The Real Cost of More Roads

Every time Manatee County opens a newly widened road, we celebrate the extra paved lanes and the perceived faster travel. But should we?

Because I can make an argument that what we’re really doing is inadvertently sacrificing the very safety and sustainability we claim to want for short-term gain. After the celebration, the reality sets in; our approach to building and expanding our infrastructure is fundamentally flawed, both in its logic and its long-term safety and financial consequences.

We celebrate these lanes and speed as if they are the answer to all our transportation and growth problems. But what’s really happening is starkly different.

Widening roads doesn’t make us safer. It encourages speeding, deepens our reliance on cars, and sets up a future taxpayer burden for the perpetual maintenance costs that few communities can afford.

Now imagine a system where slowing down and removing cars from the roads is a feature, not a bug. Traffic calming measures, complete streets, roundabouts, and smarter intersection designs can naturally encourage safer driving and smoother commutes. Instead of building ever-expanding roads for a one-to-two-hour window of peak traffic, while encouraging unsafe driving on under-capacity speedways for the remaining 22-23 hours a day, we could design environments that are tools for safety.

Slower, more deliberate speeds reduce fatal accidents, aligning with our stated safety goals.

The FDOT’s Target Zero initiative offers a glimpse into an alternative approach - one that advocates for minimal fatalities and severe injuries on the road. Yet, while this is their stated goal, local polices all over Florida push for expansions that promote and encourage unsafe driving patterns.

So, what exactly constitutes a smart, efficient, and safe infrastructure strategy?

There is a more thoughtful path forward. Instead of relentlessly widening roads at over $8 million per lane mile while we eminent domain our neighbors’ front yards, we should focus on enhancing our overall transportation network with multimodal solutions. Redirecting funds from these endless lane expansions to develop integrated systems, improved transit options, safer intersections with roundabouts, and extensive recreational/commuter trail networks. These are the options that create the infrastructure that moves people and enriches and maintains our communities.

Otherwise, every new lane is nothing more than just asphalt - it’s another impervious surface, increasing flood risk and erasing green spaces that define our neighborhoods. Some on our Board have tried to decline the building of needed housing, of schools, and even baseball fields because of flood concerns, yet they prioritize paving endless stretches of green space and removing mature trees in the right-of-ways…flooding and environment be damned. This is short-sighted, as the near-term gain of improved vehicular flow will come at the expense of the deterioration of both our environmental health and community character.

In truth, each expansion is a costly and unsustainable commitment, not just for our environment, but for our long-term budget - a Ponzi scheme of infrastructure where today’s new asset becomes tomorrow’s liability.

The financial implications are severe. Every new road or lane is a mandate for future maintenance with your tax dollars, not just a one-time expense with a developer’s impact fees. Communities often underestimate the long-term liabilities, focusing on the initial capital outlay while ignoring the recurring costs. This cycle of expansion and deferred maintenance is unsustainable. It’s a fiscal trap that leaves local governments scrambling for funds, often at the expense of other critical services.

This isn’t just fiscal imprudence, however; it’s a betrayal of our long-term vision. By continually expanding roads to accommodate more cars, we’re not solving transportation challenges - we’re deepening them. Adding lanes encourages more car travel, which demands even more expansion, perpetuating a cycle of overbuilding and escalating maintenance burdens. Building excess-capacity roadways encourages new residents to live further from employment and services, perpetuating a cycle of endless sprawl. The immediate gratification of a smoother ride blinds us to the hidden costs that will burden future generations and taxpayers.

At the heart of our misguided road-building philosophy is the “Level of Service” metric, or LOS. For decades, LOS has been the standard for evaluating road performance, and it’s a focus of EVERY Manatee County land use meeting. It’s a simple concept: roads are graded from A (free-flowing traffic) to F (heavy congestion), and some people insist that we design every road to maximize the “grade.” On paper, it sounds logical.

In practice, it’s a recipe for disaster and wasted tax dollars for expensive, and most likely unnecessary, additional capacity.

