A new group has formed in Portland to oppose freeway expansion, and specifically to fight against a $450 million expansion of the Rose Quarter Freeway in the heart of the city. No More Freeways PDX is led by a committed trio of political activists and economists which includes Joe Cortright (writer at City Observatory), Aaron Brown and Chris Smith.

"The Oregon DOT has been beating the drums about freeway expansion like every other state DOT for forever," says Brown, but this particular project lay dormant for several years due to a lack of funding. Now the state's most recent transportation bill, passed in June, has allocated the money to make it happen.

Brown, his colleagues and fellow activists around the city know that urban freeway expansion is expensive, damaging to local businesses, harmful to the health of nearby, often-low income residents, bad for the environment, and, moreover, doesn't even solve the problem it claims to address: congestion.

"We're trying to raise awareness that there are a lot of infrastructure needs in Portland, and this project doesn’t solve any of them," says Brown. "It is extra space on the freeway for cars to be stuck in traffic."

Cortright is also eloquently quoted in an article on OregonLive explaining, "It's [$450] million that you might as well put in a pile and burn it, because it's not going to have any effect on recurring congestion." He and other Strong Towns members have written extensively on the subject of "induced demand" — the fact that data from across the nation shows that adding lanes to highways only brings more cars onto those roads and does nothing to decrease traffic. Cortright has also chronicled the mistaken data analysis that has led the Oregon DOT to claim that a wider highway will be a safer highway.