Highway Robbery - Dissent Magazine
Government highway agencies have enabled the blatant falsification of traffic model results. As a result, the United States wastes billions on road expansions that fail to cure congestion and make it harder to get around without a car.
In 1996, the state highway agencies of Kentucky and Indiana set out to build a new bridge over the Ohio River, adding more lanes to Interstate 65 where it leaves downtown Louisville. Their planners employed an elaborate computer model to forecast future traffic volumes. The model predicted that by 2025, 160,000 cars would cross the old and new bridges on an average weekday. Based on that forecast, the states decided to make the new bridge six lanes wide. When it finally opened, in 2016, the project had cost more than a billion dollars.
In 2023, just 70,000 cars crossed the two adjoining bridges on an average day. The model was wrong, but it did its job for the highway agencies: they got to spend all that money on the new bridge.
