Opinion: Wider roads fail and the public knows this

With the region’s elected officials gathering at their annual retreat this Friday and Saturday, the Coalition for Smarter Growth continued to urge reform of the region’s transportation priorities.

A national poll of 2001 voters (90% of whom are drivers) released last week by Transportation for America revealed that two-thirds of Americans know highway expansions don’t cure traffic. Sixty-seven percent of American voters polled agreed that widening highways attract more people to drive, which creates more traffic in the long run, defeating the stated purpose for countless road expansion projects across the country.

In short, the public understands that “induced demand” is real, even if they are not aware of the term itself. Today, when officials in the DC region are planning for at least 900 more lane miles of highway and arterial road expansion and amid the ongoing debate over high-occupancy toll lanes for 495/270 in Maryland and 495 through Alexandria, the Coalition for Smarter Growth (CSG) urged officials to reconsider these plans. “CSG’s Induced Demand fact sheet for local, regional, and state officials – released today – makes clear the failures of road expansion,” said Stewart Schwartz, Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

“Induced demand is the widely documented phenomenon in which widening major roads and highways results in more driving (vehicle miles traveled) that generally cancels out any congestion-reduction benefits in as little as five to ten years,” said Bill Pugh, Senior Policy Fellow for CSG and author of the fact sheet which draws upon numerous national and international studies and includes local DC area examples.

“Unfortunately, elected officials in the DC region continue to propose over 900 lane miles of major road expansion and continue to ignore the reality that it won’t work,” said Schwartz. “They will end up wasting billions of tax dollars and make our quality of life worse, not better.”

The Council of Governments’ Transportation Planning Board is currently developing its Visualize 2050 regional “constrained” long-range transportation plan1 (the existing 2045 plan includes 900 lane miles in road expansion), and in Northern Virginia right now, counties and cities are submitting project applications for funding through the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.

CSG has previously shown in its “On the Wrong Road” report that the NVTAuthority’s “unconstrained” Transaction 2050 plan would add 1000 lane miles of roads in Northern Virginia alone and induce growth in driving at 1.5 to 3 times the rate of population growth in the outer suburbs. The NVTAuthority has allocated over half of its regional funding to road capacity expansion projects, even though the agency’s own Technology Strategic Plan acknowledges the reality of induced demand.

Stewart Schwartz
Executive Director, Coalition for Smarter Growth

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