Readers of the New York Times last Monday may have been mystified by the page one story headlined, "Stimulus Ideals Conflict on the Texas Prairie" about a long-planned, 180-mile outer-beltway toll road that would stretch through seven Texas counties and form a huge ring around greater Houston. The kicker: an early 15-mile segment of the sprawl-inducing project will be built on mostly vacant prairie land with $181 million in stimulus funds from Washington.
The highway proposal exposes tensions about which transportation projects the new Federal fuding should be supporting. According to the Times story, President Obama made his opposition to sprawl explicit during a trip to Florida last month while he was pushing for the stimulus bill's passage. "The days where we're just building sprawl forever, those days are over," he said, urging officials to employ "innovative thinking" when deciding how to spend their transportation money
The "Grand Parkway" project is so obviously rooted in 1970s transportation and land use planning that it would be laughable today -- were it not for the fact that the road will probably be built, providing the opening for a bizarre, decades-long period of government-sponsored suburban sprawl.
A critic of the road, Citizens' Transportation Coalition, a Houston-based advocacy group, asks rhetorically on its Web site, "Is this truly the best use of today's taxpayer resources? Faced with escalating fuel costs and environmental degradation, policy makers can make more responsible choices by allocating funds to transportation projects that will not spur increases in single-passenger vehicle miles traveled."
Read the full story at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/us/23sprawl.html?_r=1&hpw
More information from Citizen's Transportation Coalition at: http://www.ctchouston.org/
