Author's Forum: City Limits

Alright, we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to On the Park Bench, a Public Square Conversation brought to you by Congress for the new urbanism. On the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries, providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time. The webinar series is a platform for C new members to engage, debate, and collaborate on the pressing issues of the day. Welcome to today's

on the Park Bench webinar, Authors Forum City Limits with author, Megan Kimball. You can share your thoughts on hashtag on the Park Bench. WWW dot tiny URL. Dot com slash OTPB feedback. And you can join us for upcoming webinars. Our next webinar is on Tuesday, April sixteenth. That is Authors Forum taking a pen for a walk. Join author and former senior board chair, Ray Gindros, to discuss his new book, Taking a Pen for a Walk. DPC partner and see new fellow Marina Cory will moderate the discussi

on. You can register online at Cnu. Dot org. Slash resources slash on the park bench. And registration is open for seeing you 32. SEDU 32 will be in Cincinnati, Ohio on May fifteenth through 1820 24. This is the premier national event bringing together policymakers, planners, urban designers, developers, advocates, and more to engage with the trends and challenges related to building community. We've extended our early bird deadline through April fifth at 5 PM. Eastern so be sure to register soo

n. And welcome to today's webinar. Today we have Megan Kimball. Megan Kimball is an investigative journalist and the author of Unprocessed. A former executive editor at the Texas Observer. Kimball writes about housing, transportation, and urban development for the New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, and Bloomberg City Lab. She lives in Austin, Texas. And I am Lauren Mayor, the communications manager at CNU. As a reminder, please use the Q&A function to ask questions as they occur to you

. Let's go ahead and start today's webinar, Megan, over to you. Everyone, I'm so delighted to be here. Before I jump in, I just want to say when I started reporting on highways 4 years ago, I went and read every one of Cnu's freeways without futures reports, so I'm so grateful to be here talking to you all. Okay. So I am as Lauren said the author of this book, City Limits. It actually publishes today, so I'm really excited to be here with you all right now talking about it. Oops. So right, as La

wrence and I'm a full time freelance journalist, I live in Austin, Texas and I primarily write about housing and transportation. These are some of the issues that I've, these are some of the stories I've written recently. But I'm here to talk to today about my book, City Limits. So this book looks at the history of the Interstate Highway System asking the question, how did we come to have all of these highways routed through our cities to begin with? And then it looks at 3 present day freeway fi

ghts in Texas. One in Austin where I live, I 35. It's a massive highway expansion. The central segment is an eight-mile stretch of highway that goes right adjacent to downtown Austin, a highway that goes right adjacent to downtown Austin, literally a mile from where I'm sitting right now. Divides the east and west sides of the city. And the capital Express Central project will expand this highway from 12 to 20 lanes. And Houston just down the road, there's a massive highway expansion called the

North Houston Highway Improvement Project. And you can see that on the map there how much of the city this will impact it will rebuild and route the entire downtown loop and then a 20 mile stretch of I 45 going to the suburb of Spring. This project will displace 1,200 people and 300 businesses. And then I go to Dallas and report on I 3, 45, which many of you might be familiar with. There's been a campaign for well over a decade to remove this stretch of highway. It's an elevated highway that goe

s on the eastern edge. Of downtown Dallas. And you know an urban planner there started a campaign to remove this elevated highway and you know use the land that it consumes and then it impacts for more productive use like housing or offices or something that the community might want. So the book really looks at these, this kind of the heart of the book. It looks at these 3 projects, but mostly it looks@theagencytext.the Texas Department of Transportation, which is behind these projects. And ask

this sort of fundamental question. Winding highways does not fix traffic. Why are we still widening highways? This has been well understood since 1962. When an economist published this paper, the law of peak hour expressway congestion, you know, the Interstate Highway System had just, the, act had just passed, highways were beginning to be built through cities across America. And you know commuters were like thought these highways were promised to fix traffic everyone was gonna be able to get wh

ere they were going seamlessly and they didn't seem to do that. And the reason why is that when you on urban commuter expressways, peak hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity. This is a phenomenon probably most of you are familiar with, induced demand. I was certainly aware, but when I started reporting this book, but I kind of had this basic question, well, is text out aware of that? Why are we winding these urban highways promising to fix congestion when more than 70 years of e

