‘It’s just more and more lanes’: the Texan revolt against giant new highways

theguardian.com:

Texas, with its wide-laned roads and supersized highways, seems like an unlikely place for a rebellion against the supremacy of American car culture.

But last week a band of residents from across Texas descended upon the state’s department of transportation (DoT) to voice fury over new highway expansions that are set to displace thousands of people and raze hundreds of businesses, schools and churches. Meanwhile, the state is actively crushing local plans to encourage more cycling and walking as an alternative to driving.

Festering concern over the seemingly endless swelling of highways has even sparked an unusual intervention from the federal government, with Joe Biden’s administration launching a civil rights investigation last year into the Houston project that has paused its construction. “Federal transportation department monitoring and intervention on civil rights grounds is rare,” said Theodore Shaw, director of the center for civil rights at the University of North Carolina. “The courts have not done much about it.”

Holding signs riffing off familiar tropes in this conservative state, such as a picture of a bicycle under the words “Come and take it”, several dozen protesters rallied outside the Texas department’s headquarters in the shadow of Texas’ pink-hued capitol in Austin.

“It’s just plain Jane boring lanes, more and more lanes,” said Fabian Ramirez, a structural engineer whose property in Houston’s Northside district is set to be flattened as part of a controversial $9bn project to widen and realign the city’s highways. “There’s no train, there’s no bus, there’s no anything that supports mass transportation. It doesn’t exist. They [Texas DoT] love concrete. I mean, geez. I love building stuff, but I also have a