Miami’s titanic I-395 reconstruction project, which includes double-decking a section of State Road 836, has been hailed as a solution that will make traffic jams disappear. But as the history of other road-fattening projects shows, it will do just the opposite, making it one of the worst “Highway Boondoggles” in the country, according to a report on wasteful spending.
The five-year, $802 million “Connecting Miami” redesign made the fifth annual list of expensive, unnecessary and ultimately counterproductive highway projects compiled by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and Frontier Group, nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations studying public policy issues. Also on the list of nine, which will cost a total of $25 billion, are projects in Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Raleigh, North Carolina.
The problem is that widening highways to reduce gridlock never works and actually puts more cars on the road. Added capacity induces demand and induces travel, multiple studies show, including one by economists who called the phenomenon “the fundamental law of road congestion,” in which the number of vehicle-miles traveled increases in direct proportion to the available lane-miles of roadways.
Read more at our news partner the Miami Herald.