![]() The idea that public transit is for socialists and that highways enable free-market capitalism pervades Texas politics. If you build it: The headquarters of the Texas Department of Transportation, whose belief that a Texan will always require a car has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Advocates in Texas are at the epicenter of a national movement asking: What if, instead of building our aging roads back wider and higher-doubling down on the displacement that began in the 1950s and the climate consequences unfolding now-we removed those highways altogether? What if we restored the scarred, paved-over land they inhabit and gave it back to the communities it was taken from? 10 But all of the evidence says that that’s not true, that instead is much more like a gas, meaning the volume of traffic congestion will expand to take up the capacity allowed.” 9īut if traffic can expand, it can also contract. For the engineers, “the solution is building bigger pipes. “I think traffic engineers tend to think traffic is like a liquid: If the pipes aren’t big enough, then it gets plugged up and overflows,” says Robert Goodspeed, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan. Yet in those same areas, congestion increased by 144 percent, significantly outpacing population growth. Between 19, the 100 largest urbanized areas in the United States spent more than $500 billion on adding new freeways and expanding existing ones. This is how transportation departments across the country have functioned for decades: building ever bigger freeways to fix congestion, despite the reams of evidence that it doesn’t work. Since 2015, the state has committed more than $25 billion to “congestion relief” projects, with plans to expand freeways in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso. Even though it is much more efficient, sustainable, and safe to move people through crowded cities by other modes-like buses and trains-TxDOT spends essentially all of its funding on enabling seamless car travel. Texas leaders have decided that to accommodate that growth, the state needs “to get new roads built swiftly and effectively,” as Governor Greg Abbott promised to do. Most of that growth will happen in urban areas like Austin, which has been the fastest-growing major metropolitan region in the country over the past decade. Texas’s population is projected to nearly double by 2050. Or you use that paddle and you travel to Cedar Park.” 3 If you can’t afford to buy in Austin, Lafleur says, “you’re left up a creek without a paddle. She soon realized that her nonprofit salary wouldn’t get her very far. “It was horrific, because the days went by so slowly.” 2īefore she moved, Lafleur had been renting an apartment less than 10 minutes from her office, but she wanted to own a home in the city she’d grown up in. “I was told that to heal, I needed to sit in a quiet room and let the time go by,” she says. The concussion she’d suffered kept her out of work for more than three months. ![]() David’s South Austin Medical Center the nurses had cut her clothes off her body to take a CT scan. When she woke up, she was in a hospital gown at St. As Lafleur merged onto the frontage road, a car stopped abruptly in front of her. ![]() She doesn’t remember much about what happened next. ![]() This story is published as part of a partnership between The Nation and the Texas Observer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |