2/22/2023 0 Comments Katy freeway express lanes![]() “Highways are essentially fossil fuel infrastructure but we haven’t really heard about them in climate discussions until now,” Holland said. The frenzy of road building is championed by Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, as a response to the state’s ballooning population, which grows by about 1,100 people a day, and driver frustration over gridlock. How the states use those highway funds will basically determine whether we meet our transportation emissions goals,” said Ben Holland, an urban design and land use expert at RMI, a clean energy non-profit.īeyond the highway expansion in Houston, Texas is upsizing major roadways that carve through Austin and El Paso, as well as eliminating the planned bike lanes and pedestrian crossings in San Antonio. While some states, such as California, have started to recognize studies that show if you sow more asphalt you simply reap more traffic, Texas is pushing ahead with an unprecedented blitz of new road space for cars. “A lot is changing in Texas.”īut the federal government is still funneling $350bn to the states for highways via the infrastructure bill, a situation that experts warn could wreck the US’ climate targets by spurring more car driving and planet-heating emissions. “Five years ago the idea that there would be any elected officials publicly opposing a freeway widening would seem farfetched,” said Jay Crossley, executive director of Farm and City, a non-profit that works on Texas urban living issues. Ron Nirenberg, San Antonio’s mayor, accused the state of “1950s thinking” and a “religious fascination” with highway expansions. San Antonio planned to narrow a two-mile stretch of Broadway Avenue, a key thoroughfare, and add protected bike lanes, only for Texas DoT to overrule the city in January to halt it, citing fears over worsened traffic congestion. “I should be able to enjoy being Mexican in Houston in 2022 without somebody trying to push me out of my neighborhood.”Ĭity leaders in Texas, meanwhile, have also started to question the car-centric status quo. “All of these Black and brown neighborhoods are being attacked by this expansion,” he said. Ramirez said repeated expansions of highways in Houston have invariably destroyed homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods like his. I love building stuff, but I also have a moral compass.” “There’s no train, there’s no bus, there’s no anything that supports mass transportation. “It’s just plain Jane boring lanes, more and more lanes,” said Fabian Ramirez, a structural engineer whose property in Houston’s Northside district is set to be flattened as part of a controversial $9bn project to widen and realign the city’s highways. Holding signs riffing off familiar tropes in this conservative state, such as a picture of a bicycle under the words “Come and take it”, several dozen protesters rallied outside the Texas department’s headquarters in the shadow of Texas’ pink-hued capitol in Austin. “The courts have not done much about it.” “Federal transportation department monitoring and intervention on civil rights grounds is rare,” said Theodore Shaw, director of the center for civil rights at the University of North Carolina. Other social media posts that use the image have claimed that the image depicts the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway in China, which experienced a major traffic jam around one of its toll booths in 2015.Īlthough Lead Stories could not locate the origin of the image, the color correction, season and other elements of the image are visually similar to images of Russian highways.Festering concern over the seemingly endless swelling of highways has even sparked an unusual intervention from the federal government, with Joe Biden’s administration launching a civil rights investigation last year into the Houston project that has paused its construction. In an email to Lead Stories on June 22, 2021, Nancy Singer, a spokeswoman for the FHWA, said: ![]() According to a fact sheet from the FHWA, the largest section of the Houston portion of Interstate 10 only spans 12 lanes, far fewer than the highway shown in the Facebook post. Using Google Images, Lead Stories did not find any authentic images of the Katy Freeway that matched this image. The Katy Freeway is in Houston and is a part of Interstate 10, which runs across the Southern and Western U.S. (Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Jun 22 22:19:11 2021 UTC) This is what the post looked like on Facebook on June 22, 2021: The post featured an image of a highway with dozens of lanes, with a caption that read: The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on June 22, 2021. Is an image that depicts a highway with some 20 lanes in each direction a photo of the Katy Freeway in Texas? No, that's not true: Although Lead Stories could not locate the origin of the image, it is not the Katy Freeway, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) confirmed.
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