America *Must* End Highway Expansions
(Source: Unsplash.)
When we build a highway, we know we have to maintain it. The same applies to a bridge. Every highway or bridge that has ever been built comes with a predictable and easily calculable schedule for maintenance. This isn’t difficult math.
On Wednesday, the Montreal Gazette reported that Canada’s Environment Minister, Steven Guilbeault, said that the government has made the decision to stop investing in new road infrastructure. “There will be no more envelopes from the federal government to enlarge the road network,” they quoted Guilbeault as saying.
So, why do we struggle to maintain our roads and bridges? Why do we continue to suffer with enormous backlogs of basic infrastructure maintenance? Why do we have round after round of tax increases, referendums, and debt expansions to pay for perpetually underfunded transportation systems? Did nobody see this coming?
Even more unfathomable is why we continue to build more. More highways. More bridges. More interchanges. More frontage roads. More and more lane miles are added every year to a system that we are already failing to properly maintain. This is madness!
The goal of Strong Towns’ End Highway Expansion campaign is to curtail the primary mechanism of local wealth destruction and municipal insolvency—that being the continued expansion of America’s highways and auto-related transportation systems.
Highway building is a bipartisan obsession. In fact, amid all the partisan rancor and cultural division that defines modern political discourse, the one thing that our national leaders can find consensus on is the funding of new highways and bridges.
The largest federal infrastructure spending plan ever proposed identified 173,000 miles of roadway already in poor condition. The bill would only have modernized 20,000 of those miles, and that would take a decade in which time the backlog of maintenance would be even bigger.
The same with bridges. Our leadership identified 45,000 bridges already in a state of disrepair. Over a decade, they would fix only 10,000 of them. That’s all.
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What happens to the hundreds of thousands of roadway miles not maintained? And what happens to the tens of thousands of bridges that we don’t fix? Nobody knows because there is no plan.
What there is a plan to do is to build even more. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has supercharged highway and bridge building, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into existing programs that are designed to do just that: build more highways and bridges.
More ribbon cuttings with smiling politicians. More press releases touting progress. More fiddling while Rome burns.
This farce needs to end.
We need to restore faith in our institutions, to show that the government is competent enough to maintain the essential infrastructure systems our nation relies on. The first step—the only logical thing we can do right now—is to stop building more.
We can debate the second step. There needs to be a lot of discussion, at every level of government, about the series of policy changes that need to come about to manage and maintain a mature transportation system, which is what we now have. We might not agree on the second step, but we can all agree on the first:
Until we have a credible plan for maintaining our existing transportation infrastructure, we must stop building more roads and bridges.
Every new lane mile we build adds to our backlog of future transportation costs. Every bridge or interchange we construct makes our fiscal insolvency worse. No matter how important you think your local project is, that project is making your transportation system worse off.
It’s making us all worse off.
