Wider Won’t Work: Wider Highways Are a Recipe for an Unhealthy Future

Los Angeles County already suffers from some of the worst air pollution in the United States. Expanding our freeways will only make matters worse. Yet Metro and Caltrans are still pushing ahead with plans to expand freeways throughout LA in a futile attempt to relieve the “congestion” once and for all.

The communities along Interstates 605, 60, 10 and 5 are among the communities with the highest pollution burden in California. Every day, residents of Monterey Park, Alhambra, Avocado Heights, Montebello, Baldwin Park, Bassett and Boyle Heights breathe some of the most polluted air in the country. Widening these freeways encourages more car travel, adding more pollution to already underserved communities committed to environmental justice, with lifelong health consequences.

The transportation sector currently accounts for more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions in California. While electrification will help reduce vehicle emissions, heavier electric vehicles still emit brake and tire dust, other dangerous forms of air pollution. According to the CA Air Resources Board’s 2017 Scoping Plan, we won’t meet our air quality and climate goals unless we drive less. Seven years later, we still need to align our transportation spending with the science.

Metro and Caltrans could save hundreds of millions of dollars in construction and future maintenance costs by using the existing freeway footprint for new carpool or toll lanes. The savings could then be used to repair existing lanes and fund long-awaited projects to facilitate regional, multimodal public transportation in the region, such as:

After more than half a century of discriminatory and dangerous freeway expansion, the Metro Board of Directors and Caltrans leadership must choose a healthier, more multimodal future for all of us. A future in which rates of childhood asthma, obesity, and cancer—life-altering diseases linked to air pollution exposure—finally decline.

Given what we now know, more pollution, displacement, and destruction are no longer an option. As LA prepares to host what is being touted as the greenest Olympics yet, the Metro Board should turn the page on this history of misguided, short-sighted, and auto-centric transportation planning. Over the past five years, the Metro Board has done just that with the 710 North and South extension. They can and should set a new direction for the entire region, once and for all. The time is now.

Twenty years ago, cities across the county successfully tackled the state’s leading cause of premature death: tobacco use. Californians now take smoke-free restaurants, bars, and hotels for granted. Our smoke-free efforts are now being replicated around the world. All it took was evidence-based policy and some political leadership.

Today, we face a greater, but no less avoidable, threat to public health and safety: our addiction to heavily polluting forms of transportation. Fortunately, it is a problem we can solve. But first, we have to stop digging. No more lanes.