vidence demonstrates that it won't actually work. So to answer that question, there's lots of different ways to answer that question. I really looked at the Texas legislature, which is the agency directing text dot. And I think there's a lot of this comes down to the directive that we've been given by our governor, Great Abbott. So I'm just going to play a campaign ad that he ran in 2,014 on governor promising to fix traffic and Texas cities. A guy in a wheelchair can move faster than traffic on

some roads in Texas. I'm Grey Gather and my plan adds millions for new road construction without raising taxes, fees, or tolls. We pay for it by ensuring that money dedicated for roads will be spent only on roads. And no more taking highway funds by the legislature to pay for their projects. Collect me and I'll get Texas moving. So you can kind of see that the. Political promise here is that Texas needs for prosperity. We need to fix our road and get people out of traffic and get Texas moving.

So when Abbott was elected, he came into office. He started a program called the Texas Clear Lanes Program. Which literally is to widen highways and Texas cities cities across the state. And it has since allocated 66.7 billion dollars to widen highways in the 5 major cities across Texas. And I think the reason behind that is, you know, this is a quote from Greg Abbott. A few years ago that, you know, transportation infrastructure, fixing traffic feeds into keeping Texas number one in the nation

for economic development. So there is like a pretty persistent belief that facilitating car travel equals prosperity and that is not only true in states led by Republican governors, I think that's a pretty universal American belief that time lost to traffic is inefficient and it will and make facilitating card travel will make every American freer and more prosperous. This, this, the middle one is from the Texas DOP party platform in 2,022 and one of their official party planks is freedom to tra

vel. Saying that, you know, any measure to impose a road diet removes freedom from Texans. And to me that was pretty revealing as terms of, you know, road diet removes freedom from Texans. And to me that was pretty revealing as terms of, you know, this is fundamentally an ideological belief, the idea that more highways creates more prosperity. I think many people on this call know that that indeed isn't true, but I really wanted to understand like why are we still doing this? So. I went as part

of my reporting for the book. Trying to answer the question of how did we get all these highways routed to our cities to begin with. I drove to Abilene, Kansas, which is where the as in our presidential library is. And I looked at Eisenhower's papers around the creation of the Interstate Highway Act in 1,956. So the Highway Act passed in 1956 and allocated 25 billion dollars to the Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in American history. And to implement that oversee the

implementation of that program, Eisenhower appointed this guy, General John Bragden. They met each other in in the military. They're old old friends and Bragan was an engineer. You know, he worked for the US Army for many years. And he was tasked with overseeing the implementation of the program. And, 1960, Bragden looked into the Interstate Highway System and realized it was running drastically over by budget. So it was a 25 billion dollar program and it was currently 11 billion dollars over bu

dget. 1,961. Excuse me, in 1960. So, Brad, and started looking into it and he found out the reason it was so over budget is because states were taking federal money. The Highway Act. Allocated or said that it would pay 90% of the construction cost for roads in states would only have to shoulder 10% that was a huge increase before it was 50 50. And so states were taking on that federal money and to shoulder 10%. That was a huge increase before it was 50 50. And so states were taking on that feder

al money and deciding to build highways through their cities to fix this newly through their cities to fix this newly created problem of traffic congestion. So Branton saw that and saw how much interstate highways were costing in urban areas and he asked Congress to look into the issue. Hey, did Congress intend when it passed the Interstate Highway Act for these highways to be built through the middle of cities or did it intend? For highways to go around cities. You know, the Highway Act was cal

led the National Defense Highway Act. So it was really, you know, when Eisenhower presented it to Congress, the idea was to connect the country, not to solve traffic congestion. The Biden really wanted Congress to answer, hey, did you guys mean for federal money? To be spent solving army congestion? So Congress looked into it. They produced a report. And then, and, brought up his findings and what's called this interim report, which he presented to President Eisenhower. In 1961 and I'm just gonn

a put this code up here I'm not gonna read it to you but I think this code to me when I found it, it like kind of anchored the reporting in my book, which is to say The interstate system is not the vehicle for solving rush hour traffic problems or for local bottlenecks. Practically all the experts agree that mass transit is the solution for solving congestion in cities. And that, you know, Bragan was an engineer. This is simple geometry. People take up less space than cars. And so this quote com

