Between 1993 and 2017, we added 42 percent more freeway lane-miles in the largest 100 urbanized areas, which significantly outstripped the 32 percent growth in population in those regions over the same time period. So congestion and delay went down, right? No, it exploded—up by a staggering 144 percent, far outpacing population growth. Not everyone was building roads at the same rate, but the story was the same all over the country:

Among urban regions with moderate or high population growth, some cities saw their populations grow at a much faster rate than freeway lane-miles, and also faced significant increases in delay—no big surprise. At the same time, however, freeway lane-miles were expanded a roughly equivalent pace as population growth in cities like San Diego, CA and Nashville, TN yet they saw larger increases in delay: 175 percent for San Diego and 329 percent for Nashville. Meanwhile, lane-miles were added at more than three times the population growth rate in places like Pensacola, FL and Omaha, NE yet delay still increased by 233 percent and 231 percent, respectively. And delay increased by an astonishing 446 percent in Boise, ID, where population grew by 117 percent and lane-miles grew by 141 percent. …in Jackson, MS, population grew by a comparatively low 9 percent and the region expanded its freeways at seven times that rate, yet delay increased by 317 percent. Buffalo, NY’s population dropped by 12 percent, and the region still faced a 175 percent increase in delay.

We are spending billions of dollars to widen or expand roads and seeing nothing logical or helpful in return. And yet we are continuing to double down on a strategy that isn’t working.

It’s been an expensive gambit. If you read Repair Priorities back in 2019, you might remember that states alone spent more than $500 billion on highway capital investments in urbanized areas between 1993-2017—much of that on expansion projects. States are on the hook for maintenance, which makes these expansions major financial liabilities now and for years into the future—something you’re unlikely to hear trumpeted by the elected leader promoting the latest big widening project. For roads already in good condition, it still costs approximately $24,000 per year on average to maintain each lane-mile in a state of good repair. The price tag just to maintain what we’ve already got is staggering.

If the “solution” to congestion isn’t working and we’re producing more liabilities than we can ever possibly afford to maintain, why continue plowing billions of dollars into this tactic?

Somebody needs to call a “time-out.”

Why aren’t we reducing congestion and what does land use have to do with it?

The Congestion Con primarily looks at data on freeway lane-mile growth, but you can see the same issues at play on state and local roads, and it’s not always just the fault of our transportation agencies: land use is a primary driver. But bad transportation decisions begat bad land use decisions and vice versa, as we’ll explain momentarily.

A better question to ask than the headline above would be this: Why should a land-use and transportation system perfectly designed to generate maximum congestion ever be expected to reduce it? This is one of the fundamental truths about congestion that is yet so misunderstood. As the report quotes Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns, “we manufacture a flood” of congestion, and we do it on purpose. How?

Here in the first graphic below is a pretty typical pattern of land use and transportation investment in most growing metro areas. There’s a state-owned road, and a community starts sprawling outward, adding new subdivisions and more development along the road.