Against the backdrop of booming highway construction under TEA-21, the environmental movement is mobilizing to block highway construction wherever it can.

"The massive avalanche of highway funding Washington has now unleashed could easily put sustainable transportation and anti-sprawl advocates' backs to the wall for years to come in many states, especially in the transit-poor South and West," said Jon Orcutt, of the New York City-based Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

"TEA-21 means big increases in spending that will go for environmentally damaging, and sprawl-inducing new beltways and bypasses," said Hank Dittmar, former executive director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, an anti-road-building consortium. "STPP will focus its future efforts on public education and organizing to ensure that the transportation institutions implement TEA-21 in the public interest, rather than the special interest of the road building and development communities."

In recent months:

* citing the Clean Air Act, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit with the aim of sanctioning highway funds from St. Louis and Missouri DOT;

* also citing noncompliance with the Clean Air Act, a coalition of environmental groups filed suit in Georgia to stop 61 highway projects in Atlanta; and

* in Texas, EPA was considering whether Houston's pollution controls and plan would be adequate to meet federal standards by the 2007 deadline. Formal disapproval would lead to economic sanctions, including loss of federal highway funds.

Even worse, the EPA was attempting to reposition itself to stop road construction by encouraging pro-environment activism at the local and regional levels, according to an internal EPA document.

"In the future, the highway industry will encounter a variety of organizations advocating anti-highway messages as part of their campaign to promote significant changes in the country's development patterns," said Rocky Moretti, director of research of TRIP, The Road Information Program. "The anti-highway forces have a vision of the future that appeals to the public, until people look past the surface. The highway industry must craft an alternate vision of the future that says that livable communities concepts can coexist with suburban development."

The rallying cry against highways this year is sprawl. Stopping suburban sprawl has become the point of reference for anti-growth proponents, stop-highway coalitions, environmental advocacy groups, the EPA and the Clinton administration itself, principally Vice President Al Gore.

"The highways that are built to sustain these suburbs add to our pollution and energy problems, and increase our dependence on an automobile way of life which is unhealthy, anti-social, and unsustainable," wrote Dr. John Holtzclaw in the Sierra Club tract, Curbing Sprawl to Curb Global Warming.

The anti-sprawl movement achieved its acme in Gore's livability agenda, promulgated in January with an eye to the elections in 2000, which calls for increased government spending to restore urban areas, protect farmland and promote "smart growth."

The essence is massive increases in spending on mass transit and CMAQ funds well beyond those in TEA-21, and added funds for pilot and existing programs that address the environmental impacts of transportation, provide access to jobs, create green corridors, enhance transportation corridors and improve intermodalism, according to AASHTO. The funding is described in the administration's FY2000 budget proposal.