https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/09/18/this-is-what-victory-looks-like-freeway-fighters>The epitaph for one such freeway project, the half billion dollar widening of I-205 south of Portland.>Opposition to the project was led by No More Freeways, a grassroots Portland group fighting billions of dollars of freeway widening projects being pushed by ODOT. No More Freeways celebrated its Sixth Birthday this past month, and marked the passing of the I-205 project, along with its allies “Youth vs. ODOT”–young climate advocates who’ve relentlessly campaigned against these wasteful projects.>No More Freeways filed detailed objections and critiques of the project technical work in comments on its Environmental Assessment. In addition, NMF’s community members submitted over 300 comments in opposition to the I-205 expansion during the public comment period last spring, including technical comments pointing out the explicit violation of federal environmental protection law. >This is how bad projects die: Agencies finally, and reluctantly, concede that they don’t have the money to pay for them, and that they are so bad that no one can be convinced to appropriate (or borrow) the money needed to move them forward.>We can only hope that this first small victory will signal a turning of the tide in the battle against wasteful and counterproductive highway expansion projects. Oregon DOT continues to maintain the “extend and pretend” fiction that its now-$1.9 billion Rose Quarter project is still alive, but it too, will have to yield to the fiscal reality that the highway department is essentially broke and doesn’t have the resources to maintain the roads it currently has, much less build enormously expensive new ones.Fucking Christ half a billion for a highway? Plus do not forget maintenance. Yet everyone says that a Light Rail for 100 million is wasteful spending lol.