Federal transportation policy lacks clarity and direction. What are we trying to accomplish with national infrastructure spending? Are we focused on efficiently moving goods across the country? Supporting commuters? Stimulating economic development for big-box retailers? Fostering local entrepreneurship? Creating construction jobs? Addressing climate change and environmental degradation? Promoting equity and social justice?
The current answer seems to be "yes" to all of it. Federal transportation policy is attempting to solve every national issue through a single policy mechanism. This ambition, while politically convenient, creates incoherence in practice.
Much like the infamous Willie Sutton quip about robbing banks "because that's where the money is," every major public challenge eventually gets recast as a transportation issue — because that’s where the money is. And so, federal funding becomes the tool of choice not because it's best suited to the problem, but because it's what’s available.
This diffuse set of goals leads to projects with muddled objectives and poor outcomes. One of the clearest manifestations of this is the creation of the "stroad" — a street-road hybrid. Streets are designed to maximize financial productivity by fostering community investment, supporting small-scale commerce, and encouraging local interaction. Roads, by contrast, are meant for high-speed, long-distance travel with minimal access and limited economic engagement along the route.
When transportation policy lacks a clear objective, we end up with stroads: high-speed corridors pretending to be places, and public infrastructure built without regard for long-term financial return. The result is dangerous, inefficient, and economically unsustainable. These are investments that generate liabilities, not assets.
With the Interstate Highway System completed more than 50 years ago, the purpose that once justified federal infrastructure investment no longer exists. Yet the funding continues, now defaulting to projects that have little national value and even less financial return. In the absence of a clear federal purpose, stroads have become the go-to project. They are now ubiquitous in and around America's cities, consuming massive public investments while generating long-term liabilities instead of sustainable financial returns.
One example is US-19 in Pasco County, Florida, one of the deadliest highway segments in the United States. But more than that, it is one of the clearest examples of how federal transportation policy creates dangerous, expensive, and economically destructive outcomes. It’s not just a design failure; it’s an investment failure.
History and Federal Involvement in US-19
The original federal investment into US-19 expanded it into a high-speed arterial, intended to support regional traffic movement. But even before the highway was completed, the federal investment created a powerful incentive for local governments to approve and encourage low-density, auto-oriented strip development along the corridor.
For municipalities, the promise of new commercial property, increased sales tax revenue, and one-time infrastructure grants made this form of development politically irresistible. With the federal government covering the cost of the major roadway, local governments had an opportunity to generate quick fiscal returns without committing significant local resources. Approving strip development along the US-19 corridor was framed as an economic win: a low-cost way to capture new tax base and demonstrate growth.
Since then, big-box stores, strip malls, gas stations, storage facilities, and fast-food chains have lined the highway. The very presence of the driveways, turning traffic, and access points meant to serve this new development compromised the highway's function as a transportation corridor. These features introduced friction, conflict points, and the need for frequent signalization, slowing down traffic and increasing the risk of crashes.
A highway that had been designed, with federal dollars, for speed and throughput was forced to operate like a local street, constantly interrupted by vehicles entering and exiting the driving lanes. This degraded the core function of the highway: long-distance, uninterrupted mobility.
In essence, the highway investment was undermined by the very development it created. What was intended to serve regional traffic ended up overloaded with local access needs. The corridor could no longer serve its original purpose, but it also failed to evolve into a productive local street. It became a stroad — expensive to build, dangerous to use, and financially unsustainable to maintain.
As congestion mounted, the federal response was more spending on new highways. State Route 589 (Suncoast Parkway) was constructed to bypass US-19. As that has continued the same cycle, Interstate 75, farther east, became a bypass of the bypass.
Each wave of construction triggered more low-value growth and more need for new capacity. The underlying development pattern — fragmented, low-returning, and dangerous — remained unaddressed as local governments plan for and pursue the next round of transportation investment.
Safety, Design, and Economic Consequences
US-19 exemplifies how the stroad creates both functional confusion and public danger. Designed to accommodate high-speed traffic while also providing frequent local access, the corridor ends up serving neither function effectively.
Between 2001 and 2016, 137 pedestrians were killed along this stretch of US-19 in Pasco County. In the five years that followed, another 48 lives were lost. These are not random events; they are the predictable outcomes of a design that mixes high speeds with access to adjacent development. Wide travel lanes, high speeds, driveways at nearly every property, and long distances between crosswalks combine to create an environment that facilitates collisions.
In response to these hazards, officials — often accessing federal transportation funding — have invested in superficial retrofits: additional signals, turn lanes, signage, and lighting. These expensive measures may mitigate some risks, but they fail to address the fundamental flaw: a corridor trying to be both a road and a street, both a place for high-speed travel and complex turning movements.
This flawed design also undermines long-term financial viability. The land uses encouraged by this kind of federal investment — strip malls, big-box stores, and fast food restaurants — are inherently low in tax productivity. They are spread across large parcels, set back from the street, and surrounded by surface parking. These sites generate minimal value per acre while demanding some of the most costly public infrastructure: wide roads, utilities stretched across great distances, and complex stormwater and signal systems.
Value per acre is a critical metric for evaluating whether public investments generate sufficient private wealth to sustain infrastructure and services. In productive places, this value is high. In environments like US-19, it is low. Despite this imbalance, local governments often pursue federal funding for these projects because they can reap immediate benefits from an investment they don’t have to fully fund.
The federal government builds the road, and the local government gets to capitalize on it, approving adjacent commercial development that appears to boost the local economy. But these are shallow gains. The development is typically low-value, low-density, and high-cost, delivering little in lasting fiscal return while undermining the mobility purpose of the original investment.
Ultimately, US-19 is not just a failure of traffic design; it is a failure of investment strategy. A corridor built with public money has become a long-term liability: dangerous to use, expensive to maintain, and delivering little economic benefit to the community it was meant to serve.
A Pattern of Failure
US-19 is not an isolated case. It is a repeatable, predictable outcome of federal policy, a simple formula that continues to play out in cities and towns across the country. The federal government makes a mobility investment. The local government approves adjacent commercial development to chase short-term gains. The infrastructure fills with local traffic, congestion mounts, and then another bypass is proposed, sometimes multiple bypasses of bypasses, each one degrading mobility rather than enhancing it.
Local governments have evolved to exploit federal transportation investments for short-term local gain. The result is development that looks like growth, but delivers little financial return, while it undermines the transportation system it depends on. The system keeps going because the funding remains.
That funding lacks focus. What began as a strategy to build the Interstate Highway System has morphed into a self-perpetuating subsidy for fragility. The Federal Highway Trust Fund is insolvent. Cost-benefit analyses and traffic projections are manipulated to justify projects. An entire industry of consultants, contractors, and administrators exists to keep the pipeline going.
Federal dollars should support national priorities: connecting across regions, supporting goods movement across the continent, and maintaining the interstate system we've already built. Until that shift happens, the pattern will continue — because it is the only kind of investment the federal system is capable of making.
The federal government cannot design places. It cannot orchestrate complex, nuanced, locally specific improvements that create lasting value. It can only build big infrastructure.
That was useful when the mission was connecting cities across a continent. But now, with that system long complete, the same tools are being used for local development — something they were never meant to build and cannot build well. The result is not just inefficiency; it is the steady erosion of our transportation network and public finances, creating more corridors like US-19: expensive, unsafe, and financially ruinous.
