The idea that highways don't belong in cities may be news in Texas, but it's not a new idea. In his book in 1963 highways and citiesCritic and historian Lewis Mumford writes: The blood they circulate must enter through an elaborate network of rather small blood vessels and capillaries. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who signed the 1956 bill funding America's postwar highway boom, did not consider these roads to belong to cities.
Yet our cities are surrounded by highways that divide neighborhoods, prioritize cars over other modes of transportation, and are associated with negative impacts ranging from asthma to climate change. I am. For example, downtown Dallas is bound by a noose of urban freeways. The impact of those roads, and what we can do about it, is the subject of a new book. City boundaries: Infrastructure, inequality, and the future of America's highways.by Austin-based journalist Megan Kimble.
In an email, Kimble spoke about the policies that led to this situation, the targeting of minority communities, and the plan to demolish Interstate 345. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
Why are you publishing a book about highways and cities now? Was there anything in particular that inspired you to write it?
In early 2020, the Texas Transportation Commission voted to fund a more than $4 billion project to widen Interstate 35 one mile from Austin, where I live. I was writing about housing policy. texas observerWhere I worked, highways seemed like gateways to a larger story of car addiction and sprawl. That summer, I learned about a major highway expansion project in Houston. This resulted in the demolition of more than 1,000 homes and businesses. I went to Houston and walked in the expansion footprint with a grassroots group that opposed expansion, and I was completely shocked by the scale of the evacuations. I felt like no reporter really dug into the government agency behind all these expansions: the Texas Department of Transportation. And no one was able to satisfactorily answer my fairly basic questions. If expanding freeways doesn't improve traffic, why keep expanding them?
Then I learned about Patrick Kennedy's campaign to get rid of I-345 in Dallas. It felt like a third act. So that's the book's ultimate argument: we should tear down these urban freeways and build something else in their place.
You will arrive at Interstate 345. But first, let's look back at history. The idea that highways don't belong in cities is not new, yet somehow we keep building and expanding them. How did we get here?
Americans believed in the idea that highways and automobiles created prosperity and freedom. The idea was first voiced by General Motors in his 1939 year, but soon became part of federal policy, subsidizing car travel compared to all other forms of transportation. It's hard to imagine now, but nearly every American city once had a very good public transportation system. We removed that transportation to build highways. So people had no choice but to drive. President Eisenhower pitched the Interstate Highway System to Congress, emphasizing the importance of connecting cities across the nation for commerce and national defense. But as America's cities were filled with cars and people cried out for less congestion, planners received federal funds and built massive highways that cut directly through cities, often as intended. It passed through predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
Federal housing policy promised to encourage families, white families, to move to the suburbs and use these highways to quickly return to the city. A similar movement is occurring today. As people move away from cities like Austin, they increasingly rely on highways like Interstate 35 to get back to work and school.
You spend a lot of time writing about people displaced by highway construction and the impact it had on minority communities. How did race influence the construction of urban highways?
In the 1950s and 1960s, city planners and highway engineers intentionally routed urban freeways through black and Hispanic neighborhoods. That's clear in the historical record, the idea that highways can help eliminate so-called blighted areas. Red light districts, communities that have been denied access to credit and government-backed mortgages simply because blacks and Hispanics live, have lower interstate access than the highest-rated districts. We found research showing that people are more than three times as likely to have a home in place. routed through them.
Not only did highways displace and destroy communities of color, they also contributed to urban segregation. In Austin, for example, Interstate 35 was built along East His Avenue. Twenty years ago, the city's first comprehensive plan prohibited blacks from living west of East Avenue. Freeways only reinforced this racial segregation and created a wall between black neighborhoods and the city center.
This brings us back to I-345. The freeway is an aging overpass that separates downtown Dallas from historically Black Deep Ellum. When I started writing about plans to demolish it in 2013, I was told it was a fool's errand. Demolition is now a reality, but the city has made a half-hearted plan to dig a trench instead of removing it.What will happen? best resultsAnd what do you say to those who believe that removing it will cause traffic Armageddon?
TxDOT's “hybrid option” for I-345 (the ditch you mention) is clever branding that suggests the state has somehow found a compromise between highway construction and highway removal. I think. But ditched highways are still essentially highways, and there are benefits to complete removal, freeing up dozens of acres of land for construction and restoration on Dallas' property tax rolls or otherwise. There is absolutely no benefit to extending it with . When TxDOT presented the complete removal option to Dallas, it presented a vision of Carmageddon: 19,000 hours of travel delays. However, these transportation models do not take into account how people's travel behavior changes depending on accessibility. Whenever I get in the car, I always look at Google Maps to find the shortest route to my destination. If it's not a freeway, I don't take it. People are rational consumers of goods, and roads are a commodity like any other.
All cities that eliminate urban highways or otherwise reduce their car capacity will see a reduction in traffic, even on parallel routes. People simply drove less. The demand-induced corollary that adding car capacity fills that capacity with cars is: reduction request. If Dallas wants to build a city that is less car-centric (I think it's an open question whether or not to do so), getting rid of I-345 is a great place to start.
