A “boondoggle” and a “Texas-sized mess of a highway plan” is how one national headline recently described the proposal to spend more than $7 billion in public dollars to rebuild and realign I-45. It is hard to disagree.

The project — which would remake I-45 between downtown and the Sam Houston Tollway — represents a doubling down on the formula that has made Houston a national leader in roadway deaths and transportation CO2 generated per capita. It has made us increasingly vulnerable to major storms and flooding while doing little to address congestion on our roadways.

The I-45 project is likely to do irreversible damage to our city’s finances and ecology. It will reduce the city’s tax base by eliminating existing businesses that affect 25,000 jobs. This includes approximately 20 city blocks in EaDo, a thriving entertainment and residential neighborhood with massive unmet potential. It will wipe out homes, churches and businesses in neighborhoods including Independence Heights, Near Northside and Fifth Ward, repeating the sins of the past by building highways through historical African American and Latino neighborhoods.

This project represents a major transfer of wealth from the city to the suburbs, trading actual city of Houston homes, land, and businesses for the promise of faster trips through Houston. Researchers say that promise won’t pan out long-term: As Houston’s own history with I-10’s expansion demonstrates, adding lanes doesn’t improve freeway congestion for long.

Adding insult to those injuries, the expanded freeway will likely lead to further development on our shrinking forest and prairie lands north of Houston. That open land currently buffers neighborhoods downstream from flooding, and it filters rainwater, improving our area’s water quality.

I have been part of many of the “Make I-45 Better” discussions, hosted with the idea that, if TxDOT would come to the table with resources and an openness to new design approaches, the damage caused by the project could be offset by the benefits it could create. I no longer think this trade-off makes sense.

To move people without the putting an undue burden on the neighborhoods along the I-45 corridor, we need a better regional approach.

What might be possible if we work together on a different vision? Imagine if the state legislature allowed TxDOT act like a true department of transportation — not just a highway department. Imagine leaders from TxDOT, METRO, the city of Houston and others sitting together and figuring out how we can best connect people to the abundance Houston has to offer. Imagine a safer, sustainable and more equitable Houston, where people had choices to avoid congestion. Imagine if we implemented projects that strengthen our city instead of undermine its competitiveness.

That approach shouldn’t be limited to freeways. Given the funds dedicated to I-45 and other roadways, METRO’s METRONext plans, Harris County flood bond projects and Harvey Recovery funds, tens of billions of dollars will soon be spent on infrastructure to remake our city. We need a vision for how all this investment fits together.

Here is my start at outlining one — a new vision for I-45 and a transportation system that leads to a more sustainable, more equitable Houston.

1) Starting with I-45, build a fast regional transit system. The Houston-Galveston Area Council’s High Capacity Transit Task force has shown that major investments in regional transit would greatly reduce the need to expand our roadways. Our current commuter bus system shows how well this can work for people commuting to downtown Houston.

Imagine going to an Astros game and having a choice of either fighting traffic and paying $40 to park or taking transit to and from the game.

We need to build two-way regional transit service that connects all major activity centers in our region seven days a week. We should build regional rail or bet big on being the world leader in autonomous transit vehicles operating in dedicated lanes in the center of every freeway corridor. We should start with I-45 and soon follow with I-10 and I-69. We should connect these services along the planned Innovation Corridor from downtown to the Texas Medical Center so that transit is meaningfully faster than any other mode of travel. We should focus on making transit the easy choice for people to move quickly around our region.

2) Optimize lanes and price congestion. We should not meaningfully widen the footprint of I-45. Instead of using TxDOT’s list of 100 most congested freeway segments as a list for planned highway widening, which only moves the bottlenecks farther down the highway — or increasingly, onto already overburdened city streets — we should use the list as a target for more creative approaches.

We need effective ways to match driving demand to the supply of roadways include converting existing lanes to managed lanes (such as HOV lanes); and congestion pricing (so that certain toll lanes cost more during hours of peak use). Revenue from congestion pricing could be used to expand our regional transit options, support equitable transportation, and maintain existing roadways.

Instead of repeating the sins of the past — widening highways through historic minority neighborhoods, destroying homes and further dividing communities — we could invest in better alternatives that bring our communities together.

3) Decommission the Pierce Elevated. Great cities across the world are removing highways, not rerouting or rebuilding them. These freeway removal projects have supported the development of great places with minimal impact on traffic congestion. The current plan to reroute I-45 just shifts the burden of the elevated Pierce Elevated from Midtown to neighborhoods on the north and east.

