highway Archives - Transportation For America

There’s a climate cost to America’s freeways, and it’s not paid equally

A freeway laces through Seattle as smog descends on the city's skyline

The environmental impacts of the Interstate Highway System continue to harm communities of color through health hazards, pollution, and displacement.

The sprawling roadway network of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) is a ubiquitous feature of life in America. Long drives along vast stretches of freeway have come to symbolize mobility and freedom in cultural memory, obscuring the insidious nature of the creation of the highway system and its legacies of environmental racism and inequality.

These legacies are not abstract; they have tangible effects in terms of pollution, population displacement, and environmental degradation. To illustrate this point, we’ll start with a story.

The community of Shiloh in Coffee County, Alabama

Highways can endanger lives by exacerbating negative health and safety outcomes. This is exemplified in the ongoing injustices against the predominantly Black community of Shiloh in Coffee County, located in the rural south of Alabama, where the expansion of Highway 84 from 2 to 4 lanes has compounded flooding impacts for the residents. Completed in 2018, the highway expansion project elevated the roadway significantly higher than the existing terrain and neighborhood.

When it rains, the water from the highway is diverted towards people’s homes (as you can see in this video from ABC News) as pipes in the drainage system are pointed in the direction of the neighborhood. Paved roadways are also particularly impervious to stormwater and create substantial run-off, which picks up additives such as rust, metals, and pesticides. The Shiloh community consistently experiences flooding, and with heavy rain becoming increasingly frequent due to climate change, the situation is only expected to worsen. Flooding has affected the structural integrity of homes and is raising alarming health concerns with residents reporting the appearance of mold. Physical damages and rising maintenance issues have forced the Shiloh community to contend with the difficult reality of investing in expensive repair projects or leaving their homes.

The Shiloh community has been working to bring awareness to the plight and adversity they have been experiencing for the past 6 years, in a political landscape that has largely neglected to address the severity of the environmental disaster created in their backyard. Alabama DOT (ALDOT) continues to maintain that no discrimination took place when they planned the highway widening project and that the flooding is not a consequence of the expansion. Following community complaints, three residents received settlements of $5000 or less in exchange for restrictive covenants on their property that release ALDOT from any responsibility of flood damage, which is the extent of any action taken by the state.

Robert Bullard, popularly known as the “father of environmental justice,” has also been collaborating with the community to demand accountability at the federal level. Their efforts culminated in an ongoing civil rights investigation from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and a visit from the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in early April of this year. But so far, no real relief has been found. The residents that signed away their rights feel misled and misheard, with the fear that their homes—and all the wealth and history they hold—are being washed away.

A compounding price

While the community of Shiloh’s case is an extreme example, countless communities across the country are harmed by existing highways and highway expansion projects. The highway system was constructed in a way that cut through vibrant existing neighborhoods, plowing through the heart of communities of color. This build-out of infrastructure cemented racial divides and segregation, encouraging connectivity for certain communities at the expense of others.

Inequities produced by the highway system are reinforced daily, with communities neighboring freeways bearing a disproportionate share of environmental harm. The siting of highways has historically exposed low-income communities and communities of color to higher amounts of air, water, and noise pollutants which in turn produces higher risk for disease and illness. Research indicates that there is a higher exposure to air contaminants for these communities which increases risk for cardiovascular disease and lung problems, among other health concerns. Proximity to paved surfaces, which absorb more heat than natural surfaces, means that communities are subjected to extreme heat as well.

A man in a cowboy hat walks down the sidewalk next to a row of parked cars in Little Village, Chicago — *Little Village, Chicago (Wikimedia Commons)*

Residents of Little Village, a predominantly Hispanic community in Chicago, have had to contend with poor quality air as a constant feature of their neighborhood that is located in close proximity to Interstate 55. Despite this, a proposal was introduced to add new lanes to the highway, incentivizing increased traffic, leading to a higher concentration of air pollutants in the region and a litany of detrimental health effects. Similarly, a controversial expansion of I-45 in North Houston is set to start soon, which would displace communities and add to existing problems of air pollution.

One of the regulatory tools that the public has at their disposal to challenge administrative actions is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires agencies to produce detailed statements on the environmental impacts of a project, potential actions to mitigate damage, and alternative projects with lower impact. Periods for public comment are integrated into the process as opportunities for affected communities to raise concerns and ensure that their considerations are involved in the decision-making process. Although NEPA gives the public a platform to voice their concerns about projects, it is not designed to stop these projects from being implemented, even if they may cause significant environmental harm. This means that infrastructure projects, such as highway construction and expansion, can continue to move forward even when the repercussions on environmental justice are clear.

