The widening of highways does not help with traffic jams, but it does affect climate change

California is proud of its climate leadership. And the state’s transportation industry—its biggest source of emissions—is not; its electric vehicle policies have been adopted by other states across the country. Sacramento lawmakers have also taken drastic measures to reduce car use altogether, enacting laws aimed at reshaping communities to encourage walking, biking, and taking public transportation.

But the reality of the world often does not live up to this idea. In particular, communities across the province continue to invest heavily in highway expansion projects that undermine efforts to change the way people travel. Thanks to something known as lure travel, these projects lead Californians to spend more, not less, time behind the wheel.

Amy Lee, a postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, has spent years studying the transportation and politics of highway expansion in California. Yale Climate Connections spoke with him to learn more.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Yale Climate Connections:Can you give me a high level summary of the requested trip? How does this work?

Amy Lee:So the biggest thing people consider when deciding how to travel is cost. That’s a matter of dollars, but also time—time is a really important factor in how we move. If a certain road is congested, traveling on it may take a long time, or an unexpected time, which makes people not use it.

Highway expansion is like selling a ride. It tries to reduce congestion by increasing the number of road services, reducing the cost of travel time for travelers who use it. So let’s say traffic prevents me from going to a restaurant I really like 20 miles away, but after the highway is widened, I can go there more often. Or I might choose a doctor in the next town over the one in my area.

We are reshaping our travel patterns as a result of freeway expansion, and the resulting new driving is what we call undone travel. And studies have shown that because of induced travel, congestion returns to previous levels about five to ten years after a highway is widened.

YCC:Is this a new discovery, or have we known about it for a long time?

Lee:We measured this for quite some time. It has been observed for at least 100 years, and has been measured with advanced statistical methods since the ’70s and ’80s.

YCC:So the expansion of the highway seems to be a problem from the point of view of transportation planning. Can you say more about how it affects climate change?

Lee:There are several ways. One is that the materials involved in making highways and roads—concrete, aggregate, asphalt—are incredibly carbon intensive. Highway expansion takes a lot of carbon out of your production.

And then when the freeways are built, we develop our communities around them, we continue to build along these freeway corridors, which generate more traffic, which leads to more colds. Currently, cars run mostly on fossil fuels, and this seems likely to be the case for a long time.

Freeway expansion can make it more difficult to travel in urban areas. I live in a city with an old set of freeways built through the city to bring commuters into the city center, separating neighborhoods like mine from the city center. To get to the town where I live, you have to go under the highway twice. Researchers have been doing really cool work about how that affects walking and cycling. As roads are widened, not only is the mall or your doctor’s office further down the highway, but it’s also becoming more difficult to get around your neighborhood without driving, even if it’s just a short walk.

YCC:I think there is also a huge cost to the highway expansion. They are expensive, and that is money that could be spent on other things.

Lee:Definitely. It’s not because of a lack of funding that we don’t build transport infrastructure and bikes everywhere. In California alone, nearly $30 billion is expected to be spent on transportation in the next fiscal year—an astronomical sum. So we have money; it’s how we choose to use it. And historically, and still today, a lot of it goes to highways and highway expansion.

Transportation people like to say, “Oh, but we can’t just change the money, because there’s not one big pot where the funding for each project comes from.” And that is true; there are a number of jars created by the law. If we wanted to change those policies, we could. I won’t underestimate how difficult it can be, though.

YCC: For your PhD thesis, you interviewed a number of people involved in highway projects in California. What have you learned about how they think about increased mobility and climate change?

Lee:There is a wide range of opinions about imported travel. Some people see it as a very important factor that should be considered in policy and projects and that our goal in the world of transportation should be to reduce the effects on the climate. However, that is not a widely held view.

The ideas often go along the lines of, “Yes, climate is a big problem, we need to deal with it, but we have terrible overcrowding in our society, and it’s an urgent problem, so we just need to do this work now.” .” People talk about property issues, about community members coming to council meetings and saying it’s hard to get their kids to school—in many communities in California, the main way to get around is the highway. So for them, although climate mitigation is a very important goal, it is not today’s problem. It is tomorrow’s problem, and what they need to do today is to relieve congestion, and the way to do that is to widen the highway.

