Book review: City Limits

 

Megan Kimble, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways (Crown, 2024)

I can't believe there was a day when people were like, you know what we should do? Tear down all the businesses and houses around our downtown. That seems smart. Let's do that.

--BETH OSBORNE, Transportation for America (Kimble 2024: 202)

This is an even better book than I expected. At its heart it is the story of grass-roots movements in three Texas cities--Austin, Dallas, and Houston--in opposition to Texas Department of Transportation plans to widen interstate highways through the centers of their towns. Those stories are well-told, including accounts of public hearings and interviews with participants on all sides. Results of their efforts were mixed, but demonstrated the importance of community input.

Megan Kimble (from her website)

Besides that, City Limits has two features that make it valuable to those of us who don't live in Texas. (Remarkably, I have not been to any of the three cities!) The first is to describe early in Part I the context in which the current controversies exist, that being the story of the Interstate Highway System. President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously championed that system, but explicitly as an inter-city road network. Apparently without his knowledge, the program aggressively included highways built through cities as well, including all three of the Texas cities discussed (see pp. 27-34). 

The intra-city highways typically obliterated many blocks of existing black neighborhoods and lowered the quality of what remained. This experience was seen with I-90/94 in Chicago, I-94 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and probably your town as well. 

"Before" picture from Dan Ryan Expressway hologram
(my photo at National Museum of American History)

(In Cedar Rapids, without a substantial black population, I-380 plowed through a working-class white neighborhood, and its huge right of way remains an obstacle to development on the west side of the river.) She also discusses highway removals in San Francisco and Rochester, with possibly more to come.

The second feature of the book that is relevant to readers in and out of Texas is hearing directly from those affected by intracity highway construction and expansion; these conversations make up much of Part II. We meet Lockridge Wilson, whose Dallas neighborhood was cleaved by I-45, which he now uses to get to work; Elizabeth Wattley, who managed restoration of Dallas's historic Forest Theater before she found it in the path of I-45 expansion; Elda and Jesus Reyes of Houston, who rally their mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood to defend their homes against I-45 expansion; Angel and Michael Leverett, who live in the Austin suburb of Kyle, reliant on I-35 while choosing employment that will somewhat minimize their commutes; and dozens more. Their stories add dimension to the policy problem, and though neither you nor I are likely to meet any of these people, there are stories just like theirs in the places where we live.

Berm view: 3rd St SW, looking up at I-380

Kimble concludes the book on a hopeful note, but there really are no clear signs of what the future will bring for intracity highways. We need to stop doing what we've gotten used to doing, as well as undoing some of the damage where we can. Their social and environmental costs are hard to ignore, and their financial costs are prodigious, though maybe not as visible as other areas of government budgets. ("I don't think federal taxpayers should be subsidizing the costs of [mass-transit] systems," Baruch Feigenbaum of the Reason Foundation tells a congressional hearing (p. 99), conveniently overlooking that highway infrastructure too is "subsidized.") Land costs, too: outside of the city, but the junction of Interstates 80 and 380 was recently redone to correct a serious problem with the original design, and the footprint of the new interchange is at least as large as the entire downtown area of Cedar Rapids including Kingston Village. (I have it 1.35 square km for the interchange... 

...1.3 square km for downtown-plus-Kingston including the river.)

However, the obstacles to change are huge. It seems expressways are one policy where powerful economic interests are at one with the cultural interests of the Republican party base. This is particularly true in Texas, where private motor vehicles are as sacred as teaching Christianity in public schools, opposition to abortion, closing the border, and free access to heavy weapons (see page 12 of the Texas Republicans' new party platform; for perspective on that platform, see Tumulty 2024.) Neither Texas Governor Greg Abbott nor Transportation chair J. Bruce Bugg have a background in transportation, but they know what they like, and it involves adding lanes (p. 9).  Heck, even in New York, there are limits to how much the interests of local residents can match up with those of commuters.

1960s highway protests in Washington, ultimately successful
(my photo at Anacostia Museum)

A recent Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Samuel Alito (cf. Howe 2024), though it dealt with congressional districting, raises a lot of doubts about whether disparate racial impacts can stop highway expansion as they were in Houston, without an explicit statement from planners that the highway was intended to harm blacks. The costs we've sunk into building expressways also inhibit change: in the long run, public transit is more scalable and less harmful, but at present adding highway capacity is easier.

We've been making a mess of things for 75 years, and now we've built our cities and our lives around coping with it. The way forward is far from simple or clear, but Megan Kimble has given us a good introduction to the issues involved.

SEE ALSO: Dan Allison, "Lawsuits Against YOLO 80," Getting Around Sacramento, 4 June 2024

Joe Cortright, Driven Apart: How Sprawl is Lengthening Our Commutes and Why Misleading Mobility Measures are Making Things Worse (City Observatory, 2010)

Freeways Without Futures 2023 (Congress for the New Urbanism)