Recent research and analysis conducted by T4A has found that trends of highway expansion are continuing to stay the same. Funding is being moved towards emissions-increasing roadway widenings at a critical moment in the climate crisis when our dollars should be spent towards robust public and alternative transportation options. Our transportation system is steeped in environmental racism and continues to function as a driver of inequality. It has created countless socio-economic benefits for certain communities at the tremendous expense of others. Changing weather patterns have also unearthed the fragility of our transportation networks and the need for resilience to allow them to withstand vulnerability.

As the current administration works towards building a future for transportation infrastructure that is equitable and sustainable, it is presented with an opportunity to radically redress historic inequities and meaningfully change how we invest our federal transportation dollars and prioritize who we invest in. Our report, Divided by Design, explains further. Read it here.

Better build another highway: The Legacy Parkway story

A long highway surrounded by grasslands and hills, with a narrow black trail curving to the left

Gently curving through wetlands southeast of the Great Salt Lake, Utah’s Legacy Parkway has been characterized as an example of a state DOT making a principled compromise to craft a transportation solution balancing transport modes and ecological needs. However, the legacy UDOT had truly left behind was a connection for the new West Davis Corridor, an ongoing project continuing the march through the remaining marshes and farmland of the Salt Lake Valley.

Background

Over the last thirty years, Utah has seen impressive population growth that has been unmatched by most states, but not all responses to growth balance communities’ needs for equity, environmental preservation, and economic sustainability.

According to projections from transportation planners at UDOT, population and travel demand in the five counties on the east half of the Great Salt Lake were going to increase an astonishing 60 percent and 69 percent, respectively, by 2020. (2020 Census data shows their population estimate was off by about 130,000 people.) Planners warned that at this scale of growth, not building new highway infrastructure would be devastating with travel speeds at peak hours dropping to just seven miles per hour.

To prevent this catastrophe, Utah Governor Michael Leavitt announced long-range plans for Legacy Highway in 1996, a 120-mile highway running parallel to Interstate 15. The first portion of this expansive route would be called Legacy Parkway and double as a “line in the sand” to prevent development west of the highway. Under the Utah DOT’s original preferred plan, that line would cut through 1,568 acres of Utah’s rare wetlands and historic farmsteads.

Advocates push back

Starting in 1997, the Utah Department of Transportation began environmental impact studies for Legacy Parkway as part of the NEPA process, culminating in the release of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) in 1998. In the public meetings following the release, advocacy groups like Utahns for Better Transportation highlighted a multitude of flaws in the study and in the plans themselves. Instead of presenting alternatives to highway routes, UDOT presented the public with alternative highway routes, variations in the right of way that differed only in their relative negative impacts on residences, farms, and wetlands. Residents pointed to the Draft Environmental Statement’s incompleteness and contradictions, finding it had failed to calculate the project’s impact on wildlife, paradoxically associated higher air quality with increasing vehicle travel, and neglected to evaluate transit and land use among the alternatives. In an analysis commissioned by the Sierra Club, researchers found the DEIS’s traffic analyses were misleading. The models were applied inconsistently across geographies, allowing UDOT to present the no-build alternative as extremely untenable.

Legacy Highway

Musicians weighed in on the project too. Country music singer and songwriter Brenn Hill wrote the song “Legacy Highway” expressing his frustrations about the plan. The title of this blog post comes from the lyrics of that song. Listen to it here.

After one year of comments and federal reviews, UDOT and the Federal Highway Administration, the lead federal agency of the project, released the Legacy Parkway Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) in July 2000. Utah DOT’s new preferred plans would include a multi-use trail, cost only $369 million, fill only 46 acres of wetlands, and impact the second least amount of developable land compared to alternative highway plans.

Screen capture of a chart of Projected Demographic and Traffic Changes in Legacy Parkway’s 2000 Environmental Impact Statement, which includes projections for population, households, employment, vehicles, home-based work trips, total vehicle trips, VMT, and average system peak speed. The chart is available on page 47 of the document linked in the caption of this image. — *Legacy Parkway 2000 Final Environmental Impact Statement, including the projected 60% increase in population from 1995 to 2020.*

While UDOT’s Final Environmental Impact Study portrayed Legacy Parkway as a principled compromise that could both meet the automotive travel demands of 2020 and preserve wetlands, it still ignored much of the substantive criticism levied against the models in the earlier Draft Environmental Impact Statement. As UDOT forged ahead, awarding construction contracts as early as December 2000 (before they’d received final permits), Utahns for Better Transportation, the Sierra Club, and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson took the only recourse left to them: they filed a lawsuit.

