I’m surprised the recent story on the proposed widening of I-15 doesn’t repeat the oft-used reasoning from anti-highway builders that building more freeway lanes will just attract more traffic and that congestion will, in time, be the same or worse as it is now.
Brian Brenner, professional engineer and civil engineering professor, addresses this pro-highway vs. anti-highway argument in the “Build It And They Will Come” chapter of his book, “Don’t Throw This Away! (The Civil Engineering Life).” In it he references a paper by Robert Cervero in the Journal of the American Planning Association, in which it is shown that building new highways does not necessarily attract more traffic and cause more congestion. Cervero writes: “It is important to focus on the bigger picture when framing highway policies. The problems people associate with roads — congestion, air pollution, and the like — are not the fault of road investments per se. These problems stem mainly from the unborne externalities of the use of roads, new and old alike. They also stem from the absence of thoughtful land use planning and growth management around new interchanges and along newly-expanded highways.”
It seems to me that doing nothing to I-15 in northern Utah will simply cause paralysis and existing problems to get worse. As Professor Brenner concludes, “Blaming all the problems on roads and autos masks the real issue, that of land use.”
Steve Wilde, Sandy
