This is an opinion column.

It’s about the money. They’re still trying to spend $5.4 billion on this boondoggle called the Northern Beltline.

The Highway to What the Hell? The Do-Nothing Doughnut. So much dough that it’s nuts.

Think about $5.4 billion. With a “B.” That’s $2,817 for every family in Alabama. To build a 52-and-a-half-mile road around Birmingham for what researchers say are the wrong reasons, based on bad data, that will likely damage the environment and backfire on the city it is to skirt.

Try to get your head around this project, which is slated to be the most expensive road ever built in Alabama. At current projections it’s $104 million a mile. A road that will do nothing at all to help with overcrowded roads in Huntsville or Baldwin County or even Shelby County.

It’s $5.9 million for every 100 yards of road. That’s a football field’s distance, or about 10 seconds out of Derrick Henry’s day.

Henry makes about $8 million a year. That’s worth 136 yards of this road – less distance than the Heisman winner averaged per game in college. But then. Alabama Defensive Coordinator Kane Wommack makes $1.55 million a year. That’d only get you 27 yards on this road. Too bad he couldn’t hold Vandy to that. Ever.

But I digress. An average Alabamian’s income wouldn’t buy two feet of this road. It’s $58,929 per yard, $19,643 per foot, $1,637 per inch.

All this in a state that hates the federal government but is happy to play politics with the federal money it gets to build roads to anywhere. In a state that claims it’s too broke to expand Medicaid to help families and children, too broke to fully remove the sales tax on food. In a state where a kid can’t even qualify for Medicaid unless his family makes less than $5,400 a year — or about 3.3 inches of this damn road.

Yes, it’s about the money. But it’s also clear now, after years of hype and spin and unconvincing argument, it’s not just about the money.

A new study by a team of economists from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte found the Alabama Department of Transportation not only used flawed studies to justify what will be the most expensive road project in Alabama history, but continued to use that data even after it was discredited by economists.

“The current re-evaluation of the Beltline project continues to use outdated and inaccurate numbers,” the new study says. “As such, the benefits of this project have been dramatically overstated while the costs have not been fully considered.”

The study was commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has – commendably, as far as I’m concerned – shuddered at the impact of this project.

Matthew Metzgar, one of the authors of the report, said the SELC asked for an honest assessment of the plans.

“It seemed on the surface that this was a large amount of money for a little gain,” he said. “They wanted us to take a look and see if that was true or not.”

An ALDOT spokesman said the department is still reviewing the new study, but said residents in the area of the beltline overwhelmingly support the project, which they contend will spur economic development.

This study doesn’t just bust all the myths about this boondoggle, though. It deconstructs them. And it’s blistering.

“The Northern Beltline project is being sold primarily as an economic development project,” it says. “However, the primary purpose of any transportation project should be the efficient movement of people, goods, and services … Building a ‘bridge to nowhere’ may create temporary construction jobs but provides little benefit to the overall community.”

It says the notion of “if you build it, they will come” is bogus. In fact the reverse is true, that economic development and jobs create demand for roads, not the other way around.

And the promise of jobs is, well, like the promise of the Edsel.

ALDOT has predicted the project will result in 2,842 permanent jobs, the report said. That sounds great, until you realize that’s $2.3 million a job. And that more than a million people live in the Birmingham metro.

There will certainly be plenty of temporary construction jobs. But taxpayers will pay $845,453 for each one if the project is completed in 30 years, the researchers said.

It clearly won’t be done in 30 years, but Birmingham might be.

As the study points out, Birmingham is losing population, the MSA is growing slower than average. And where it’s been growing the most, where we do need better and bigger roads, is on the exact opposite side of the city. Plus,Jefferson County already has its hands full without paying to build more roads and sewers and other infrastructure in the hinterlands, and there is simply no demand for this kind of investment.

Except from road builders and landowners who think they’ll get a boon from this doggle.

But that hope is as overblown as the price tag.

The study makes clear that this is a road around Birmingham that will benefit – if anybody – out-of-state travelers and maybe a few people high-tailing it back and forth between Tuscaloosa and Gadsden. Economic development will likely be limited to the kind of stuff you find at every interstate exit.

“A bypass-focused beltline will essentially create a series of travel stops, rather than building vibrant communities,” the report said. “Fast food restaurants and gas stations are not the main drivers of economic development.”

It’s not just that it won’t live up to the expectations. It’s that it will hurt.

“Building a large northern beltway will only serve to pull more traffic and potential development away from the city itself,” the report says,

It may shift people and resources from the city toward those outer areas, but “shifting population from one area of an MSA to another however is not growth,” it said.

It’s an illusion. Like this boondoggle.

We are spending $5.4 billion to stick a knife in the heart of the city of Birmingham. All while Madison and Baldwin County, and Shelby, for that matter, beg for real traffic help.

“The funds for this project could be better used for other transportation projects in the Birmingham area, or for other non-transportation projects which would create more jobs and produce economic growth,” the report said.

It goes on to say what everybody around Birmingham already knows, but relentlessly refuses to address. That the Birmingham-Hoover MSA needs regional cooperation to reverse its course. Not a $5.4 billion road.

It’s harder to cooperate, I guess, than to spend $4,900 for every man, woman and child in the metro area.

It is incompetent at best, corrupt at worst. Yet the politicians and spin doctors boast of it and put up signs calling it “another project to rebuild Alabama.”

This is not rebuilding Alabama. It is breaking it.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.