teamed up to profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. Streetsblog will be serializing the case studies in the report. Yesterday, we looked at Connecticut's $11.5 billion I-95 widening. Today, we focus on a proposed $3.3 billion highway widening in Tampa.
January 20, 2016
Ohio Cities to State DOT: No More New Roads, Just Fix What We Have
Given that the federal Highway Trust Fund is broke and the Interstate Highway System is more or less complete, maybe -- just maybe! -- it doesn't make sense to keep expanding highways. And if there's one place in the country where it's especially urgent to stop building more highways, it's northeast Ohio.
April 2, 2015
How the Lure of Spending Keeps Dumb Highway Projects Alive
Decades ago, Ohio officials drew a line on a map -- the Eastern Corridor, a highway for commuters living in Cincinnati's eastern suburbs. No matter how much time has passed and how little sense it makes to build that highway today, that line can still seem like destiny.
March 2, 2015
Cincinnati’s Highway Revolt on the Verge of Victory
Could the end be near for the $1.4 billion Eastern Corridor highway project proposed for eastern Cincinnati? Language added to Ohio's transportation budget, which is being debated right now, would specifically "prohibit [Ohio DOT] from funding the Eastern Corridor Project in Hamilton County."
February 25, 2015
Wisconsin Dumps One Urban Highway Boondoggle in Favor of Another
One of the nation's most poorly conceived highway proposals will become slightly less ridiculous. Transportation officials in Wisconsin recently announced they will no longer consider double-decking a portion of Interstate 94 in Milwaukee. The billion-dollar project would have raised the highway to building height in the Story Hill neighborhood.
February 19, 2015
Talkin’ Infrastructure With Chuck Marohn, Mike McGinn, and Kevin Shephard
Last week, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns hosted a video panel to discuss a very hot topic: How America's infrastructure got to be in such bad shape.
February 17, 2015
The Final Nail? Indiana Gov Says Illiana Expressway Boondoggle “On Hold”
Yesterday, the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), under the leadership of Governor Mike Pence, joined newly elected Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) in putting his state’s commitment to the Illiana Expressway project on hold.
February 12, 2015
Can Seattle Stop Its Highway Tunnel Boondoggle Before It’s Too Late?
It's been one year since the world's largest tunnel boring machine, "Bertha," got stuck 120 feet beneath Seattle. Before it broke down, the colossal machine had excavated just 1,000 feet of the two-mile tube that's supposed to house a new, $3.1 billion underground highway to replace an aging elevated road called the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
January 5, 2015
The Great Traffic Projection Swindle
This is the final piece in a three-part series about privately-financed roads. In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the Indiana Toll Road as an example of the growth in privately financed highways, and how financial firms can turn these assets into profits, even if the road itself is a big money loser. In this piece, we examine the shaky assumptions that toll road investments are based on, and how that is putting the public at risk.
November 20, 2014
Study: Corrupt States Spend More on Highways
A new academic study helps explain the enduring political popularity of expensive transportation boondoggles like Birmingham's $4.7 billion Northern Beltline and Kentucky's $2.6 billion Ohio River Bridges.
June 6, 2014