Stim Cash Gone Bad: Feds Fund Houston’s Highway to Nowhere

Robin Holzer. Photo: New York Times.

Reuters just wrapped up a two-day “Infrastructure Summit” and published a great collection of stories about the state of transportation policy in the U.S. I especially like this piece, featuring Robin Holzer of the Houston-based Citizens’ Transportation Coalition, who does a great job illustrating some of the major deficiencies that the federal stimulus bill failed to address:

Under the current system that U.S. President Barack Obama
has maintained, at least for now, the U.S. government will pay as much
as 80 percent of the multibillion dollar cost of a proposed 180-mile
ring road around Houston — its fourth such loop — even though it
serves a thinly populated rural area.

In contrast, an expansion of the city’s light-rail system is only
eligible for getting 50 percent of the cost paid by the federal
government, she said.

Yet more than 147,000 people live within a half-mile of the ten stations on the light rail system, Holzer said.

To demonstrate the low demand for the new ring road, Holzer
displayed a picture of its empty lanes that she said she took at 5 p.m.
one weekday — a typical rush hour in urban areas.

“It’s a boondoggle highway in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “We need to invest our money where the people are.”