Displacement and Dollars Down the Drain: The Data Behind California's Highway Expansion Crisis - Streetsblog California

"For nearly 70 years, highway agencies across the United States have operated mainly behind closed doors - widening roads, displacing communities, and spending billions in public funds with almost no transparency or accountability. Highway expansion has always carried a cost, but that cost was kept hidden: unreported demolitions, untracked displacements, and unmeasured neighborhood and generational harm. This year, that changed. For the first time in the state's history, California's highway agencies were required to disclose the human impacts of highway expansion."

"Welcome to California's highway industrial complex: a system that pours billions into policies that make congestion, pollution, and inequity worse, while calling it progress. For nearly seven decades, California has bankrolled highway expansions that sacrifice frontline communities to build more lanes that never actually solve congestion. In fact, data shows it's made traffic worse. More lanes haven't eased traffic - they've deepened harm, draining public dollars, displacing communities, and leaving drivers with longer commutes than before. The I-405 expansion is a prime example."

Highway agencies in the United States, and especially California, spent decades expanding roads with minimal transparency, displacing communities and spending public funds without reporting human impacts. SB 695 required California agencies to disclose demolitions and other harms, revealing how many homes and businesses were removed between 2018 and 2023. Massive projects such as the I-405 expansion cost over a billion dollars, took years, displaced residents and firms, and failed to reduce congestion. Adding lanes frequently worsened traffic, increased pollution and inequity, drained public dollars, and inflicted neighborhood and generational harm on frontline communities.

Read at Streetsblog