Highway Expansion

The California Court of Appeals yesterday confirmed a lower court ruling that the environmental impact report (EIR) for San Diego's long-range regional transportation plan was inadequate. The EIR, said the court, underplayed the impact of the emissions that would result from its highway-building, sprawl-inducing plan.

When visitors land on the front page of the Presidio Parkway's website, they see an animated pelican emerging from beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, gliding across green hills and blue skies. When the bird lands, you can "Meet Parker" with a click and learn all about the Presidio Parkway Pelican.

A new academic study helps explain the enduring political popularity of expensive transportation boondoggles like Birmingham's $4.7 billion Northern Beltline and Kentucky's $2.6 billion Ohio River Bridges.

San Mateo County's Mid-Coast Multi-Modal Trail just barely made it into the list of Pedestrian and Bicycle Program projects approved for funding by the Transportation Authority (TA)'s Board of Directors last Thursday. Despite this step forward, building the trail will be difficult thanks in large part to restrictions on how TA funds can be spent, which hamper walking and biking projects.

San Mateo County is poised to spend more than a hundred million dollars on an expansion of Highway 101 while passing over more effective, less expensive options to improve people's commutes.

The evolution of state and regional transportation agencies is painfully slow in places like Missouri and Ohio, where officials are plowing ahead with pricey highway projects conceived of decades ago. But plenty of Midwesterners have different ideas for the future of their communities, and they aren't shy about speaking up.

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it (along with libraries and our diminishing public schools), but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

There's a place just outside Houston where the vinyl siding and attached garages thin out and recede into grasslands.

The South Carolina Department of Transportation is sometimes still familiarly known as the "highway department." That was, in fact, the agency's proper title until 1977, when it was changed by order of the general assembly to the Department of Highways and Public Transportation.