How reauthorization can halt the highway harm

Transportation for America’s Fix it First principle is not just about fixing our crumbling roads before building new ones. We must also look at policies to fundamentally repair the communities that have been historically harmed and divided by the highway system and put a stop to any further damage.

T4A’s policies to rebuild local economies by reconnecting communities

Under our Fix it First principle, we want to fix the communities that have been harmed by highways in addition to avoiding any more damage from the status quo. This post will explain how to assist in reconnecting communities by:

1. Combine the Reconnecting Communities Pilot (RCP) and Neighborhood Access and Equity (NAE) Program grant programs and protect the effort to redesign or deconstruct outdated infrastructure that has hindered growth in low-income communities. Ensure funding levels are protected and increased to meet the demand to address transportation infrastructure, particularly highways and rail.
2. Modernize transportation models for accuracy. Transportation agencies do not have the necessary tools to accurately assess the impacts of various highway project alternatives on traffic and development. 
3. Include housing in programs like RCP/NAE to preserve affordability. Funding must be available for strategies like land trusts, property tax abatements, and the construction of affordable housing units to ensure current residents benefit from the improvements.
4. Don’t allow new barriers to be created. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) should do a review of all of its regulations, procedures, and guidance documents, identify practices that lead to projects that create division and hardship to local mobility and economic development, and implement changes. 

How highways have harmed

The Interstate Highway System has played a large and detrimental role in dividing communities, making people more dependent on private cars to move around. In 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, passed during the Eisenhower administration and established what would become the modern federal highway program for funding and building the current system. As a result of highways cutting through the heart of cities and white Americans taking advantage of moving to the suburbs, many marginalized groups saw the worst of the effects. 

While Eisenhower may have conceived of the program as a means to build roads to cities, in practice, the program more often than not built roads through cities.  Building highways through cities gave white and wealthy suburbanites access to urban centers while segregating themselves from communities of color. These communities were usually targeted intentionally by openly racist leaders, such as Sam Englehart in the South and Robert Moses in the North. The displacement and devastation from the construction are brazen and obvious in these neighborhoods. Pedestrian access has been disrupted and de-prioritized, air quality has worsened due to increased congestion, and opportunities for homes have been replaced by dangerous corridors with speeding cars. This upcoming reauthorization is a serious opportunity to not only repair the communities that have been most harmed by highways, but also stop any further damage the status quo has laid. 

Protect the reconnecting communities program

The Reconnecting Communities Pilot program (RCP) is a discretionary grant program that was authorized with $1 billion in the IIJA. The purpose of this program is in its name: to reconnect communities by removing or mitigating transportation facilities (such as highways) that have created barriers to community connectivity, access or economic development. Although the grant program is very new (and definitely has room for improvement), this program is a step in the right direction to repair the damage from disconnecting highways. 

RCP is an opportunity that should be continued in the upcoming reauthorization. The grant focuses on improving access to jobs, education, healthcare, nature, and recreation that have otherwise been hindered due to years of destruction from bad highway planning. By continuing to provide them discretionary funding opportunities, communities can begin to undo the damage of misguided highway expansion. Congress must protect this grant program to ensure the efforts to fix the damages of the past are given ample opportunity and priority for communities.

Modernizing transportation models

Although the RCP grants are a great funding opportunity, we need to remove systemic barriers that hold back these projects. To keep RCP projects moving forward, transportation agencies need better tools to accurately evaluate the impacts of highway project alternatives. Reliable and encompassing tools to measure these alternative projects are needed to highlight how RCP projects can have accurate impacts and benefits. These forecasting tools should be accounting for variables such as individual trips that shift to other corridors or that involve a different mode of transportation. However, because of outdated models that presume everyone drives, state DOTs are often the first to freak out at the thought of removing a portion of a highway and use the argument that traffic will explode. These models are holding back RCP projects and not painting the whole picture.

Traffic forecasting tools must account for individual trips that shift to other roadways or occur at different times of day, and can be made using other modes of transportation. In order to receive federal funds, transportation agencies should be held accountable for their projects’ results and be transparent about what traffic forecasting tools they are using and how they use them. True accountability includes making public the past accuracy (and inaccuracy) of highway agencies’ predictions versus ground truth, and providing clarity on what assumptions and inputs are being used in traffic forecasting models. This also means that, if highway project sponsors are going to claim benefits for air quality improvements from reduced delay, they need to account for emissions and pollution from increased travel volume from induced demand. Instead, they must clearly demonstrate that any environmental benefits are sustained over a long term period and result in lower pollution levels than the baseline.

Ultimately, the crux of our policy proposal is to eliminate obstacles for RCP projects and ensure the greatest accuracy within transportation models. In order to repair the damage of the past, we must also stop any hindrances that are in the way, which starts with accurate transportation traffic models.

Update the NAE program to include housing

The Neighborhood Access and Equity program was established under the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and provided $3 billion to improve connectivity in communities that have been impacted by divisive infrastructure. This same divisive infrastructure also disproportionately targeted communities of color and systematically removed existing housing and businesses deemed “substandard.” Instead of properly investing in these marginalized communities, the interstate system displaced nearly 475,000 households (over two million people) in less than twenty years. We cannot talk about mobility without integrating housing into the solution. 

Funding must be allowed for strategies like the construction of affordable housing to ensure that current residents can benefit from mobility improvements and reduce displacement. Leveraging additional housing in land reclaimed by RCP projects would provide those living in the community with options, and even opportunities for those originally displaced to return. This is imperative to ensure that the people who have suffered from the damage can reap the benefits of investment in their communities.

Don’t let new barriers be created!

The damage caused by disconnecting highways is not just a thing of the past—it continues very outwardly today. Our current approach towards infrastructure still consists of obsolete transportation policies, funding systems, and models that have their roots in the 1950s, which often directly harm vulnerable and marginalized communities. Harmful highway expansions are still being planned through or near low-income neighborhoods, like I-49 in Shreveport, Louisiana, which is destroying homes and churches. 

The system still does not prioritize moving people—only cars. This priority presents itself when state DOTs fail to consider local pedestrians, transit riders, and bicyclists when expanding corridors for the benefit of drivers from far-off neighborhoods. This ends in a never ending cycle of sprawling land use and displaced economic development in favor of storing and moving cars. This practice remains justified due to old practices never being retired and consistently disproven claims that congestion can be alleviated with just “one more lane”.

We need to halt the practices that got us here today. If we completely stop creating the same problems, then we would not have to keep repairing them! The RCP grant was authorized $1 billion over five years in the IIJA, which is a grand start to undoing the damage. But that investment is pathetic in comparison to the $154 billion that state and local governments spent on highways in 2021 alone. 

Currently, the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) regulations, procedures, and guidance documents only encourage the same old destructive practices. In order to stop the damage, these regulations need to be reviewed and updated—otherwise, we are stuck in the same loop. In reauthorization, we are calling for updates to the regulation and guidance determining how agencies use value of time, benefit-cost analyses, highway and road design guides, and project selection procedures. These processes guide how agencies design and build projects, and reforming them would address the root causes of the harms that transportation planning can still perpetuate today.   

Looking ahead

Decades of devastating practices have destroyed communities, especially the marginalized. But it’s not too late to undo the damage! Reauthorization is the chance to reconnect communities and allow a wider range of options to move around. Check out the rest of our reauthorization policies here.