The stupid! It burns!

Did Mike Huckabee just say that he wanted to add a lane of I-95 from Bangor to Miami during the debate?

Oh yes he did.

The Huckster has a history of good-sounding ideas (abolish the IRS!) with horrible effects easily recognizable with an additional thirty seconds' thought (instant creation of a huge black market, a plummet in revenue). As if I even have to, here are some of the most obvious, thirty seconds' thought reasons this is stupid, coming from someone who has been on every mile of I-95 from York, Maine to Miami.

1. A lot of I-95 a wide-open four-lane rural highway. Between Richmond and Jacksonville, the highway is hardly ever congested because it goes through unpopulated areas. Adding another lane to handle the rush hour in Florence, S.C. is a colossally waste of money.

2. Where more capacity is needed, there simply isn't room. The highway cuts a wide swathe through the Bronx, built at the cost of many once-vital neighborhoods. You just can't cut out more at the wave of a hand to create space for the highway. Also, I-95 goes over the George Washington Bridge in New York, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge in Washington and any number of other bottlenecks. Do you really think Huck is going to knock down the GWB to build a wider one? How will traffic flow in the interim?

3. Adding lanes don't decrease congestion. The faster new highways are built, the more people move farther away from where they work. Another lane almost always leads to congestion reductions that are eaten up by people who assume that it will stay as uncongested as they day it opened. Now we're stuck with a bunch of extreme commuters spending three or more hours per day.

The real solution to congestion and economic growth through infrastructure is more complex. On the one hand, more money has to be spent on mass transit, including commuter rail. The marginal increase in congestion with each additional car is exponential up to a point: one car on an empty road does nothing, nor do two or three or ten. However, adding one more car to an already clogged road decreases average speed by a surprisingly large amount. Therefore, taking "a little off the top" makes a big difference. If you think traffic in the large northeastern cities is bad, it would be even worse without mass transit.

On the other hand, the car culture is entrenched and people want backyards. We need to increase the gas tax to encourage car-pooling. Slugging in Virginia is an amazing phenomenon caused by a lack of parking and overwhelming congestion outside the HOV lanes. It can happen elsewhere.

Yes, we need to invest in infrastructure to drive economic growth. But adding another lane to I-95 is probably the dumbest way to do it.