A FRACTURE IN TECHNOCRACY.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson reports an intriguing development in Texas.

Often referred to by advocates as simply “the I-45 project” for the mega-highway upon which much of the construction would be focused, the massive effort would expand and re-route roughly 25 miles of the Space City’s aging downtown and northside freeways, displacing 1,000 disproportionately Black, Brown, and low-income households, along with a swath of businesses that employ almost 25,000 Houstonians.

[The Texas department of transportation] argues that the expansion is necessary to reduce congestion in the fast-growing region, despite decades of evidence that adding lane miles has the opposite effect.  Some advocates for the proposal have also claimed that the new highway design would be greener than what the city has now because it would bury some sections of the most high-polluting roads — but opponents have pointed that the state DOT wouldn’t be responsible for paying to actually put anything on those highway caps, and the COVID-battered city government probably won’t be able to afford it, either.

That's a lot going on, but if one part of government recognizes that funding from Washington is simply a fiction by which Houstonians get to sit in traffic at the expense of somebody else, and another part of government recognizes the dirty little secret of urban renewal, that might be a good thing.  "Mobility justice and environmental advocates, meanwhile, have almost uniformly decried the I-45 project as a boondoggle that recalls some of the most racist transportation projects of the urban renewal era, not to mention a massive step backwards for climate change."  You know a project is unpopular, if a critic characterizes it as one that would "make Robert Moses blush."