There is also a very technical debate about adventure travel going on—although some would say that it is a philosophical debate conducted under the facade of a technical debate. It has some similarities to climate denial, with its varying degrees of denial. You don’t hear a lot of people say, “I don’t believe in adventure travel,” although that happens sometimes. Some say they believe in folded travel as common sense, but they don’t think that’s what will happen in their communities. Or they think, “My project is unique and won’t attract travel.”

YCC:And if I understand correctly, California has climate-focused policies to not increase highway expansion that would lead to attractive travel, but these expansions happen all the time. Is this accurate?

Lee:Yes. You hear some people say, “Yes, there are greenhouse gas goals in California, but there are many goals, and there has been no ranking or prioritization of these goals. Why then should transport be focused on the climate instead of economic development?” So California has a policy about it, but it doesn’t dominate the minds of many actors.

If you were to take one of my hobbies, listening to public meetings, you would hear that a lot. People say things like, “This project is not compatible with the goal of reducing carbon emissions, but this is a really important freight corridor.” And most elected and appointed officials seem loathe to do anything that could be seen as damaging property and the economy. As someone said to me, “Transportation projects are like apples and oranges—everyone likes them, except for the communities they have to live near.”

YCC: Freight and “goods moving” are semitrucks, I think?

Lee:Yes. There was even a record of goods across California’s transportation and climate policy. It is only about the transportation of passengers, despite the fact that trucks cause a lot of air pollution, health risks, a lot of carbon.

Another problem that cannot be ignored when thinking about the expansion of highways in California, and in the US in general, is the large political economy built on large infrastructure projects. There are many people who produce concrete and build highways or work for construction companies. And in California, where you have a lot of Democrats in the legislature, labor unions and unions are really strong players. So although there is a policy to reduce carbon emissions, and has a great material interest in the construction of large transport projects, and these groups have the ear of elected officials. There is a lot of money to be made from that $30 billion in transportation funding.

YCC:To me, one of the reasons travel is an interesting concept is that it means you can’t have a transportation system based solely on cars that people will be happy with, because you’ll never be able to build your own house. way out of the traffic jam—they’re actually in it. Is that an accurate understanding of the matter?

Lee: Yes, and that’s what California’s climate and transportation policy was trying to achieve: reduce dependence on cars by doing integrated land use and transportation planning, so that there is more accessibility in many ways, in fact. The idea is to give people more options to use transportation methods such as public transportation, walking, and cycling.

It’s a great idea, but how it plays out when driving is where the rubber meets the road. And as many people from across the transportation spectrum have told me, the most prominent political issue for many elected officials, especially at the local level, is traffic. People at the local level hold a lot of power; The policy arena in transport is very diverse. And congestion is a key issue for local politicians. They need to show that they are trying to do something to help, even if it doesn’t work out in the long run: They should be re-elected.

It’s not uncommon for local politicians to come up with solutions like building new housing in urban areas, which would help people walk and bike to their jobs instead of taking the freeway. Housing development is a slow process, and it is not publicly regulated in the United States. On the other hand, transportation is publicly funded. So local elected officials use transportation as a platform to try to deliver to their constituents.

Widening the highways also seems like an obvious thing to do. Improving housing options and mass transit are very effective ways to help people avoid congestion, but that will involve trying to get them to think about a different future. Although with the expansion of the highway, he just told them, “I will help that highway you are on all the time.” So it sounds very obvious and straightforward.

And most elected officials don’t get into these things, do they? It’s not like they got a lesson on the thrill ride when they took over.

But you will never solve congestion this way; we have shown that time and time again. Everybody likes to think of Los Angeles as a traffic city, and it’s a good example of, “Look, they’re building as many freeways as possible, and there’s still congestion.”

— Sarah Wesseler