Highway Safety
Expanding the highway won’t reduce congestion or improve safety—it will create more traffic, higher speeds, and deadlier crashes, and induce even more car dependency and suburban sprawl. Read below to learn about the harmful effects of widening the highway.
NMDOT wants to make the highway much faster
The primary goal of the I-25 project is to increase the speed and size of the highway. Safety is secondary to these "improvements".
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Increasing the speed and size of the highway will lead to:
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Increased number of crashes
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Increased severity of crashes
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Increased pollution from exhaust, tire, and brake fumes
​Excerpt from the Phase 1A study shows that safety is secondary and their primary concern is to increase the design speed to 70 mph for the sake of ‘traffic flow’
Speed kills
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Regardless of the posted speed limit, drivers will drive the design speed of the road [source].
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A crash at 70 mph has over 90% chance of resulting in a fatality.
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New Mexico is 6th highest in the nation for speed-related fatalities at nearly 4 out of every 10 crashes [source].
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Speeding is responsible for more fatalities than driving under the influence.
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We shouldn't be speeding up our urban highways, we should be slowing them down! ​
70 mph is too fast!​
Likelihood of fatality increases significantly with increased car speeds (55 mph≈88 km/h and 70 mph≈112 km/h). Data from Rosen et al. 2011.
More lanes, more crashes
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The proposed plan adds an extra lane in each direction—4 lanes per direction total—which would result in more lane changing.
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Lane changing, especially at speed, is one of the leading causes of crashes [source].
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Adding another lane along I-25 would mean that more people would have to merge over more lanes to get to their exit.
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This would compound on other stressful factors of this stretch of highway: The second most accident-prone sections of highway are interchanges such as the Big-I and on/off ramps.
Expansion = congestion
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Although counterintuitive, adding more lanes makes congestion worse. ​
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This phenomenon was first observed in the 60s and has been the case for every highway expansion since.
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We now understand this effect through the economic concept of induced demand.
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Latent demand: Wider roads make driving more convenient, encouraging more trips to be taken. These induced trips quickly fill the new road capacity.
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Suburban sprawl: Highway expansion enables developments, like Rio Rancho, farther from the city center since people tend to live where they can maintain a 30-minute commute. This sprawl increases overall traffic, eventually filling the new lanes and leading to worse congestion.
Case study: Katy Freeway, TX
The Katy Freeway was widened to 23 lanes to the tune of $2.8 billion. It only took three years for congestion to increase by 25 minutes in each direction!
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In 2008 Katy, TX completed a $2.8 billion project to widen the Katy Freeway to 23 lanes. Over the course of 2011 to 2014 congestion increased by about 25 minutes each direction or over 50 minutes daily [source]
​Where do we go from here?
More modes of transportation
Having different transportation options is the only proven solution to congestion. In New Mexico, 74% of us drive to work alone. Many of us do not have the option to take the bus, bike or walk to work. In addition to congestion, that's making us and our communities more isolated and less healthy [source 1, 2, 3]. Let's work towards a better future for New Mexico where we have the freedom to choose how we go places!
