In her new book City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, investigative journalist Megan Kimble weaves together the origins of urban highways with the stories of people impacted by our transportation system—and she features a behind-the-scenes look at how SGA is working with a handful of communities to repair the damage of past highway projects. We sat down with Megan to have a conversation about the modern freeway fighting movement, what the federal government can do to address divisive infrastructure, and more.
While most of what you chronicle is happening everywhere, Texas is certainly at the forefront of some of the worst excesses of money-wasting highway expansion projects that damage communities and bring diminishing returns to taxpayers. How instrumental was seeing the Texas angle up close for kickstarting your book?
I started reporting City Limits in the spring of 2020, when the Texas Transportation Commission allocated $4 billion to expand I-35 through the heart of Austin, a mile from where I live. I had been writing about housing and sprawl, and the highway seemed like a way into that larger story of car dependency. So initially, I was just covering I-35, but my lens soon widened across Texas when I learned about a massive highway expansion in Houston that would demolish 1,200 homes. I went to Houston in December 2020 to see the impacts of that project firsthand, the enormous acreage that would soon be consumed by a highway, and that’s when the book really came together for me, centered around the idea that Texas is the epicenter of the highway industrial complex.
I love the heat—I live in Texas, after all—but last summer was the hottest on record in Austin. It was soul-crushing. In the midst of this punishing summer, when our rivers dried up and springs were unsafe to swim in, TxDOT formally approved the I-35 expansion, which will only bring more emissions and pollution to Austin. The idea that highways are fossil fuel infrastructure absolutely motivated me while I was reporting this book.
You note that state DOTs use “traffic models so complex that no one could understand them.” What did you learn about the models?
Mostly, traffic models are used to justify highway expansion by predicting a future of catastrophic congestion. Activists and urban planners call this “colonizing the future”—if we plan for a future of car-centric sprawl, that’s what we’ll get. These models aren’t accessible or public, so TxDOT gets to make some fairly outrageous claims, and it’s almost impossible to challenge them. In Austin, for example, TxDOT predicts that daily traffic on I-35 will increase by something like 50 percent by 2045. Accordingly, an eight-mile trip across the city on I-35 that “should take approximately 8 minutes”—TxDOT’s words, not mine—will take 223 minutes by 2045. 223 minutes is 3.7 hours! I can walk eight miles in less than 3.7 hours. No one will sit in traffic for 223 minutes—they simply won’t use the highway. But TxDOT’s models don’t incorporate how driver behavior might change when confronted with a new reality.
Even with the new Reconnecting Communities program and Congress’ willingness to acknowledge the past harms and damage—specifically to communities of color—of highway construction, to what extent do you think anyone in control has grasped the notion that we’re still doing the same damage today? Has highlighting this fact become one of your primary aims with your book now that it’s wrapped?
To paraphrase Transportation for America’s Beth Osborne: We are trying to fix with one hand what we are spending much more money to break with the other hand. A few months before publication, my publisher asked me what my goal for this book was. I wrote down one phrase: Abolish the Highway Trust Fund. The Highway Trust Fund was supposed to expire in the 1970s! In 1973, Maine Senator Edmund Muskie called the trust fund “a transportation financing system designed for a time long past.” And yet here we are, fifty years later, stuck with the same system that funnels billions of dollars to roads and road expansions to the exclusion of every other form of transportation.
Going into this book, what’s something new or surprising you learned during your writing about where federal infrastructure money comes from and how transportation spending decisions get made?
I was shocked to learn how little control the federal government has over transportation funding. Most federal money gets distributed directly to state departments of transportation through formula funding. That means an agency like TxDOT—which also has the authority to self-certify its own environmental review—operates with almost no oversight from the federal government. So even if a charismatic DOT leader like Pete Buttigieg promises to repair the harms caused by urban highways, there’s actually not that much he can do.
What do you think the future of the freeway revolts has in store for it? What does this movement look like in ten years? How is it changing?
The modern freeway revolt is still so young. The grassroots activism I document in Houston, for example, began five years ago with a few people printing “Stop TxDOT” yard signs. Since then, they’ve become a fairly formidable group that has actually changed transportation policy in the greater Houston region. I think the freeway fighting movement is maturing and professionalizing. I went to the first freeway fighters gathering in Cincinnati last fall, which I covered for Bloomberg, and was struck by the magnitude of the fight: 25 groups spread across 17 states came together to talk about political strategy and grassroots organizing. They’re planning to meet again this fall in Minneapolis. To me, that signals a national anti-highway movement is brewing, perhaps similar to where the pro-housing YIMBY movement was a decade ago.
If widening highways doesn’t fix traffic, then why ARE we spending billions to continue doing so? Where do you find hope for the future in ending that cycle?
I think we continue to build and expand highways because there is a persistent belief in the United States that cars create freedom and prosperity, and infrastructure that supports cars also supports freedom and prosperity. I wrote an entire book in an attempt to dispel that belief, but it is embedded into many narratives of what it means to be American. (For example, the Texas GOP party platform includes “Freedom to Travel” as a formal resolution: “We oppose anti-car measures that punish those who choose to travel alone in their own personal vehicle.”)
What gives me hope is the increasing number of people who understand how self-defeating this cycle really is. I canvassed neighborhoods in Houston with the grassroots group Stop TxDOT I-45. It was astonishing, first of all, how many people who live in neighborhoods adjacent to I-45 had never heard of TxDOT’s $9 billion project to expand that highway—and, second of all, how many people responded, upon learning about the project, “That won’t fix traffic.” Houstonians drive on the Katy Freeway and saw how congestion got worse after TxDOT expanded the highway to 26 lanes. For them, induced demand isn’t an abstract concept.
You note that the built environment can change in a hurry. We have this sense that infrastructure is permanent, but it is, in fact, changing all the time. Is this just a failure of imagination or something else?
I think it’s a failure of imagination, but one that is absolutely understandable. I’m 37 and I have only ever lived in cities that are completely wrapped in highways. They feel like they have always been there and will always be there. But until I began investigating what cities looked like before highways were built—and traveled to places, like Rochester, New York, that have since removed them—it’s hard to conjure what else might exist. I think that’s one of the jobs of journalism: To imagine what else might be possible.
ABOUT MEGAN KIMBLE
Megan Kimble is an investigative journalist and the author of Unprocessed. A former executive editor at The Texas Observer, Kimble has written about housing, transportation, and urban development for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, and Bloomberg CityLab. She lives in Austin, Texas.
ABOUT CITY LIMITS
An eye-opening investigation into how our ever-expanding urban highways accelerated inequality and fractured communities—and a call for a more just, sustainable path forward. Learn more.