Straight from the mouths of Reuters (via Yahoo! News)…

…Environmentalists say an 18-lane highway going up in Houston speaks volumes about how people in his home state of Texas view the planet. Between 2003 and 2009, $2.7 billion of state and federal money will have been plowed into expanding 23 miles of Interstate-10 in west Houston to as wide as 18 lanes in some stretches…

…and…

They had sought to preserve a rail line that ran along I-10 for a commuter train that someday might bring workers to the city from distant suburbs. But after 15 years of study and discussion about the highway, state officials decided to go with a highway-only strategy….Part of the difficulty in weaning Houston off road building, environmentalist Blackburn said, is that the decades-long debate over transit planning has been dominated by the region’s energy interests and by developers who made their fortunes building homes in far-flung suburbs.

What can you say?