Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Highway Expansion

Cincinnati’s Highway Revolt on the Verge of Victory

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 25, 2015 | No Comments

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.” The amendment was introduced by Republican state lawmaker Tom Brinkman, who represents an eastern portion […]

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Americans Are Driving Less, But Road Expansion Is Accelerating

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 20, 2015 | No Comments

Americans drive fewer miles today than in 2005, but since that time the nation has built 317,000 lane-miles of new roads — or about 40,000 miles per year. Maybe that helps explain why America’s infrastructure is falling apart. The new data on road construction comes from the Federal Highway Administration and reached our attention via Tony Dutzik at the Frontier […]

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More Money Won’t Fix U.S. Infrastructure If We Don’t Change How It’s Spent

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 5, 2015 | No Comments

“America’s infrastructure is slowly falling apart” went the headline of a recent Vice Magazine story that epitomizes a certain line of thinking about how to fix the nation’s “infrastructure crisis.” The post showed a series of structurally deficient bridges and traffic-clogged interchanges intended to jolt readers into thinking we need to spend more on infrastructure. The idea […]

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Washington Republicans: Put Seattle’s Highway-Borer Out of Its Misery

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 30, 2015 | No Comments

If nothing else, the politics of Seattle’s deep-bore highway tunnel fiasco keep getting more interesting. With Bertha the tunnel-boring machine stuck underground and “rescue” efforts literally destabilizing city neighborhoods, a pair of Republicans in the Washington State Senate introduced a bill to scrap the project before any more money is wasted. While putting a halt to […]

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Can Seattle Stop Its Highway Tunnel Boondoggle Before It’s Too Late?

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 5, 2015 | No Comments

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. […]

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The Great Traffic Projection Swindle

By Angie Schmitt and Payton Chung | Nov 20, 2014 | No Comments

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. […]

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