Road rage

No, one more lane will not make any difference: widening roads remains a fool’s errand. Cities that price driving honestly get fewer cars. Byron Hebert, the city administrator for Katy, Texas, told Community Impact in September 2025 that getting his fast-growing suburb moving meant widening every north-south road within reach.

A few weeks earlier, Governor Greg Abbott had committed 146 billion US dollars in new spending to the Texas Department of Transportation over the next decade. The Katy Freeway , the stretch of Interstate 10 connecting Houston to its western suburbs, was last widened in 2011 at a cost of 2.8 billion US dollars, ending with 23 lanes and the ‘world’s widest highway’ title. By 2014 evening commute times along it had climbed 55 per cent. The Texas A&M Transportation Institute ranked the same segment the most congested in the state in its 2024 study. “One more lane, bro, just one more lane, I promise” has become a meme for an obvious reason. Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner published the canonical paper on this in the American Economic Review in October 2011. The two economists, then at the University of Toronto and Brown, set the elasticity of vehicle-miles to road capacity at close to one: lay down 10 per cent more lane-kilometres in an American city and motorists, old and new, will drive about 10 per cent more miles. Wenhua Hsu and Hongliang Zhang replicated the result on Japanese expressways three years later. The arithmetic has aged unhelpfully for the lane-builders. The Pearland Economic Development Corporation, south of Houston, has been busy marketing the planned widening of State Highway 35 as a commercial-development opportunity under its ‘ Pearland 20/20 ‘ plan. Wider lanes invite developers, developers invite fleets, and the fleets refill the lanes. Houston TranStar’s figures this year had drivers on the Katy stretch spending longer in rush hour than they did in 2024.

Key points

• A few weeks earlier, Governor Greg Abbott had committed 146 billion US dollars in new spending to the Texas Department of Transportation over the next decade.
• The Katy Freeway , the stretch of Interstate 10 connecting Houston to its western suburbs, was last widened in 2011 at a cost of 2.8 billion US dollars, ending with 23 lanes and the ‘world’s widest…
• By 2014 evening commute times along it had climbed 55 per cent.
• The Texas A&M Transportation Institute ranked the same segment the most congested in the state in its 2024 study.
• “One more lane, bro, just one more lane, I promise” has become a meme for an obvious reason.