The state of Florida is a perennial contender in the Olympics of Bad Ideas, and its latest is a doozy. The state Senate has voted 37-1 to advance a plan that would construct three new toll roads totaling more than 300 miles, and would divert over $1.3 billion from the state's general fund to pay for them. The bill is headed to the House for a vote as of this writing.

These roads would mostly parallel existing Interstate 75 through parts of the state that are rural and very sparsely populated. The proposed routes pass through what are now cattle pastures, citrus groves, and pine forests. The largest city on the longest of the three routes—Perry—has fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.

The bill is backed, entirely unsurprisingly, by groups with names like the Asphalt Contractors Association of America. It's opposed by a host of organizations including the Sierra Club and 1000 Friends of Florida. Thomas Hawkins of 1000 Friends makes a collection of arguments against these roads concisely and eloquently in this Gainesville Sun op-ed. I won't reinvent Hawkins's wheel in this post—I recommend reading his op-ed.

Let's get one thing clear: There is absolutely no present, looming problem that these toll roads would solve. None. It's not hard to travel north-south through the rural parts of Florida. You might encounter brief congestion around a construction zone or crash site. But 95% of the time, traffic flows fine on Interstate 75, and traffic is extremely sparse on the mostly 4-lane federal highways that would be replaced by these new north-south freeways: U.S. 19/98, and U.S. 17.

Ah, but what about hurricane evacuation? Don't we need another highway to get people out of the state quickly in the event of a catastrophic storm?

In a word: no. During Hurricane Irma in 2017, six million people—nearly a third of the state's population—left Florida. Interstate 75 was at a crawl, but parallel routes, including U.S. 19—the route of the proposed Suncoast Parkway—were not especially congested. The issues reported after the fact had more to do with long lines for gasoline, and people evacuating who lived on higher ground and did not need to. There are many roads that lead north through Florida. Evacuation is an information and coordination problem, not a capacity problem.

So why is this proposal even taken seriously? Enough that it stands a very real chance of becoming reality? It's an exorbitant amount of money for extensive new highways in places where there's almost zero current demand.

Proponents offer a laundry list of justifications, some of which are fairly laughable ("expand bicycle and pedestrian trails" was cited by the bill's sponsor as an auxiliary benefit), but one of which deserves a serious rebuttal, because it is taken seriously, even by many people who don't favor unfettered development in rural areas for its own sake.

I hear versions of this refrain over and over again, in local debates and in statewide ones:

"We need to start building more infrastructure now to prepared for coming population growth. We need to be proactive, not reactive."

That view—that the purpose of road infrastructure (and water and sewer and broadband, which Senate President Bill Galvano says the toll road projects will also lay the groundwork for) is to get out ahead of growth rather than to respond to the needs of already productive places—deeply misconstrues the relationship between public infrastructure and private development. And that misunderstanding is at the root of the fiscal crisis that communities all over North America are facing.

The Circular Logic of "Preparing" For Growth by Building Roads That Enable Growth

Florida is growing. Fast. The state could add 7 million people to its existing population of 20 million by the year 2045, according to UF demographers. Let's say we don't dispute that statewide figure, but accept it as valid. There is good reason to do so.

The more you zoom out, geographically speaking, the more reliable such growth projections are, because they depend much less on local decisions. If I tell you the entire state of Florida will add 7 million people, you can imagine that the forces that drive that—the retirement of baby boomers; immigration to the United States; people's perennial love of warm winter climates, nice beaches and Mickey Mouse—include things well outside the control of Florida policy makers.

On the other hand, the population of your block or your neighborhood can't be projected in this way, because it doesn't primarily depend on macro forces—it depends on micro decisions that we get to make. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of your city or county. These population projections by county have a dramatic range between the "low" and "high" estimates, because local political decisions can have a profound impact on where development occurs.

And the local decision that most influences where development happens or doesn’t is the decision of where we build vital public infrastructure like—you guessed it—new roads. When we talk about the need to "prepare" for growth with a brand new road deep into a rural area, we're glossing over a huge chicken/egg problem.