Federal Court: Specific Traffic Projection Data Required to Get Federal Highway Funding

A federal court in Wisconsin yesterday ruled that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) did not properly justify the need for a $128-million widening of a stretch of State Highway 23 between Fond du Lac and Plymouth.

Jeff Inglis

Policy Analyst

A federal court in Wisconsin yesterday ruled that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) did not properly justify the need for a $128-million widening of a stretch of State Highway 23 between Fond du Lac and Plymouth.

The ruling [PDF], the result of a lawsuit by 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, a non-profit organization focusing on land-use planning decisions, blocks federal funding for the project until the official traffic projections are substantially revised and explained. It also sets out the first judicially defined standard for traffic projection models on highway projects.

This issue is one we at Frontier Group have been following for years. This specific Highway 23 expansion project is one of four wasteful highway projects highlighted in Frontier Group’s September 14, 2014, report Fork in the Road: Will Wisconsin Waste Money on Unneeded Highway Expansion or Invest in 21st Century Transportation Priorities?, written by Tom Van Heeke and me, with Bruce Speight, then with WISPIRG Foundation (he’s now with WashPIRG).

The report documented the fact that WisDOT had projected annual traffic volume increases on that stretch of road far exceeding the actual rate of traffic growth.

A May 2013 report, Road Overkill: Wisconsin Spends Big On Questionable Highways, Even as Driving Declines, by Frontier Group’s Tom Van Heeke and Tony Dutzik again with Bruce Speight in his time at WISPIRG Foundation, documented similar problems at seven other Wisconsin highway projects. And a September 2014 report, Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future, highlighted similar problems with projects across the country.

 According to yesterday’s ruling, the state must provide much more detail about the statistical modeling and traffic projections used to justify the project than has historically been required of transportation agencies seeking the green light for new roads. Specifically,

  • Documents must give clear details on computer models used to calculate future traffic, including data inputs to the model and numerical results for specific locations in particular years.
  • If agencies use more than one traffic-projection model, they must provide detailed results for each model, along with information about how and why the models’ results compared to each other, and how the agencies reconciled any differing projections.

As a result of this project’s documents’ lack of that information, the judge ruled that the agencies did not properly follow the Environmental Impact Statement process mandated by the National Environmental Protection Act. The judge also criticized the agencies for their failure to provide specific responses even when this deficiency was raised in court.

The ruling itself is not a panacea. The judge did defer significantly to the agencies, even ruling that once an Environmental Impact Statement is complete, an agency has great latitude to choose a course of action. Quoting another case, the judge wrote, “NEPA merely prohibits uninformed – rather than unwise – agency action.”

But the judge’s decision is a shot across the bow of WisDOT and other agencies that have used poorly documented traffic forecasts to justify multi-million dollar highway projects that aren’t actually needed and don’t serve the best interests of the public. And it is yet another piece of evidence demonstrating that the process by which we decide how to spend tens of billions of transportation dollars each year needs a thorough overhaul.

Authors

Jeff Inglis

Policy Analyst