Lawsuit

Construction on the Legacy Parkway began in January 2001, just after the Federal Highway Administration approved the Legacy Parkway FEIS. With no other recourse, Utahns for Better Transportation, the Sierra Club, and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson sued the Utah Department of Transportation and participating federal agencies to stop the construction of Legacy Parkway. The plaintiffs brought their issues against the DEIS and FEIS to the Utah District Court.

Elected leaders make a difference

It should not be too surprising that Anderson, a mayor known for his ardent advocacy for sustainable municipal policies, joined the suit. Since the start of his term in 1999, Mayor Anderson had seen the outsized impact that Salt Lake City’s TRAX light rail system had on the city and presided over network improvements that improved daily ridership vastly beyond initial projections. Local support for transportation alternatives grew to be so strong that voters in the city passed tax increases—on themselves—to support the development of new mass transit infrastructure. Building off of public support for these new systems, Anderson stated that “with the commitment by the community to mass transit comes a commitment by our Administration to transit-oriented development.”

While the first case against Legacy Parkway was dismissed in the Utah District Court, the coalition of advocates appealed the decision in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. In November 2001, the court issued an injunction and forced the Utah Department of Transportation to cease construction. After nearly a year of review, the Court found that the federal agencies’ Environmental Impact Statements were inadequate “to the point of being arbitrary and capricious.”

The court forced the agencies to develop a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement that addressed failures to adequately consider harm to wildlife, alternate highway routes, narrower median design (the design included in the 2000 FEIS would have allowed for future expansion to six lanes), and mass transit. UDOT and the FHWA developed a new impact statement to account for the original deficiencies from 2002 to 2004, but by then, the project could not afford any more lawsuits.

Compromise

Advocates might have won the battle, but they lost the war. They negotiated a compromise with UDOT while the Final Environmental Impact Statement was being drafted, winning concessions like $2.5 million for rapid transit studies, an additional $12 million for land preservation, and unique provisions banning semi-trucks and lowering Legacy Parkway’s speed limit (an ineffective solution to dangerous roadway speeds, as we wrote in Dangerous by Design).

Construction resumed in March 2006, Legacy Parkway was completed in 2008, and just 12 years later, the provisions expired, allowing the speed limit to increase and semi-trucks to drive on the parkway. By making a few temporary compromises, UDOT successfully greenwashed the first segment of the 120-mile-long Legacy Highway network that now transports 20,000-30,000 vehicles a day.

When Legacy Parkway opened, it was celebrated by motorists for its scenic routes and tranquil views of sunflower blooms along its meandering path. Ironically, drivers enjoying the views now contribute to emissions in a region with some of the worst air quality in the nation. To build the parkway, over 4 million tons of material had to be used to fill in the wetlands below the road and the concrete and steel used in construction could have produced as much as 40,000 tons of CO2. It cost 685 million dollars.

Better build another highway

Though planners miscalculated how dramatic population growth would be in the past, the counties surrounding the Great Salt Lake will no doubt continue to see major growth. But rather than taking congestion as a sign to innovate new solutions, like a hammer looking for a nail, UDOT uses the all too familiar tool of highway expansion to “solve” congestion. Lane additions and highway expansion every 10 years can’t solve traffic and certainly will not improve ecological outcomes, but it can cost the public their health and hundreds of millions of dollars for a handful of miles.

Now UDOT has new plans for a northern expansion of Legacy Parkway, meant to address still further population growth projections. UDOT and FHWA have familiar words for the project, called the West Davis Corridor:

By 2040, the number of households in this region will increase by 65 percent. This population growth requires a solution that addresses upcoming transportation needs while minimizing impact to the community and environment. After a thorough analysis of fifty-one alternatives, a preferred alternative (West Davis Highway) has been identified. By 2040, this one project would reduce all congestion west of I-15 by one-third.

This new highway will include a land preserve and a recreational trail as part of its environmental impact mitigation strategy. While the interchange to I-15 is being constructed, traffic is being routed over the Legacy Parkway. The budget for the West Davis Corridor project is $800 million.

A satellite image from the Utah Department of Transportation showing a new extension of roadway North of Legacy Parkway, weaving past the Salt Lake and into suburbs north of Salt Lake City. — *Project plans showing the interchange between I-15, Legacy Parkway and the West Davis Corridor. Image Source: ArcGIS*

State DOTs would have us believe that highways are the solution to population growth and congestion on our nation’s roadways, but history has proven otherwise. Costly highway projects always seem to require a new costly highway project, and the endless cycle only makes conditions worse for the environment and people who live around and drive on these roads. While advocates did succeed in changing the course and character of Legacy Parkway, this compromise failed to make lasting change. To do that, we need more than compromise. We need a fundamental change in our priorities.

