Post by icemandios on Apr 6, 2021 16:26:10 GMT
Highway Foes Emboldened as Buttigieg Puts Houston Project on Pause
After the U.S. Department of Transportation asked the Texas DOT to halt a highway expansion, freeway fighters nationwide are calling on Secretary Pete Buttigieg for similar aid.
Namely, the North Houston Highway Improvement Project, a $7 billion plan by the Texas Department of Transportation to widen I-45 and parts of I-10 and I-610 on the downtown edge of the state’s largest city. According to TxDOT’s environmental review, the NHHIP would remove more than 1,300 homes, businesses, schools and places of worship. Much of the impact would land in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods, some of the same ones the highway’s original construction tore through in the 1950s and ’60s. On March 6, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wrote to TxDOT, asking that the state pause the expansion until federal officials determine whether “further actions may be necessary” to address “serious concerns” in letters by opponents that the project would violate Title VI civil rights law.
The move stunned people like Bakeyah Nelson, the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, who authored one of those letters in January. She’d hoped federal officials would be sympathetic, based on remarks by President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg signaling that the future of U.S. highways had to be rethought on climate and racial justice grounds. But she knew it was exceedingly rare for the U.S. DOT to formally intervene in a highway project outside the normal decision-making schedule, and that stepping in to stop a new road is antithetical to the agency’s DNA. “We didn’t know that response was coming,” she said.
Now the national landscape of freeway fights is shifting, with activists, urbanists and researchers filling DOT inboxes with requests for similar action against road projects from coast to coast. Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which includes $20 billion to “redress historic inequities and build the future of transportation infrastructure,” is further encouraging highway foes that a new chapter in the story of U.S. road building has begun.
After the U.S. Department of Transportation asked the Texas DOT to halt a highway expansion, freeway fighters nationwide are calling on Secretary Pete Buttigieg for similar aid.
Namely, the North Houston Highway Improvement Project, a $7 billion plan by the Texas Department of Transportation to widen I-45 and parts of I-10 and I-610 on the downtown edge of the state’s largest city. According to TxDOT’s environmental review, the NHHIP would remove more than 1,300 homes, businesses, schools and places of worship. Much of the impact would land in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods, some of the same ones the highway’s original construction tore through in the 1950s and ’60s. On March 6, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wrote to TxDOT, asking that the state pause the expansion until federal officials determine whether “further actions may be necessary” to address “serious concerns” in letters by opponents that the project would violate Title VI civil rights law.
The move stunned people like Bakeyah Nelson, the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, who authored one of those letters in January. She’d hoped federal officials would be sympathetic, based on remarks by President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg signaling that the future of U.S. highways had to be rethought on climate and racial justice grounds. But she knew it was exceedingly rare for the U.S. DOT to formally intervene in a highway project outside the normal decision-making schedule, and that stepping in to stop a new road is antithetical to the agency’s DNA. “We didn’t know that response was coming,” she said.
Now the national landscape of freeway fights is shifting, with activists, urbanists and researchers filling DOT inboxes with requests for similar action against road projects from coast to coast. Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which includes $20 billion to “redress historic inequities and build the future of transportation infrastructure,” is further encouraging highway foes that a new chapter in the story of U.S. road building has begun.