es directly from this presentation that he gave to Eisenhower in 1961. I actually found like his note cards, original note cards that he had as he presented to President Eisenhower. And Eisenhower responded apparently in frustration that this was not what he originally wanted, that he had not intended the Energy Highway System to build highways through the middle of cities. Well, it was an election year. And so he said he felt like his hands were tied. He didn't feel like he could direct the Bur

eau of Public Roads to tell states to do something different. And so basically nothing happened to Brampton's report. The program continued. States continued building massive highways to the middle of cities despite that not being the intention of the Understand. We program. And I sort of threw in this quote from President Nixon here because I think kind of for many, many years, highways and transit were not necessarily politicized. You know, Nixon said in 1,973 when the, another highway funding

act passed that allowed for the first time gas tax money to be spent. Okay, you know, he said like, this is good. It gives cities more flexibility to build systems that are appropriate for them rather than locking them into new highway expenditures, which can sometimes make such problems even worse. So again, this has been very well understood by people, by leaders of both parties. That highways in urban areas don't solve congestion. Well, password to today. This is what we have. This this is a

picture of Interstate 35 and Austin where I live and the one on the bottom is interstate 10 in Houston. You know, I think we most of us, I certainly have grown up. Only in this world surrounded by these like towers of concrete. And it's very hard to imagine something different. As a result, this is what's happened is our massive highways, we have filled them up with cars and cars pollute. They create air pollution but they also pollute greenhouse gas emissions. I found this kind of buried in a

tech start report when I was doing, earlier reporting for the book and this absolutely floored me. So we have this big circle that is total worldwide carbon dioxide emissions. We have within that the United States has a disproportionate share of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. And then we have Texas and then we have on road Texas emissions, that purple circle. I think this graphic is trying to tell us that Texas on road emissions are so small as a percentage of the worldwide emissions. I i

nterpret it very differently. I think that our highways in Texas are contributing almost half a percentage of global carbon dioxide emissions. That is an enormous amount. For one state. And to me, I think that was very galvanizing because it means that what happens in Texas is really important not just to the country but to the whole world. But if people here are trying to resist some of these and. You know, there's like, there's a huge amount at stake. So that led me to report on, you know, fre

eway fighters, mostly in Texas for my book, but I have covered, since then, you know, the national movement of freeway fighters that have been galvanized, many of them by climate change, by the enormous greenhouse gas emissions that are created on our roadways and seeing you know transportation is the largest contributor to climate pollution in the US and yet every state has a project on the books to wind the highway and make that worse. So I wrote about the in Cincinnati last year there was the

first kind of freeway fighter assembly. Of people across the country these grassroots activists who are have come together to try to oppose expansion and you can kind of see like there are groups all across the country seeing you in America walks have done a really good job I think of gathering those groups and kind of helping to Put a circle around them to say, hey, this is a movement because largely I think as a fiber 8 years ago, these groups weren't necessarily talking to each other and the

y were very much isolated in their own fights. So that brings us to the freeway finders in Texas. This is a picture from a protest that stop text. Dot I. 45 organized in Houston in the summer of 2,022. The building behind them is a building called the lofts at the ballpark which is this really great building called the Lots at the Ballpark which is this really great 3 building apartment complex built right on the transit line near downtown. Houston. It was built in 2,001. And it's in the footpri

nt of the massive North Houston Highway Improvement Project. And so Text Dot bought those buildings and was preparing to demolish them when that project was actually paused by the federal government because people, a few people filed civil rights complaints saying that it was it violated civil rights act because it disproportionately impacted black and Hispanic people. And so while the federal government was investigating these civil rights complaints, Texan actually moved forward with demolishi

ng these buildings. And that was discovered by like an ordinary activist going to work, someone who was volunteering with Snapchat. I 45 and he thought, hey, wait a sec, I don't know if Texan has the authority to do that. So they looked into it and found that in the environmental impact statement, text I had accounted for the 165 units which was the front building which is actually in the footprint of the expansion but not the back 2 buildings which represents more than 200 additional units. So

