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City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways by Megan Kimble

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Posted 2024-08-01

People PlacesBook Notes by John December

In this book, Megan Kimble tells the story of two worlds: the people working to plan and build highways and a separate world of people displaced by and fighting this construction. She describes this multi-decade and multi-faceted conflict and the changing generations involved. Ultimately, Kimble uncovers an important conclusion about this struggle and a way forward that could help reclaim the future of cities in the American landscape.

Kimble focuses on case studies in Texas involving expansion plans of I-35 in Austin, I-345 in Dallas, and I-45 in Houston. However, as she describes, the same type of conflict has played out over decades in hundreds of different places. Freeway builders tap a bottomless well of money and power and work relentlessly to plan and expand highways and steamroll over community feedback, local conditions, empirical evidence, and common sense. The people opposed to freeway expansion, forming ad-hoc groups, struggle to understand dislocations in their communities and grapple with highway plans they cannot understand. With few resources, these freeway fighters seek to confront the freeway builders and gain some control over their neighborhoods but end up in lengthy battles they usually lose.

This conflict seems intractable, but by the end of this book, the author reveals the hidden factor that keeps this conflict locked in place: the ideology that holds highways as the rightful, perpetual disruptor of cities. This highway ideology remains unspoken while open conflicts play out: highway expansion proponents and freeway fighter opponents engage in a public drama with rote lines and formulaic rhetoric in a repertory theater of the absurd that leads to the same ending nearly every time. Meanwhile, the unexamined author of this drama--the freeway ideology--keeps the game fixed against anything but perpetual highway expansion.

This struggle between highway ideology and communities is a story that has continued for almost 70 years in the US and worldwide. Kimble's book plays a vital role in updating us on a new generation of people working to counter highway expansion. Most importantly, Kimble's book peels back history and reveals a key to unlocking this conflict: a re-examination of the ideologically-driven policy decisions and assumptions that place highways and suburban mobility over--literally on top of and displacing--urban health, equity, livability, and prosperity.

This book helped me understand key points about highway building:

  1. Interstates were never intended to go into cities. President Dwight Eisenhower, the originator of the US Interstate Highway system, did not intend the interstates to go into cities and was angry (p. 33) that cities adopted plans for interstates to cut through and destroy city neighborhoods. John Bragdon, overseer of the interstate highway system, had pointed out that the interstates were not meant to go into cities or form "loops" in cities (p. 31) or be "co-opted to solve local traffic problems within cities" (p. 31). Bragdon maintained that "Practically all the experts on the transportation problem of cities agree that rapid transit and mass transit systems are the solution... subways, commuter trains, special bus lines, are the answers for solving this [city transit] problem" (p. 32). The election year and plans already advancing motivated Eisenhower to give up trying to stop interstates from going into cities. Cities, lured by the promise of federal funding to build local roads in their borders, jumped on the chance to co-opt the interstates, and the rest is history (pp. 33-34).

  2. When highways are widened, induced traffic (also called induced travel or generated traffic) fills in the added capacity, removing the supposed benefit of widening highways. This has been a widely recognized consequence of highway building for many decades (pp. 15-16; pp. 73-24). Jake Blumgart (2022) describes how decision-makers regularly ignore the induced traffic phenomenon despite decades of research on the topic. Todd Litman covers the topic in detail in "Generated Traffic and Induced Travel." By failing to address induced traffic, widening highways creates more traffic, which leads to further highway capacity problems (Transportation for America, 2020 "The Congestion Con: How more lanes and more money equals more congestion"). Jane Jacobs in her book, Dark Age Ahead (2004), pp. 73-76 describes traffic engineers who refuse to look at the behavior of traffic but instead hold beliefs about traffic flow that have no basis in reality. Widened highways also have subsequent costs of automobile crashes. The cost of these crashes reduces savings from any temporary congestion reduction, as Robert Steuteville wrote in the CNU Journal (Steuteville, 2022). Therefore, widening highways to reduce congestion is an unsustainable and expensive cycle and suggests circular (Singer, 2013) or invalid (Jacobs, 2004) reasoning. The result is that highway departments spend large amounts of money to make congestion problems worse, cause deaths, cause harm to communities, and increase costs.

