Milestones: An off-ramp for highway boondoggles

Through research and reporting, PIRG has called out the problems with highway expansion and drawn attention to real transportation issues affecting the public.

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If they build it, cars will come

It’s counterintuitive: You might expect that adding more lanes to a busy highway would ease traffic. But it doesn’t.

It turns out, as multiple studies show, that expanding a highway actually sets off a chain reaction of decisions — more businesses locate on a city’s outskirts, more people move to the suburbs, more people opt to drive instead of taking transit, and so on. Soon, traffic is just as bad, or worse, than it was before more lanes were added. Call it the Fundamental Law of Road Congestion.

The bottom line, PIRG researchers have found, is that instead of addressing the real transportation challenges that most Americans face, highway expansion projects cost truckloads of money, diverting funds away from road repair, public transit and other needs. That’s why in 2014, PIRG came up with the sobriquet “highway boondoggles.”

In the years that followed, PIRG shone a spotlight on more than 58 of these boondoggles. PIRG’s six Highway Boondoggle reports not only helped the phrase make its way into the transportation policy lexicon, they also helped stop four highway expansion projects that would have cost taxpayers up to $13.15 billion.

Staff | TPIN
PIRG’s Phineas Baxandall (center) speaks at a Congressional briefing about Transportation in the Rayburn House Office Building in June 2009.

Wasted money, missed opportunities 

In September 2014, U.S. PIRG Education Fund released our first report on highway boondoggles, written by Phineas Baxandall and Jeff Inglis. Phineas and Jeff detailed the problems, cost and return on investment of 11 highway expansion projects slated to cost $13 billion.

As PIRG staff researched, wrote and publicized subsequent editions of Highway Boondoggles, the attention they generated among elected officials, activists and the media helped put a stop to several projects. For example, officials halted the Tesoro Extension in California and the Dallas Trinity Parkway in Texas. The projects were cancelled in 2018 and 2017 respectively — the city of Dallas saved $1.5 billion by canceling the expansion and the southern California region saved $200 million. Other PIRG-targeted boondoggles have been cancelled, put on hold or delayed in Wisconsin, Illinois, New Mexico and South Carolina.

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Illinois PIRG’s Abe Scarr releases the Highway Boondoggles report in September 2014.

Better options to more of the same

PIRG’s transportation team also offered proactive policy suggestions at both the state and federal level. By refraining from or cancelling costly and disruptive highway expansion projects, the advocates said, government could instead invest in public transportation and adopt changes in land-use policy, road-pricing measures, and technological measures that help drivers avoid peak-time traffic.

The 2021 PIRG-backed bipartisan infrastructure bill, while still allocating too many dollars to highway projects, set aside record investments in public transit as well as better infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians.

Staff | TPIN
WISPIRG’s Peter Skopec (right of speaker) stands with coalition partners at a Highway Boondoggles event in 2015.

About this series: PIRG and The Public Interest Network have achieved much more than we can cover on this page. You can find more milestones of our work on transportation below. You can also explore an interactive timeline featuring more of our network’s transportation milestones.

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