text out in its environmental documentation had not fully accounted for the number of units it was going to demolish. So they organized this massive protest. You know, they got more than a hundred people out outside. They marched throughout east downtown along St. Emmanuel Street. And as a result, text dot, the city of Houston got involved and they are gone involved and, they were actually able to save the back 2 buildings. So text dot has since demolished the front building, but those back 2 bu

ildings remain housing and they will, I don't know what exactly what's happening now, but they will likely transition into some kind of permanent support of housing, perhaps for people exiting homelessness. I think what freeway fighters in Texas have done really well to get people kind of galvanized and interested in this movement is like really showing on the footprint of the city what these highway expansions will do. You know, you like Oftentimes these like these expansions until construction

begins exist in like an 8,000 page environmental impact statement that is very dense and very inaccessible for normal people and what activists I think have done a really good job of is making that accessible and real before it actually happens. So the picture on the left is a picture from this place called Stars Cafe. It's on I 35 frontage road. And that that pink line represents the right of way that text out will take to expand i. 35. So a group of a coalition of groups in Austin fighting. I

35 expansion had a press conference there a couple of years ago and they put this pink line up and over the building to even the alley behind to really show like, hey, this all of this space, you can look up and down the street will be highway. And I think that is a really kind of compelling visual for ordinary people to be like, hey, do I want that? Is that something that I want for my city? Similarly stop text. 45 and Houston have had numerous protests and they've stenciled spray paint stenci

ls on the right of way, the proposed right of way for the I. S. Stencils on the right of way the proposed right of way for the I, the proposed right of way for the I. 45 expansion in Houston saying, TEXTON wants a highway here. And it's sort of like I think really compelling you walking along a city and you're, 5, expansion in Houston saying, text out what's the highway here. And it's sort of like, I think, really compelling you walking along a city and you're like, a hundred feet from a highway

. And you're like, a hundred feet something that is when they're planned for decades it's very hard to understand and wrap their head around. So these groups, have come, you know, across the state have come together and started talking to each other in Dallas and El Paso and, in Houston, I'm in Austin and they have organized not just in their own cities but they organized a statewide protest at the Texas Transportation Commission which is the body that oversees text. All the commissioners are ap

pointed by Greg Abbott. And they have numerous times over the last 5 years, you know, gone to protest, which I don't think had ever happened. You know, this was kind of this off the radar government body that was not used to people. Coming to ask for something else than Highway Expansion. So this is from a protest that the folks organized a couple years ago. And I think that to me is like a signals a real sea change in transportation policy that people are paying attention to. You know, kind of

formally obscure government bodies that have an enormous budget and enormous impact on how our cities are built. You know, in the book I also spend a lot of time with people who are impacted by these projects. I think that is like the kind of most compelling and concrete way to tell the story of how highways impact people's lives and so this is a home owned by Eldon and he's Suzarez, this couple on the right, they're immigrants from Mexico. They, this is their first home that they bought in Hous

ton. They had just paid off their mortgage. To expand this highway. And, you know, to know, you know, what they did like they, they connected with. Dot. 45 and they went door to door in their neighborhood talking to their neighbors saying hey will you help us try to stop this expansion. So the freeway fighters are not just kind of advocates activists. These are just normal people and the highway sort of came to their front doorstep one day and they got activated. This is a picture from a prescho

ol in Austin. It's called Escalita Dallama. And I spent a day there. It's a Spanish immersion preschool that is in the footprint of the highway expansion. So 200 families send their children to this place and their lives will be disrupted because their childcare is going to either fold or have to move. When I was reporting the book that people who own escalator were really unsure if they were going to be able to continue. They moved into this space and 2,001 and you know probably all of you know

that real estate in Austin is very different than it was in 2,001. So they have this really wonderful building right in central Austin and they really felt like this highway expansion was an existential threat to their childcare business. And I found that to be really moving, spending time here because it's, you know, I think there's this mandate of like all the grown-ups are like, we gotta get places quicker. And so we're gonna build these bigger highways. And meanwhile, these like children ar

e, you know, their whole lives are contained in this building. And it's not just how will they be impacted, but like what kind of future are we leaving for these kids? I love this picture though because the day I happened to be there they were studying it's a Spanish emerging school so they were studying mediocre. Sport there like transportation like they get around. And all the kids either chose school buses or fire trucks. Obviously. So the book ends with me going to Rochester, New York. Some

of you might be familiar with this project, but, Gotcha. The argument in the book is rather than expanding these urban highways, we should tear them down. We should remove them from the middle of our cities. We should invest that 66 billion dollars just in the state of Texas. On transit and moving people around different ways. So I went to register just to kind of be like, what does that look like? Rochester removed a stretch of its inner loop highway in 2,017. The picture on the right is Union

