Put yourself in the shoes of a reluctant cigarette smoker. You’re fed up with the habit, but every attempt to quit ends the same: your cravings win out. One day a salesman knocks on your door with a solution. He has discovered a ground-breaking way to end your cravings for good.The trick, he expl ains, is to buy even more cigarettes than you already do. If you currently smoke a pack a day, buy two. This state-of-the-art program ensures that you’ll never have to suffer a craving again. In exchange for providing this insight, the salesman requests $5,000. Does this sound like an affordable, effective solution to your problem? This metaphor illustrates a systemic issue that plagues countless American transportation authorities: many believe the solution to highway traffic jams is to just increase the number of lanes. Such efforts are expensive and ultimately ineffective, if not counterproductive. Unfortunately, the state of Connecticut may now fall victim to another of these so-called solutions. In October of 2025, CTDOT unveiled a plan to address traffic congestion on I-95 in Stamford by “increasing capacity” for the highway — principally by adding two extra lanes. The department additionally plans to construct an arterial road to reduce confusion for local drivers, and believes that these shifts will “improve mobility across I-95 for the local community.” While local drivers may benefit from the collector-distributor road, the suggestion that an increase in the number of lanes to the highway will “improve mobility” is disorienting. Highway lane expansions do not, in the long term, increase mobility in any meaningful way. Additionally, urban highway expansions have historically decimated public health and shattered communities, and this proposal’s impact on downtown Stamford will be no exception. It’s not cheap to simply increase highway width. CTDOT has not yet provided a budget estimate, but similar projects currently underway have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Anyone who’s driven on it will agree: Traffic on I-95, especially in Stamford, stinks. The solution CTDOT has proposed, however, combines improvements (like the arterial road) with expensive exercises in Sisyphean futility. Adding another lane to the highway in order to ease traffic jams is like trying to curb your nicotine cravings by just buying more cigarettes. There are only two proven methods to ease highway congestion: you either disincentivize automobile transportation or you incentivize its alternatives, and ideally you do both. For I-95, that means charging tolls and expanding public transportation. Road tolls, also known as congestion-pricing, are the ‘eat your vegetables’ solution to traffic jams; many are angered by their implementation, but if properly seasoned, most accept or even come to appreciate them. The installation of a tolled express lane on California’s State Route 91 in the 1990’s improved safety and traffic flow on a chronically congested freeway and remains popular with locals, as does a similar model implemented in Virginia in 2017. By managing demand through dynamic pricing, highway administrators apply elementary economic principles to improve outcomes for road users. Tolls limit traffic to a manageable amount, and travel times improve – it’s common sense. Motorists who frequent I-95 might be annoyed by such a fee, not unreasonably. American urban planners have long prioritized the efficiency of car travel to the detriment of other transportation modes. As a result, many who utilize I-95 lack feasible alternatives. Charging road-users a toll without providing for a substitute is punitive. Here’s where we can combine positive and negative incentives into a coherent policy. Implemented last year, New York City’s lauded congestion-pricing scheme directs 80% of revenue collected to municipal transit improvements. Drivers may be irritated by the toll, but they can now choose to take a well-funded, well-maintained train instead. A similar arrangement would work for I-95. Tolls collected on the highway could be channeled directly into transit improvements along the same corridor. We could have bus rapid-transit, revitalized regional rail, inter-county bike-paths, and faster, more reliable service on the Metro-North New Haven line for pennies-per-car. If we disincentivize excessive highway driving through a toll, we can simultaneously use the revenue to channel travelers into more efficient alternatives. Some may argue such a toll constitutes an egregious burden on drivers. Is it not more egregious to force taxpayers to spend millions on a highway expansion, one which will ultimately have a negligible effect on traffic while simultaneously scarring one of our most vibrant cities? Connecticut has a choice: double-down on discredited ideas, obsessing over automobile speeds while paradoxically gumming them up, or we can eat our vegetables and implement policies that work. The only way to quit smoking is to stop buying cigarettes. The only way to have less traffic is to ask drivers to drive less, and offer them the means to do so. Matthew Silber lives in Norwalk. ...read more read less