In my state it has been posited for decades that transportation projects (originally highways, but now some of the big highway contractors have branched into buildings as highway funds dry up) was a smokescreen for funneling contributions to certain politicians. I've seen nothing in recent years to suggest that this isn't still the case. In some instances, it is so blatant as to be nauseating, but ... nobody seems to notice, regardless of which party is currently in power.
There's a tremendous amount of what I call "engineering doublespeak" involved in transportation. Take a highway that was built in, say, 1950 for a design load of 50,000 vehicles per day. It's not uncommon to see articles claiming that older highways are carrying 180 percent of their capacity ... which, if you think about it, should be impossible. But it gets worse. In stereotypical "If you build it, they will come" fashion, transportation planners look at roads that are running at 200 percent and more of their so-called "capacity" and that are choked to a standstill at rush hour ... and they'll say with straight faces "The vehicle load has increased by 100 percent over the last decade so it will increase by anothr 100 percent over the next decade, therefore we have to expand it to handle the additional traffic."
Which completely ignores the reality that, if they DON'T expand it, since it is already at maximum real capacity, the vehicle load simply cannot possibly increase beyond gridlock, so if they don't expand it the vehicle count will NOT increase. What will happen is that the people who might have moved to that part of the state IF the road were to be expended ... won't move there, they'll move somewhere else.
The answer is trains, not more highways, more cars, and more trucks.