Street, which all the buildings that you see right there used to be highway. So they filled it in, they brought it up to grade, they built a beautiful bike plane, a 2 lane city street and they have built housing half of that housing is rented at affordable rates to people earning below the median income. And it's like really like a kind of a remarkable thing to walk around and actually experience. On the left is the inner loop north, which Rochester is currently considering. It's currently movin

g forward with a removal up, but you can actually go and see the difference. So you can walk, I went on this walk and it's like there's this giant moat of the highway. You can look across, it's just like totally dead space. It's very hard to get across it. And then you can walk 2 blocks to the south and see like a contiguous street grid. You can like it's like the highway had never been there. And to me, what that reveals is like the built environment can change very quickly. Like highways. Feel

like they have always been there. I'm 37. I have literally never known a world without highways. But going what going to Rochester showed me is like we can actually remove these things and build something different in their place like within a decade within any person's lifetime and that I think gives me a lot of hope. So with that I'm going to wrap up my presentation. Wonderful presentation. Thank you so much, Megan. So I have had the pleasure of getting a chance to read your book. And so I ha

ve a couple questions that I would like to ask you. And just for our audience, as a reminder, you can use the Q&A function to ask any questions as they occurred to you. So my first question for you, Megan, is what do you see as the role of new urbanism in this freeway fighting movement. Yeah, I mean for me transportation is like fundamentally a housing story. That's actually how I got into this as I was covering housing at the Texas Observer where I used to work and I wrote a story about Austin'

s effort to update its land development code, which was, you know, a 10 year long effort. Austin hasn't updated its own encodes since 1984 when it was a very different much smaller city. And as the city has boomed. All of that growth has happened at the fringes because it's illegal to build. Dense housing in most of the city. So I run about this like kind of contentious effort to update this zoning code got really into like land development code policy. And then publish that story and then 3 mon

ths later, text dot allocated 4 billion dollars to expand by 35 and for me I was like that's the same story our land use policy our housing policy has pushed people to the fringes. People who many people who I've talked to are like, I would love to live in Austin. I didn't choose to live in the suburbs. Like my preference is to live closer to where I work, where I go to school where I can walk and access restaurants and grocery stores. So a lot of people had not moved far away by choice. And yet

that's where they could afford to buy home. And so they were kind of forced onto the highway to get back to the things they need. And so I feel like, you know, Where are people, live dictates how they get around and that largely means that we have built highways and I think that like the lots at the ballpark is that picture included is like that was kind of touted as like new urbanism housing it's like you know it's next to a transit station it's walkable to downtown. And here comes Texan and t

hey actually are demolishing it to build a bigger highway to serve people in the suburbs. So I feel like housing and transportation are like the same story and telling them, and I really in the book try to make like weave those together. Absolutely. Yeah, you're definitely seeing that, especially as the afford will housing conversation continues to have a more of a nationwide. Recognition. So another question I have for you, from your book is that in your book, you spend a lot of time with engag

ing with community advocates and freeway fighters. And kind of what were some of the most effective methods you saw for starting discussions about both anti-expansion and highly removal. And especially how do you talk to people that don't have an engineering or new urbanist background. Yes, I went out numerous times in Canvas with. 45 this grassroots group in Houston, supposing this expansion. So they have spent years knocking on doors doing the outreach. So they have spent years knocking on doo

rs doing the outreach that The text dot did not do. And I was actually sort of floored by how many normal people understand induce demand. Houston has the kind of Very convenient example of the Katie Freeway, which is this massive freeway that texts not expanded to nearly 26 lanes and then traffic got worse. So people in Houston have driven on that freeway. They like know that story. People who are not engineers, not engaged in transportation. So it was kind of amazing to me the number of people