LOS prioritizes cars over people, measuring how quickly vehicles move while ignoring the safety and efficiency of everyone - pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and even those speeding along in those cars.

The very argument about current/future LOS is misguided. We hear that those who vote for development along these “dangerous” roads will have people’s blood on their hands. However, roads with D/E/F grades have inherently slower traffic due to congestion. Slow cars are statistically proven to be safer for other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. A majority of the serious accidents seen on these roads are usually a result of bad, aggressive driving, not bad engineering. It’s the A/B grade roads that are actually dangerous and increase the risk of fatalities with their intentionally faster speeds.

But safety is not the goal of higher-grade LOC. What it incentivizes is endless expansion, as congestion is always seen as a problem to be solved with more lanes and wider roads. In fact, adding bus stops and bike lanes for safety and convenience negatively impacts a roadway’s LOS score, as they cause delays in the flow of traffic for a single-passenger car, even if that bus may transport multiple times the number of people and result in a net decrease in traffic and lower cumulative travel time.

This misguided method for determining the “quality” of our infrastructure leads to sprawl, higher costs, less safety, and the destruction of community character. LOS doesn’t account for accident rates, walkability, or neighborhood cohesion. A road can be “A” for cars but “F” for everyone else. And as soon as you widen a road to improve LOS, induced demand fills it back up. The cycle repeats, with ever-increasing costs and diminishing returns.

If we want infrastructure that truly serves our communities, we need to measure what matters. Vehicle Miles Traveled, or VMT, is a far better alternative to LOS. Rather than focusing on how fast cars move, VMT tracks the total distance driven by all vehicles in a region over a given period. This gives planners a clearer picture of how much driving is actually happening and how it changes over time.

By focusing on reducing total miles driven, VMT aligns infrastructure planning with broader goals like sustainability, public safety, and financial prudency. It encourages investments in transit, biking, and walking - modes that LOS ignores and, more often, penalizes. VMT reflects accessibility, not just mobility; the goal isn’t just to move cars faster, but to move people to jobs, schools, and services faster, safer, and more efficiently, regardless of their mode of transportation.

Unlike LOS, which perpetuates the cycle of expansion, VMT recognizes that building more roads leads to more driving. By tracking and aiming to reduce VMT, we can break the cycle of endless expansion. VMT is also a foundation for better fiscal planning and encourages the allocation of resources more effectively. It encourages multimodal transportation but it also encourages mixed-use developments, traffic trip-capture, and in-fill growth which requires less travel along existing infrastructure and less sprawl.

We all need to reimagine our infrastructure strategy. We must get away from the lazy and cost-prohibitive idea that more lanes is the only solution to our growing pains and infrastructure deficiencies. We need to embrace traffic calming, promote local accessibility, and prioritize the preservation of environmental and community assets over the allure of extra pavement. Our overall infrastructure master plan should focus on innovative, efficient, and sustainable options for travel.

It’s about investing in a future where infrastructure supports not only our present driving needs but also the safety and resilience of our communities for generations to come.

Manatee County, and every community, needs to:

• Prioritize safety over speed - Design roads that encourage slower, safer travel.

• Invest in multimodal networks - Support and fund transit, trails, and walkable communities.

• Preserve green spaces - Value environmental health as much as vehicular flow.

• Plan for long-term maintenance - Recognize the true cost of every new lane when reviewing our future Capital Improvement Plan.

• Embrace traffic calming - Use congestion and controlled vehicle flow as a tool for safety, not just an inconvenience.

• Measure what matters - Replace LOS with VMT and other metrics that reflect safety, accessibility, fiscal-sustainability, and community well-being.

As we assess our current plans for growth and our future plans for funding, we need to rethink what progress and improvement means in our community. Let’s build infrastructure that serves people, not just cars.

Let’s invest in solutions that last, not just quick fixes that fade.

The future of Manatee County - our safety, our budget, and our environment - depends on it.

George Kruse is an at-large member of the Manatee County Commission and its District 7 commissioner. This article originally appeared on his Substack blog. Click here to subscribe.