This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
We all know WSDOT loves cars, but this is just sad.
- Go to the WSDOT home page to see their list of priorities, click on “Climate Change.”
- Look for their “Climate Change Tools,” click on “Moving Washington.”
- Notice first that this page is aimed at reducing congestion. Then notice that their first strategy is to add capacity*.
So according to WSDOT, more capacity = climate change tool. Which is absolutely true – adding road capacity is one tool to change the climate. I just don’t think that changing the climate should be one of our goals.
* I recognize that they actually say “add capacity strategically”, which is defined elsewhere as freeing up bottlenecks. But that’s beside the point. Freeing up bottlenecks will reduce traffic, encouraging people to live further from their jobs. Implying otherwise is blatant greenwashing.
[update]
Cool. Someone from WSDOT must read this blog. Some time between yesterday and today they’ve changed their website to remove the “Moving Washington” link from their climate change page. They are still greenwashing road building, they’re just hiding it.
Compare the current page to the older page (thanks Google archive). Strangely, they also removed their goals for reducing VMT by 50% in the next 40 years.
To be fair, they also list “Manage demand.” I’ve always wondered, if you have ways to manage demand why do you need to add capacity? Wouldn’t it make sense to add HOV capacity to the existing SR-520 right away, for example?
I wouldn’t worry about being too fair to WSDOT. Sure variable tolling is a good idea, but that doesn’t forgive the fact that they’re directly claiming that building roads is green. They even admit that “we can’t simply build our way out of congestion” but in the next sentence go on to say “We must plan our projects wisely by targeting the worst traffic-flow bottlenecks in our system.” We can’t build our way out of congestion, so let’s build our way out of congestion.
If I were road czar I’d have one lane in each direction of the 520 bridge be HOV. Busses currently sit around, stuck in traffic. I used to commute over that bridge and tried to use the bus once – it added an hour to my commute. Bottlenecks are the best way to convince people to get out of their cars, if we provide another choice.
What can we say? They’ve got a hammer, and to them everything looks like a nail.
Everything you might possibly think about WSDOT would lead you to the conclusion that it needs strong management by someone representing the public interest, not the institutional interest..