The Urbanophile nails it: "Louisville Bridges Project Is the Biggest Transportation Boondoggle of the 21st Century."

Go there and read all about it. The Urbanophile is remorseless.

I differ with only one point.

By rights I should be writing this for a major national publication instead of putting it on my personal web site. But I love Louisville and Southern Indiana (my hometown) and don’t want to create negative press for them. I just want it known for the record that this did not have to happen.

Without negative press -- without floggings, scourging and negative feedback in every known public configuration, right here in Louisville and all across America -- these imbeciles will do something just as stupid, yet again.

Louisville Bridges Project Is the Biggest Transportation Boondoggle of the 21st Century, by Aaron M. Renn (Urbanophile)

I have been a steadfast critic of the project to build two new bridges across the Ohio River in Louisville for over a decade. In fact, my first critical post on the bridges proposal was put up in 2007 less than six months after starting my original Urbanophile blog.

The end result was even worse than I anticipated. The project has proven to be a money waster of the highest order, and in fact by far the biggest American transportation boondoggle I can identify in the 21st century so far.

Part of the agreement between Indiana and Kentucky to build the bridges was that they would do official before and after surveys of traffic to determine the impact of the new bridges on traffic flow. The study was published in August of this year.

The result? The two states spent $1.3 billion dollars to build a parallel I-65 span in downtown Louisville that doubled the capacity of that crossing. After spending that money, traffic fell by 50%.

Let me repeat that: Indiana and Kentucky spent $1.3 billion to double the capacity of a road while traffic levels were cut in half ...