Colorado’s Bold New Approach to Highways — Not Building Them
www.nytimes.com
The state has made it harder to widen highways, and transportation officials are turning their eyes to transit.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16028585

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10092805

In Colorado, that new vision was catalyzed by climate change. In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis signed a law that required the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent within 30 years. As the state tried to figure out how it would get there, it zeroed in on drivers. Transportation is the largest single contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for about 30 percent of the total; 60 percent of that comes from cars and trucks. To reduce emissions, Coloradans would have to drive less.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Colorado’s governor and other dignitaries, including the chief engineer of the state highway department, acknowledged the moment by posing for a photo standing on bulldozer tracks, next to the trench that would become Interstate 25.

    In recent years, activists in Houston, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., have fought widenings, arguing that the increased exhaust would worsen air pollution and exacerbate high rates of asthma in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

    Back then, an economist rebutted the prevailing assumption that adding lanes would fix traffic, showing instead that wider roads only increased the number of cars and made congestion worse.

    “The scale of the challenge to getting a net-zero transportation system is, I think, much bigger than folks want to acknowledge,” said Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University.

    The widening was also unlikely to fix traffic: Years earlier, the agency had spent $800 million to expand another stretch of Interstate 25 in south Denver and ended up with worse congestion than before construction began.

    In 1958, the year that Interstate 25 opened to traffic, the State Highway Department constructed the sweeping interchange connecting Federal Boulevard to Colfax Avenue and demolished more than 240 homes and businesses in the process.

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