Community Connectors: tools for advocates

You may be fighting against a freeway expansion. You may be trying to advance a Reconnecting Communities project to remove an old highway. You might be just trying to make wide, dangerous arterial roads a little safer for people to cross. This Community Connectors portal explains common terms, decodes the processes, clarifies the important actors, and inspires with helpful real-world stories.

Inverting the IIJA’s double standard

Aerial image of a complicated highway interchange in Phoenix Arizona.

The IIJA and IRA are hailed as landmark pieces of climate legislation. Unfortunately, by prioritizing the status quo of flexibility and formula status for highway projects, the IIJA is set to see the gains of any individual emissions-reducing projects go up in smoke.

When the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was passed two years ago, it was hailed as the biggest investment in our nation’s infrastructure in decades and included flexible funding that states and metro areas could use toward climate initiatives. When followed by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last year, the first two years of the Biden presidency were described as making monumental gains on climate policy.

Unfortunately, as illuminated by an article this summer in the Washington Post, it’s clear that—on the transportation front at least— rhetoric is falling short of reality. The laws, frequently touted by legislators and administration officials as important means to reduce greenhouse gasses and slow climate change, while also providing funding for resiliency efforts, are set to do neither. Projects for private cars are getting the most money with the fewest strings—while transit, traffic safety, ADA accessibility, and other projects that could actually reduce emissions compete to share less money with more strings.

These laws are not a newfound paragon of sustainability and resilience. It’s the same double standard that got us into a climate crisis in the first place.

Some good money after a lot of bad money

The transportation sector accounts for a plurality of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (28%), and every single attempt to add capacity to a highway—or increase the number of cars it can carry by widening it—increases these emissions. This is because of a concept known as induced demand, which is essentially the “if you build it, they will come” of transportation. As demonstrated by Transportation for America’s jointly-produced SHIFT Calculator, even adding a single lane mile of principal arterial roadway can lead to tens of thousands of additional gallons of gas being burned per year.

Unfortunately, these are exactly the types of projects that the IIJA allows states to spend money on. Out of over $600 billion dollars set aside for surface transportation, two-thirds is reserved for traditional highway programs. This includes over $200 billion combined for the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) and the Surface Transportation Block Grant Program (STBG). Even if the $14 billion in two climate programs cited by the Washington Post weren’t being raided by states across the country (for projects that should be funded with NHPP and STBG dollars), it would still be dwarfed several times over by funding reserved for capacity expansion projects.

Putting the cart(e Blanche) before the horse

This discrepancy between how projects for cars and projects for all other transportation modes get treated extends beyond how much funding these programs receive to how those funds are distributed. The NHPP and STBG are formula programs which means that the amount line on these checks may already be filled in, but the memo line is effectively empty. States can use these pots of money to build new roads, make resiliency improvements, and build intercity bus terminals, among a long list of potential projects that include undergrounding utilities and controlling invasive plant life. Based on what they’ve done with the money that was specifically supposed to go to reducing emissions and increasing climate resiliency, I’ll let you guess what they continue to choose to spend this money on. (Hint: most of the arterial roads I grew up driving on are lined by above-ground power lines and kudzu-covered trees.)

In contrast, localities and states aren’t given the same carte blanche to reduce emissions. With the exception of emergency COVID relief funding, transit agencies receive effectively no funding for their operations. To build streets safe enough to walk or roll on, renovate transit stations so they’re accessible to people with disabilities, or improve the infrastructure of their transit systems so they can carry more people, many local and regional governments have to go through competitive grant application processes. And even when emission reductions get money through formula programs they often contain the exact loopholes discussed in the Washington Post, allowing their money to be moved to projects that increase emissions.

Flexibility is not a climate solution

This doesn’t mean that making infrastructure funding flexible or having competitive grant programs are inherently bad policy choices. Alaska and Florida are drastically different places with drastically different transportation needs, and it’s good to verify that projects are set up to succeed before spending significant amounts of money on them.

