Washington Transportation Secretary Roger Millar argued against further highway expansion during his State of Transportation presentation to the House Transportation Committee this week. Instead, he argued for “a resilient response” to the state’s major challenges, including climate change, inequitable traffic impacts and increasing traffic injuries and deaths.
“We are a Target Zero state, and we’re going the wrong way,” said Millar. “The data shows our system isn’t safe. It kills people, and we need to invest to stop that.” WSDOT estimates that the monetary cost of collisions, injuries and deaths is about $14 billion per year. Of course, a life is more important than money.
Meanwhile, the state is investing less than half of what it should be investing to maintain existing infrastructure. The state has been building a lot of new and expanded infrastructure, which only makes it more difficult to maintain the infrastructure the state already has. As that new infrastructure comes due for maintenance, the backlog gets that much worse. At this point, the state would need to spend about a billion dollars more per year than it is currently spending just to tread water.
One part of the solution is to stop trying to expand highways to solve congestion. WSDOT gave a rough estimate that it would cost upwards of $115 billion over ten years to add enough lanes to freeways to allow people to drive the speed limit at all times. That would require as much as $2.50 per gallon in additional gas taxes. This rough estimate does not even include all the costs associated with increasing local and connector roads to meet the induced demand from the newly-widened freeways.
“Addressing congestion through adding lanes to the Interstate system is not financially feasible, it’s not economically feasible, it’s not environmentally feasible. It’s just not going to happen,” said Millar. “We need to think about doing things differently.” He even said that the state’s path of continually expanding freeways to solve congestion has “come to a dead end.” (more…)