Building new freeway lanes “has utterly failed to stop congestion,” says a new report from Transportation for America (T4A) titled The Congestion Con. “We have added 30,511 new freeway lane-miles of road in the largest 100 urbanized areas in the U.S. between 1993 and 2017, an increase of 42 percent,” continues the report, yet “congestion has grown by a staggering 144 percent” due to “induced demand.” The report concludes that the nation should stop building new roads and instead “bring jobs, housing, and other destinations closer together.”
Click image to download a four-page PDF of this brief.
This report makes several fundamental errors. First, at least a third of the “new freeway lane-miles” that the report claims were “added” between 1993 and 2017 already existed in 1993, and thus can’t be claimed to have been built since 1993 to reduce congestion. The authors of the report knew this but dismissed it as irrelevant. Continue reading
