The project that will be approved will never be built, of course, because Harris County has a different plan waiting in the wings. Once the approval for this placeholder for federal money is accomplished, a radically different plan will be substituted and that project will be built instead, apparently with no further review.

The new project will remove the existing High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane and the additional HOV lanes called for in the current project. The community will lose its popular and highly successful Metro-dedicated busway and with it will go any hopes for future rapid transit in the corridor.

Essentially, the transitways will be replaced by a toll road, which requires no federal oversight and no citizen input, and by some new “diamond” lanes, which – at least on paper – will have the same regulations as the existing HOV lanes. But there will be no physical separation of these lanes, and drivers will ignore the rules as they now ignore the diamond lanes in the existing western part of the freeway, where single-occupant cars and trucks immediately move into them as soon as they appear. Metro’s buses will travel in the toll lanes and mingle and compete there with ordinary traffic.

This will slow the bus service, of course. As that happens, people will stop riding the buses, more drivers will drive alone in cars, and within a year or so the freeway will be just as congested as it is today, different only in that the choice of public transit will be gone.

Wealthier people will be able to pay to use the tollway, which will never be badly congested because the toll road authority will simply raise prices to control usage. In other places, these private roads for elite drivers are balanced with transit spending for the rest of the populace, but there is no balance planned here.

Indeed, almost every highway project in the region, including the $4 billion Grand Parkway, now shows up on a Harris County map of “Pooled Projects” as a new toll road. This is a very efficient way of repaying campaign contributors by letting enormous contracts much sooner than would have been possible under the modest and largely fraudulent public scrutiny such projects now receive with the federal government in the picture.

With most large highway projects moving out of federal – and thus local citizen – control, perhaps the $45 billion now set to be spent in the Metropolitan Transportation Plan can be freed up for new projects like building hotels and sports facilities in the flood plain.

At a time when nearly all other regions are using some of their transportation dollars to create more livable, equitable communities, it is inspiring to witness the innovation of our region’s leaders in finding creative ways to skirt public policy in order to expand the chaotic and increasingly unlivable patterns of development we now endure. When people here refer to Houston as a “can do” place, this is what they mean.