In desperate need of new transportation thinking

Since it’s nearly always a bad idea, let’s take a moment to recognize a recent success in widening a highway.

Interstate 84 in Waterbury was for years a notorious bottleneck. The three-lane highway inexplicably narrowed to only two lanes just as drivers neared the city, only to widen again a few miles later. That was enough to produce predictable traffic jams far outside traditional rush hours, and to send frustration through the roof during heavy traffic.

Thanks to a $330 million project completed ahead of schedule in 2018, that choke point was eliminated, with an extra lane of travel added in both directions. This involved realigning the highway, rebuilding bridges and ramps, and rerouting a river.

It was, by most measures, a success. Traffic continued to flow during construction, and travel times post-project are down.

It affected, all told, less than 3 miles of highway in one city. And while traffic is improved, it would be wrong to conclude that driving through Waterbury is now a breeze. For all the project’s plaudits, it was a high price to pay for a limited benefit, and given what we know about highway projects elsewhere in the country, those benefits could turn out to be short-lived.

This, it’s worth repeating, was a best-case scenario in a specific circumstance. Success in one place is not necessarily transferable elsewhere. There is plenty of data on what typically happens when we widen highways, and it’s very rarely considered a good deal.

All of which makes comments from a bevy of state officials a few days ago on plans for federal infrastructure dollars all the more disconcerting. Gov. Ned Lamont, members of the congressional delegation and state Transportation Commissioner Joseph Giulietti discussed what to do with billions of dollars of expected infrastructure funds from the federal government, and at the top of the wish list is apparently a wider I-95 in lower Fairfield

County. Extra lanes on I-84 through Danbury were also floated.

Now, it’s not as though Giulietti or anyone else at Monday’s news conference is unfamiliar with the concept of induced demand, the idea that more lanes will bring more vehicles, quickly eliminating any gains with new congestion. But they certainly acted as though wider highways would solve our problems.

The number of people who use a highway is not static. If the road is wider, and free, people are likely to adjust their behavior to take advantage of the newly available space. Also, populations grow — even in stagnant Connecticut. Fairfield County is the only part of the state to show real growth lately, and that’s likely to continue. Absent alternatives, there would be more people driving in those new lanes.

New lanes can sometimes be effective at cutting congestion when they’re paired with tolls in the form of congestion pricing. Given the recent history in this state on those subjects, no one considers that viable here.

Then there’s the expense. Building and widening highways costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and not all of it comes from Washington. We’re looking at years of planning and construction before the work is finished. And all of it runs into a 60-year-old maxim known as the Law of Peak Hour Traffic Congestion, which states that “on urban commuter expressways, peak-hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity.” It’s been reinforced with real-world examples across the country countless times over the years.

Again, none of this is news to people like the governor or the DOT commissioner. So why are we still doing this?

From the public’s perspective, it probably sounds like the politicians are offering a real answer. Most people likely aren’t all that familiar with induced demand, and maybe would think it sounds wrong. Of course more lanes mean faster travel times. Right? So that’s what politicians are happy to offer. More cynically, more driving means higher gas tax receipts.

In the real world, we have to do better.

This isn’t just about getting everyone onto mass transit, though we really should spend to improve our trains and buses. It’s not only about listening to people who’d prefer we all ride bikes, though that constituency should be a bigger part of planning discussions.

It’s not even solely about climate change, which the state acknowledges we’re not doing enough to tackle, with transportation the worst offender. Making it easier for more people to do more driving is not going to help on this all-important metric.

What it’s more about is how we spend our money. Billions of dollars toward something that won’t solve our problems is a bad bet, no matter what party you align yourself with. Everyone in a position of power knows better. They ought to act like it.

We’re in desperate need of some creative thinking to deal with transportation in this state. If current officials have any ideas — and there are alternatives out there — they’re keeping them to themselves.