Downtown should be a place to go to, not a place to drive through — a place for people to be, not for cars a bypass for cars. I-45 should end as a spur on the east and west sides of downtown. Drivers’ options would include switching to improved transit or using I-10 and I-69 or the 610 Loop.

Then let’s connect Fourth Ward to Downtown and convert the Pierce into the most amazing Sky Park or walkable boulevard you can imagine, capturing the economic development benefits of a great urban place.

4) Capture the great ideas. Many of the excellent projects identified to mitigate the damage of the current I-45 proposal would be wonderful. Building great bridges that include sidewalks and bikeways reconnecting the Third Ward would be great. Depressing I-69 (née US 59) between Midtown and Museum Park and between Downtown and EaDo and adding green space while not removing street connections at Polk, Cleburne and Runnels, is an excellent idea. Opening up the Little White Oak Bayou channel, connecting neighborhoods on the Northside, would be amazing. And combining Union Pacific’s Freight and Passenger Rail Lines on the north side of Downtown would be transformative and greatly enhance connectivity, not reduce it. Let’s design new versions of all these projects so we can create awesome benefits without all of the negatives that come with rerouting I-45.

5) Build a bus rapid transit and light rail network. Build and expand the proposals in METRONext, Metro’s ongoing long-range plan, by extending our existing light rail lines and building a fast, flexible bus rapid transit system. This system should ingrate seamlessly with the regional transit system along the freeway corridors, so every neighborhood has access to all the opportunities Houston has to offer without ever needing to use a car.

6) Safe streets for everyone. We have spent decades applying the principles of highway design to city streets with disastrous safety results. We need to change how we design streets to prioritize people and places, not cars, to protect our most vulnerable road users.

We have started already, with a complete streets policy and changes to our design manuals, but need to accelerate, applying those methods to more streets, from frontage roads to neighborhood greenways.

7) Expand greenways to everyone. We should build a trail along every utility easement and every channel widened using flood bonds and Harvey Recovery funds, expanding the greenways system from 200 miles to more than 500 miles. This will create a connected regional trail network and improve everyone’s access to parks and open space. Bayou Greenways has already transformed our city. We need to extend its benefits to everyone.

8) Protected bikeways to every neighborhood. Bikes (and increasingly e-bikes and scooters) improve health, reduce congestion, lower emissions and are simply fun. Every neighborhood should be connected to a safe, high-comfort bikeway that links into the regional greenway system. These should be designed for a wide range of riders and trips. Our children have the ability to get out and ride, the same way many of us did when we were growing up.

9) Build sidewalks. Houston’s sidewalks are a disgrace, and they make large sections of the city inaccessible to anyone with the slightest mobility challenge. Let’s fix that and make Houston a walkable city. Let’s build high-quality sidewalks wide enough to walk next to a friend and hold a conversation. And let’s plant trees alongside those sidewalks for shade, and add lighting for walking at night.

10) Focus development incentives. The core of Houston is growing denser, with ever more high-rises and people per square mile, but it’s doing so piecemeal, in a way that means most people still need to drive. As people are locating closer together, cars continue to require as much space as they ever did. Think about most office workers: Their cubicles often takes up less square footage than their parking spaces.

This means we are not capturing density’s benefits to create a vibrant and financially sustainable city. The only way we can manage Houston’s population growth is to finds ways to add more people without adding more cars.

We should focus our economic incentives to create dense, walkable development near major transit hubs and greenways. This will add places for people to live car-lite lifestyles and increase housing supply, reducing the impacts of gentrification on many neighborhoods. When providing incentives to developers, we should demand great buildings in return.

The cost of the I-45 project has been estimated to exceed $7 billion. With that public money, the plan is to rebuild 20 miles of existing highway with managed lanes and concrete decks that, with hundreds of millions more dollars, might someday be a park. This will provide worse air quality and more climate impacts, more crashes, less tax base and more flooding.

For that same funding, we could build all of the following: 20 miles of light rail in rebuilt streets; 40 miles of bus rapid transit; 300 miles of bike trails; 1,500 miles of sidewalks; 500 miles of protected bike lanes on smooth, resurfaced streets; and 75 miles of complete streets with new drainage systems.

We could do this all while delivering less emissions, safer streets, healthier people, and a stronger tax base. It would provide more people more access to our amazing city.

Before it is too late, we need our elected leaders to make a stand, to back a new vision.

Carleton is a Houston-based transportation planner and senior principal at TEI. His opinions are his own.