For years, planners and engineers have known that it is impossible to build ourselves out of congestion. Adding lanes to highways has a slew of negative effects, including induced demand, increased crashes, sprawl and environmental degradation. However, the State of Wisconsin continues to pour in money for large-scale highway infrastructure projects which data show are […]
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The Governor’s latest transportation budget for the upcoming biennium includes approximately $1 billion in bonding revenue, allocated mostly for the expansion and reconstruction of our highway system. This is a 46% increase in borrowing from the previous budget. Debt service is steadily becoming a larger proportion of the total budget each year, with nearly $450 […]
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By Ash Anandanarayanan, Transportation Analyst. The State of Wisconsin spends billions of dollars annually maintaining and expanding its transportation system. Here is a primer on where that money comes from and how it is spent – and why WisDOT’s budget needs to change… Every one of us uses some form of transportation every day. But […]
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Leaders Present Alternative Budget that Gets Wisconsin’s Transportation Priorities Straight Please check out the picture book we handed out at the press release Madison – Today, local elected leaders, municipal representatives from across Wisconsin, and transportation advocates presented a new budget proposal that would cut wasteful highway spending, reduce the structural deficit in the Transportation […]
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Reason 10: Reduce spending or increase taxes. Departments of transportation across the country have recognized that the gas-tax is no longer sufficient to fund transportation programs. Due to cars becoming more efficient and using less gas (or in the case of electric vehicles, no gas) revenues into state transportation funds have steadily declined over the […]
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Reason 9. We are over-engineering our highways. The state is proposing to spend over half its projected transportation budget for 2013-2015 on the repair, maintenance and rehabilitation of roads, in addition to significant highway capacity expansion. In many cases, when a road is being rehabilitated – it becomes wider, allows faster traffic flow and has […]
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