HOUSTON: INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA

Houston’s freeways began as a means to uphold and bolster racial segregation, while simultaneously providing the physical routes for “white flight.” The freeways took the racial red-lines the banks had laid out decades earlier and built them in the physical world.

While the racial animus that motivated highway construction still plays a powerful role in deciding where and what gets built, today much of @txdot’s freeway expansion plans are the result of mindless institutional inertia. Like many state Departments of Transportation (which until the 90s were known as “Highway Departments”), @txdot operates using an antiquated toolbox that prioritizes automobile throughput above all else. Rather than focusing on pedestrian safety, increasing mobility and accessibility, or racial and social equity, the DOT views its job as making room for cars. Thus inevitably more highway expansions are proposed, while other options (such as transit) are not even considered.

From @citylab: “State DOTs are highway agencies that care about the roads that are part of their highway networks. That’s the lens through which they see the world: They care about the assets they own and performance and that’s it.

Both culture and legislation have contributed to that focus, experts say. Particularly in fast-growing states, state transportation engineers have historically approached their work like a problem of demand needing supply, said Ronald Milam, a principal at the planning consultancy Fehr & Peers who researches transportation demand and policy. “They’ve looked at it as a straightforward relationship, using metrics that are usually congestion-based, like vehicle level of service,” he said, referring to the variables that go into the models that agencies use to calculate future capacity needs. Such models have drawn criticism from scholars and advocates who say that they should account for things like greenhouse gas emissions and induced demand — the principle that more road space brings more traffic, something that state DOTs are just beginning to acknowledge as a research-based reality.”