you knock on their door and they're like, well, that's not going to help. That expansion won't help. So I think when you understand induce demand, then you can understand reduced demand. So which is to say like when you widen a highway cars fill up the highway with traffic, well there are real-world examples when you remove a highway or remove away capacity traffic evaporates. So that happened in. San Francisco, the embarked at our freeway. It happened in New York City when the New York State D

epartment tore down the West Side Highway. There's like lots of real world examples where Carmichael's did not result and in fact traffic decreased transit ridership increased. So I think it's really helpful to have real-world examples of cities that have actually done this and you can measure, hey, traffic. That we're not catastrophic target jams. In fact, people drove less for the same reason people drive more when, car capacity is like. When you make driving easier people drive more when you

make driving harder people will perhaps choose differently they will kind of engineer their lives differently in traffic capacity and traffic volumes decrease. Absolutely, yeah, the freeway I think is a pretty notorious example. So my next question is also kind of building off what we were just talking about. So your book focuses mainly on the freeway fights happening in Texas. And I was wondering just how is what is happening in Texas reflective of a national trend of any sort and also what mak

es the fights in Texas unique. Yeah, the kind of premise of my book is that like Texas is the epicenter of the highway industrial complex in the US. And I think I think that's true. You know, I mean, I'd say live here, but I mean, just the budget, are we just text out just past 112 billion dollar ten-year budget? Like that amount of money. Texas has to expand. Highways is really kind of eye watering. So I think in part because of that it has galvanized a kind of similarly robust backlash. Is lik

e just more people are impacted here. These highways are taking people's homes across the state. And I think like because of that. More people understand that like there's just like a robust activism in response to that power. So you know, it's kind of like a truism in Texas is like as goes Texas goes the nation, but I kind of think. It's like Texas is both the most egregious example of the highway industrial complex and also the kind of like example of how activists can organize in response to

that because so many people are impacted. Absolutely. Yeah, no it is. Quite a bit happening in Texas. And then just kind of my last question for you before we turn it over to the audience QA is where do you see discussions about freeway removal going next? And what role do you see federal financing play in these future discussions? Yeah, I think it's like the conversation on higher removal is. It's like complicated. Obviously. I mean, I talked to people in Dallas. There's this proposal to move b

y 3 45. Who which is this kind of connector between south dallas which is where a lot of long- people of color live in north dallas which is where most of the jobs are concentrated. And people in South Dallas said, Hey, don't remove that highway. Like I need a ticket to my job. Dallas has been segregated by like as a matter of policy for 70 years and as a result people need that highway to get to work. And I think that's like a very compelling. Response. I think the answer is like, well, we shou

ld invest in a place like South Dallas, bring jobs to South Dallas, build housing there, built economic development. But it is sort of, I think, we have built a lot of places, particularly Texas, but like most of the southern and western US, where people need a car to get where they're going. Like this is not Like it's hard to unwind that and it again requires like housing policy and land use policy and that's why transportation is like as a journalist it's so compelling because it's really comp

licated it's not so simple as just being like Hey, we're gonna pass this one policy and then people will have to drive less like we really have to retrofit our cities that have been built around cars. So for me, highway removal is really compelling because I think it shows what is possible. And like perhaps a smaller scale. So like in Rochester, this is like the inner loop removal is like maybe 4 miles of highway. Rochester has a lot of highways. But it shows kind of the like in an example of ho

w do you reclaim your downtown? How do you build density in the core which is where it should be? So I think higher, mobile like as we have more examples now, Syracuse is moving forward with the highway removal. Like I think it will begin to seem more possible to people like that like I said I went to Rochester and you would never know a highway was once there. So I think the like It's kind of in a place of like we need more example so that it can seem possible. I mean, I think the reconnecting

communities program is a really amazing like kind of mainstreaming of that idea that again CNU has been talking about for 2 decades and now it's like federal policy, you know, Biden is talking about it. Budaj is talking about it. I think You know, I've learned from a lot of advocates, you know, that the reconnecting community funding is like, it doesn't necessarily go far enough. I think it still is. You know, with one hand, we're like, hey, let's repair the damage done by this highway. And with

