Highways get bigger, but traffic never gets better
The state of Texas plans to spend about $65 billion to widen its highways over the next decade.
After all that money has been spent, all that construction work completed, and all those neighboring homeowners and businesses displaced, urban traffic congestion in Texas will be at least as bad as it is now.
It’s a maddening cycle of futility that for decades was rarely questioned. But the assumption that we can build our way out of congestion is now being challenged by activists in this state’s biggest cities.
That fight is expertly documented in “City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality and the Future of America’s Highways,” the new book by Austinbased investigative reporter Megan Kimble, a former executive editor at the Texas Observer.
Kimble cites decades of evidence in making her case that our state’s perpetual race to keep building more highway capacity is a doomed mission, driven by policymakers’ myopic inability to envision an alternate course for our cities.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the interstate highway act into law in 1956, he viewed it as a means of connecting the country. To his dismay, however, the program was soon co-opted for urban highways meant to address local traffic problems.
These urban highways drastically altered the shape of Texas cities. They tore right through Black and Latino neighborhoods and forced residents out of their communities. They induced upper-middle-class families to move out of their cities and settle in suburbs.
All you have to do is look at the way Interstate 35 separated the Black community in East Austin from the rest of that city or the way the Texas Highway Department (now known as the Texas Department of Transportation) forced Black families in Houston’s Fifth Ward to vacate their homes to make way for an extension of I-10 at a time when the Fifth Ward was one of the few places in Houston where Black people were allowed to own homes.
Natasha Harper-madison, the lone current Black member of the Austin City Council, has described the stretch of I-35 that runs through Austin as “the physical manifestation of a segregationist past.”
As highways stretched, cities sprawled and lost their sense of cohesiveness. The kinds of public transit options that would work in densely populated urban areas became harder to execute as city residents pulled away from each other.
Kimble’s book includes the fascinating story of Molly Cook, an emergency room nurse who grew up north of Houston in the suburban communities of Spring and the Woodlands. As Kimble points out, Interstate 45 in Houston had been built for families like Cook’s.
But after the 2017 release of a TXDOT plan to expand most of I-45 to a width of 430 feet and force out 300 businesses employing nearly 25,000 people, Cook stepped up to oppose the highway expansion.
“This project is going to uproot families, tear apart communities and destroy thousands of jobs,” Cook said. “We know that change and progress come at a cost. But this is neither change nor progress. This is a repetition of our past mistakes.”
With “City Limits,” Kimble deals with fundamental questions of how we form communities and choose to co-exist with each other. She also addresses the unwieldy power and infuriating arrogance of the Texas Transportation Commission, which routinely defies the wishes of the communities it’s supposed to be serving.
We know that building more urban highway lanes will never relieve congestion. We also know that it will lead to more pollution, more sprawl, less green space, less available housing and fewer businesses.
Kimble’s book doesn’t offer any false promises of easy victories, but it compels us to search for a better way.