4 ms·
Do you have an example of a new highway built recently?
by readams 5y ago
Do you have an example of a new highway built recently?
- ericmay 5y agoEh it’s not just construction of entirely new highways but highway expansion. Plenty of examples of this.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoExpansion doesn't take land if the state already had reserved that land for itself. Many highways have huge rights of way beside them because the state had grand plans for expansion when they were built in the 50s-70s.
- ericmay 5y agoWhich is kind of like an accounting trick. The state already has the land, run a rail line through it instead of expanding it, etc. But ultimately the expansion of the highways has downstream effects - state will buy new land, build new roads, etc. as density flows out. If you have a two lane highway going into a city and it's congested, and then you expand it, more people move out of the city or more further away - obviously someone is building new roads or expanding existing ones as that occurs.
- ashtonkem 5y agoAccording to the Bureau of Transport Statistics the US highway system went from 4,050,717 miles in 2009 to 4,171,125 miles in 2019. This is a delta 120,408 miles, or an increase of 2.9%. This is system miles, not even lane miles, so it will not include highway expansion. Actually correlating this down to individual routes in an exhausting endeavor, given all the places these could be recorded. But I found that we did designate 7 new highways in the past 10 years, including I-14, I-11, I-87, I-41, I-42, I-2, and I-22.