But transportation policy that provides endless flexibility and ensures that most transit, active transportation, and accessibility projects have to compete with other proposed projects to access federal funds is incompatible with climate goals. For decades, state DOTs have been focused on building more and more infrastructure for private cars at the expense of every other possible mode of transportation—if we give them a choose-your-own-adventure program like the NHPP and STBG, the adventure they’re going to choose is more lane miles and more emissions. That’s exactly what Transportation for America feared would take place with the IIJA—despite the significant progress in areas like passenger rail—and what the Washington Post confirmed has happened to just a small portion of the money that’s made its way from USDOT to the states.

To reduce emissions from the transportation sector, we have to recognize that flexibility alone is not a climate solution. When it comes to climate, the goal of good transportation policy must be to make it easier to complete projects that reduce emissions and more difficult to complete projects that increase emissions. That means inverting how much we fund different modes of transportation, so that transit, active transportation, and passenger rail projects get the majority of funds, instead of highways. That also means inverting how these funds are accessed, so transit, active transportation, and passenger rail projects are funded by formula dollars, and highway projects are forced to apply to competitive grant programs.

Federal transportation policy is undermining any progress on climate

The conversation on climate change tends to focus on a few big things—electric vehicles, renewable energy, putting a price on carbon. But no matter how much progress we make on those fronts, Democrats and Republicans remain deeply committed to antiquated policy that undermines any action we take on climate change: spending billions to build new highways, encouraging more and more driving.

Transportation accounts for the largest share of carbon emissions in the U.S., and those emissions are rising—even as other sectors have improved. As federal policy and funding encourages more and wider highways, people live further away from the things they need and the places they go. We’re driving further and further every year just to get where we need to go. Emissions have risen despite increases in fuel efficiency standards and the adoption of electric vehicles. Despite an admirable 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet from 1990-2016, emissions still rose by 21 percent. Why was that? Because the total amount of miles traveled increased by 50 percent in that same period.

Simply put, we’ll never achieve ambitious climate targets if we don’t reduce driving.

We don’t have a money problem, we have a policy problem

Politicians (and the media) love to bemoan our “crumbling roads and bridges.” That must mean we need more money to fix them, right? Here’s a secret: most of the billions we spend every year on our infrastructure never go to repair. Despite the rhetoric, there is nothing in federal law that requires states to repair the roads we already have, so most federal money goes to building more highways. That’s a problem that more money won’t solve.

Even the National Academy of Sciences, through the Transportation Research Board, has called for massively increasing highway spending to as much as $70 billion annually to accommodate (or encourage, as it were) an additional 1.25 trillion miles of driving each year—blatantly ignoring what this would do to our emissions.

California, Hawaii, and Minnesota have all found that even with a fleet of electric vehicles, they will still fail to reach their aggressive climate targets without an accompanying effort to reduce driving.

A better federal policy would be to invest more in climate-friendly transportation options like transit, walking, and biking, and to stop stacking the deck so that local communities have to choose between easy money for a highway or an uphill slog for transit cash. While we guarantee states over $40 billion annually for highways, only $2.6 billion is available for new or expanded public transit, and this funding is not guaranteed. Further, while the federal government will cover 80 percent of the cost of a highway project, it will only pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of a transit project.

With limited funding for transit and the national rail network and federal dollars for walking and biking overwhelmed by the billions spent on highways, federal policy is designed to keep us in our cars. Further, highway funding is distributed by Congress to states based on how much fuel is burned. The more gas is burned in a state, the more money states get to spend on highways. It should hardly be surprising that this has forced people to drive more over the past decade while making the climate impacts of transportation worse.

When you consider U.S. transportation policy in light of the existential crisis that climate change poses, it starts to look pretty asinine.

Access to a better future

Getting where you need to go shouldn’t always require a car, but we’ve designed our communities to prioritize car travel over everything else. With nearly half of all car trips three miles or less, many trips could be easily traversed by foot, bicycle, or transit. But the way we build roads to prioritize high-speed driving makes shorter walking, bicycling, or transit trips unsafe, unpleasant, or impossible.

It’s time that we stop prioritizing expansion over maintenance. It’s time for a paradigm shift. Cars certainly have a place in our transportation system, but our climate simply cannot sustain a system that rewards more and more driving. Our communities would be happier, healthier, safer, and more equitable if we built them for people instead of cars.

If we can retire this system that has doubled the country’s amount of driving in just a little over 30 years, we could build a transportation system that would improve access to the places that people need to go and reduce our emissions at the same time. We drove ourselves into this mess; now we’ll have to drive a little less to find our way out of it.

Join us for a Twitter chat about transportation & climate change on Wednesday, September 18 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. @T4America and our cohosts will lead the conversation with a series of questions over the course of an hour. Use #BeyondEVs to tweet you answers.