For all the talk about revamping the structure of MDOT, its culture may be a bigger stumbling block in reform. State transportation departments have been notorious for an "our way or no highway" approach to business.

While MDOT says that's not the way it operates, the perception lingers.

Rick Chellman, a traffic and development planning expert who participated in the Mississippi Renewal Forum and is the head of TND Engineering, said he knows a top engineer in Rhode Island who thinks his most valuable lesson was that sometimes the most important things he'd done were projects he didn't build.

He'd rammed a bunch of highways and bridges down communities' throats, but had since learned better.

"It's not uncommon, but it's becoming less common," Chellman said. "It was definitely the way of the '60s, '70s and '80s, but things started to change a lot in the '90s."

Norman Garrick calls MDOT's method "predict and provide." The University of Connecticut traffic and civil engineering professor was part of the Mississippi Renewal Forum's transportation committee.

He said that, like many state transportation departments, MDOT looks at the history of traffic counts in a location, sees they're going up and builds to provide for future growth. The problem, he says, is that it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, a classic if you build it, they will come situation.

"Nobody gets into a car just because they want to," Garrick said. "They have some goal."

A main tenet of New Urbanism, which was the school of thought mined by the Renewal Forum and Governor's Commission, involves induced traffic. It says that when a road becomes crowded, people travel at different times, take different routes or use different modes of travel to avoid it.

If the road in question is simply widened, more people use it and cause further congestion. That can create situations that exist here, where traffic is increasing faster than the actual population is, because the car provides the main means of transportation and more people are driving farther as residential areas expand.

So sprawl creates auto-dependency, and auto-dependency makes sprawl possible.

In some states, transportation departments faced with budgets unable to support beefier highways to "fix" problems have been forced into more creative solutions. Instead of a state highway lined by big-box retail stores, they build boulevards and use zoning and land-use ordinances to help tame future traffic needs.

Intertwining those roads with other smaller roads creates a grid that experts say is more efficient than having a big highway that bogs down at the smallest accident or breakdown.

Another term used to talk about state transportation departments' actions is "design and defend." The department comes up with a plan to do something, then rebuffs challengers to its plans.

In a letter to the Federal Highway Administration during the Biloxi Bay bridge traffic debate, MDOT's planning department said that if a four-lane bridge were rebuilt, its traffic model showed traffic decreasing - because motorists were avoiding a congested bridge.

"That is, motorists in the immediate vicinity of Ocean Springs traveling to Biloxi choose to travel further to avoid the bridge congestion," it read, which is exactly the New Urbanists' point about induced traffic.

Garrick saw a quote from Southern District Transportation Commissioner Wayne Brown about how it wasn't MDOT's job to be concerned with economic development issues.

"I agree with him," Garrick said. "It's not the job we've given DOTs to do."

He said an old-school transportation department's solution is wider and wider highways, and asks where it ends, with an eight-lane U.S. 49?

"That's ludicrous," said Garrick.