Envirofraud - unscrupulous road haters

Posted Sat, 2007-09-15 12:42 at TollRoads

http://www.tollroad snews.com/ node/3136

Air pollution scaremongering long been used by environmental groups to block the road building needed to alleviate congestion - even though the resulting stop-&-go and idling traffic worsens emissions. In many US metro areas air quality data have been misused by environmentalists and their friends in the regulatory agencies to bar all lane additions - except for HOV lanes. And they are wastefully empty.

Their logic is that extra highway capacity will increase vehicle-miles traveled and applying average emissions/vehicle mile traveled (vmt) that means more total emissions and greater difficulty meeting air quality goals. Totally ignored in this logic are the benefits to emissions per vmt of managing traffic for free flow at moderate speed.

Anyone serious about air quality will see toll managed traffic lanes as being a contribution to cleaner air.

But most environmentalists are more stuck on fighting the car than they are on cleaning the air.

Maybe it's time the USDOT's congestion busters promoted some research to quantify the air quality results of:

(1) toll managed lanes,

(2) extra free capacity and

(3) congested constrained capacity.

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