Highway Expansion

Things are really getting heated in Montgomery County, Texas, just outside Houston, over a proposal to issue $350 million in bonds to maintain and expand roads. Like fire-and-brimstone heated.

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.

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.

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."

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.