the other hand, the federal government is inflicting more damage. So a great example is Austin. There's this massive highway expansion, 12 to 20 lanes. A huge highway going through the middle of the city. Guess what? A couple weeks ago, the city of Austin got a hundred 5 million dollars grant from the federal government to reconnect our community. So Texan is going to actively divide our community. They're going to take a preschool. They're going to take a affordable housing. They're going to t

ake a lot of businesses. And then we just got some money to build a park on the top. And I guess that will make it all better. Like I, so I feel a little skeptical about. The idea of like that we will really just like effectively reconnect communities by building parks over highways. Like I think it needs to go much deeper. Yes, absolutely. There is a lot of discussions about the role of capping when it comes to reconnecting communities and if that's the same thing or does the same as. Removal A

lright, I'm gonna switch us over to some audience questions. This first one came in from Alex and it has to do with the history of the Highway Act. And they are asking what was the highway act original intentions when it comes to linkages. If the goal is to avoid congested areas, did highways bypass major centers entirely or linking to feeder roads or ring roads. And did the authors realize that the people disproportionately effective would have eminent domain applied to them? Yeah, I kind of br

eezed over that I think. So the intention of the Interstate Highway Act was one of national defense. It's literally called the National Defense Highway Act. And that was like, you know, nuclear bonds were a real imminent threat. And so Eisenhower was like, you know, in his speech to Congress, he says, like, if we have to evacuate an American city because there's a threat of nuclear tactic, it will be a catastrophe because we have no roads going out of cities. So it was one of national defense li

ke not just evacuation but also like moving military goods across the country like military convoys. And Iisener sort of famously did this military convoy across the country in the 1920 s and was horrified by the state of the nation's roads. But it was also one of like economic prosperity like moving goods between cities so like trade so It was very much intended in Eisenhower's mind as something to link cities. So. And like between cities. What and that was born out in this report that, you kno

w, Brad didn't ask Congress to look into. I think it's called like the legislative intent with regards. To routes and urban areas or something like he literally asked Congress to look into like What is what was the intent of this act and so Congress went back and like sort of, you know, the people who the congressional agencies who looked into this. Like what was the intent of the people who passed this law and they found that it was like so they're in the in the act there's like a provision of

like interstate highways will be routed with like I'm forgetting it like respect to local needs. And it was like, well, what do local needs mean? Is it trying to solve? Congestion in urban areas or is it just that like local should have a say in where these highways go? And it's very much the latter like this report found kind of unequivocally that the Bureau of Public Roads was not applying the standard. But the bureaucrats was just liberally allowing cities to decide where these highways were

built when in fact the purpose of it was to route highways between cities. So I'm kind of sorry. I kind of lost the thought there, but basically the point was Congress said, Hey, the point of this federal funding is a federal objective, which is to connect cities across the country. While the Bureau of Public Roads did not create a standard, so when all of this money flowed to states, Cities were like, hey, we have so many cars on our roads. We want to build big highways to get people home to th

e suburbs, to solve congestion. And there was no kind of mechanism to say that's not what that funding was meant for. Reporting I tried to do was to try to show like the intent of this massive public works project was not to solve urban congestion. Yeah, absolutely. It is a really interesting history to know that the original intention was not these giant urban freeways that we are dealing with today. So I have. 2 questions here about induced demands that I'm going to kind of combine. There's 1

from Mark and one from an attendee. And so Mark asks, did you find any evidence that the demand induced by building and winding highways is intentional? In other words, our highways being built and expanded not to reduce congestion, but rather to serve. Suburban populations. And then the other question just has to do with what is the role of engineers. Induced demand and why is it sometimes not accepted. Yeah, so to the first question, is it intentional? So, yes, I mean, in Houston, I don't reme

mber in like 2,008 2,009. Houston built the Grand Parkway, which is this 180 mile loop around the city. So it's like the outermost out of rain. It traces 7 counties. It's absolutely massive. And when Text Out was kind of pursuing that project and trying to sell it to the Transportation Commission, it was explicitly sold as a way to like operate like an opportunity to open new land for development. So like it's not that they were like, yes, indeed, there like the road opened up much of the Katy P