  3. Kimble starkly states her book's central finding on page 274: "If widening highways doesn't fix traffic, why were we spending billions of dollars to widen highways? ...the answer is ideological. For nearly a century, we have been sold the idea that automobiles made us freer and more prosperous" (p. 274). Kimble describes how the collaboration among highway builders and traffic engineers led to the formation of the highway ideology—the prime directive for transportation in cities and among cities: to MOVE CARS (p. 61) and focus only on measuring vehicle speeds (p. 278). See also: Shifting Gears (2023) and Fighting Traffic (2008).

    • The highway ideology's prime directive still dominates transportation. While this ideology served various interests in the past, it has been shown over the past 70 years to play a part in the suburbanization of the United States and the world (see books). In many ways, this remains the imperative today. Peter Norton shows the rise of this in Fighting Traffic (2008) and its perverse extension in Autonorama (2021). Charles Marohn reveals how this ideology embedded itself in the engineering profession in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (2021). Susan Handy shows the need to re-examine assumptions about transportation in Shifting Gears (2023).

      Car bias poses a risk to public health, safety, and the environment. In their article, "Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard," researchers Walker, Tapp, and Davis (2022) showed how automobile bias is an unexamined force that introduces environmental and health hazards. Orientation towards cars as the only means of transport can obscure the harm cars inflict, as Miner et al. (2024) examined in "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment." Car dependency as a policy goal has warped cities to revolve around cars (Kay, 1997; Kenworthy, 2017; Newman & Kenworthy, 2021), endangering a healthy mix of transportation options. Building interstate highways using eminent domain to widen highways has destroyed urban neighborhoods, including prosperous Black neighborhoods (p. 58). This may have helped speculation in suburban land opportunities, but has removed urban wealth and introduced health and environmental damage.

    • Given the prime directive to MOVE CARS at all costs, highway agencies relentlessly (chapter 7) used deception and threats to follow that ideological prime directive. Kimble spends most of her time documenting how the new generation of freeway fighters face these challenges (p. 187). The Texas DOT claims sovereign domain over the land. It uses any justification to MOVE CARS onto it, including using opaque computer models that hold the assumptions of providing for car dominance at all costs--including human life and urban prosperity--to fulfill the prime directive to move cars (p. 255-256). The prime directive to build highways and move cars adjusts to deceive or eliminate opposition. Using a promise to build deck caps over highways, TxDOT could promise a "connected Austin," but by placing the costs of deck caps right onto the city, which could not afford them, the result would be a "wider gash cutting across it" (p. 260).

  4. For reform, Kimble proposes several ideas, including re-examining the highway ideology and replacing it with democratic processes.

    1. Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) that oversee highways need more equitable representation of city interests (pp. 283-4). Kimble describes how Houston and Harris County make up nearly 60% of the population served by their MPO Council, yet Houston and Harris County only have an 11% representation on the council's seats (p. 283).

    2. City designs and zoning codes should allow city features to be closer together to reduce driving distances (pp. 272-273) and emissions. Charles Moreno in his book The 15-Minute City (2024) also describes ideas to reduce the distances people have to travel to meet their regular needs. These changes must be made bottom-up, starting with residents describing their needs and how they can meet them closer to home.

    3. Kimble describes the power of bottom-up collective action in opposing highways. She quotes activist Jaime Cano working in Austin to rethink I-35 who states, "... where there is organizing, where there are people that care, there is hope." (p. 259).

    4. Mixed-use neighborhoods show promise. The author moved to a mixed-income, walkable community, replacing Austin's Robert Mueller Municipal Airport (p. 287). As part of that development, community land trusts stabilized the neighborhoods so that people would not have to move when faced with rising property values (p. 288). The mixed-use nature builds regular destinations people need close to their residences, including jobs, stores, and other amenities.

    5. Kimble points to a future vision that recognizes that highways, once seen as permanent, can be torn down (p. 290).

    6. Kimble's main thesis boils down to the simple idea that assumptions, once accepted at face value, can be changed (pp. 274--278). This idea--of change possible--is what Susan Handy concludes in her book Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking about Transportation (2023).

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2024-08-03 · John December · Terms © johndecember.com