rairie much of the land west of Houston for development and that was very intentional. So indeed I think that like Hmm, the way these highway projects also kind of are formulated is often MPOs metropolitan planning organizations which are dominated by suburban interests. Want to serve their suburban constituents who rely on the highways to get to work. And so it's like a combination of Our housing policy has forced people to the fringes and also like There is a market to man for people who want

big homes on the fringes and they are kind of facilitated and doing that by these like fast highways that can you know get them where they're going quickly so I don't know that it's like. I don't think IA DOT would ever say it was an intentional thing, but I think it's very much goes part and parcel with suburban development and all of the interests that are behind. Suburban development. Why is it so hard for state DOTS to incorporate induce demand? I don't, I still don't know the answer to that

question. I mean, the reason I kind of started with Greg Abbott is I think fundamentally it's political is that these state COTs are being directed by politicians who want to solve traffic and they don't really care. Necessarily about the best way to do that. I mean, in Texas, I've been to legislative hearings on transportation funding like there was one in 2,021 about whether or not we should allow some of the states. Transportation funding our state highway trust fund i should have mentioned

earlier 97% of it is constitutionally required to be spent on roadways in the state of Texas. There was a hearing a couple of years ago saying, hey, should we let like let some states funding be spent on transit? And now I was in the room. And I, in a legislative hearing. Where people show up and say, you know, like. Transit is for socialists, roads enable free market capitalism. Like that is a direct quote from someone who showed up to testify on this hearing. And like, you know, I've heard tha

t in congressional hearings, I've heard that in other states, this idea that like transit is somehow subsidized by the government and roads are not, which is disprovable with like a 5 min Google. Like we spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on roads in this country and federally not very much on transit, but there is still a persistent belief that Transit. Should be somehow self-sustaining where our road system is not. So to me that really gets to the question of induced demand. I

t's like, well, that just takes this huge tool out of the toolbox of a.is like if they are by their legislature prohibited from investing in transit. What are they going to do? Like that's their only tool is to widen the road. So even if they know about induced demand, like that's the only thing they can do. So I think it is like fundamentally political. Really interesting and I will ask a little bit of a follow-up question to that to this conversation, which is in your book you also talk about

the Highway Trust Fund and kind of the discussions about how that parity is done. Can you just talk a little bit more about kind of that money and what the role of funding public transit is there. So the Highway Trust Fund was established with the creation of the Interstate Highway System to fund that system. So we've been collecting a gas tax since 1,932. But that just sort of went into the general revenue fund. But when I was an hour past the Interstate Highway Act, he wanted this. The interst

ate system to be self financing. So that meant he collected. The gas X was then diverted into this newly created Highway Trust Fund and earmarked exclusively for highway creation. So it was like in initially it was like something of a like it made sense right like drivers would pay gas tax and then drivers would benefit from these highways that were built for them. It was kind of like a self-financing self-sustaining system. Well, the gas tax was the Highway Trust was set to expire in 1973 when

the interstate system was set up. It was set to be built out. That didn't happen. You know, it's like dedicated funding for roads. There's a lot of industries. Who lobbied behind keeping that. So for various reasons, it never expired. But in the 19 seventys, there began to be this discussion of like. Well, should we actually fund other forms of transportation with the gas tax. And congressional representatives from both parties, you know, there's in the record in the congressional record testifi

ed on the floor of the House and Senate saying you know, the Highway Trust Fund creates a system in which cities can only choose to solve their traffic problems through highways. Like that's a bad system. We should allow cities to choose other things if they want to if they believe that in the best interest of their constituents. So there was a fight in the 70, s and early eighties to kind of open up the Highway Trust Fund to be spent on transit. And under Reagan, there President Reagan in 1,982

, there they like you know people struck a deal to increase the gas tax and as part of that increase, it was a 5 cent increase, one cent would go to mass transit, the mass transit account. So basically it created this like 80 20 split. 80% of federal funding will go highways, 20% will go to transit. And that was this like deal struck for like what was going to be like the 5 cent gas tax increase. But that deal has like that ratio has just remain. So even today on the infrastructure investment an

d jobs act that Biden passed roughly 80% goes to highways roughly 20% goes to transit. And so there are lots of people who are trying to like change that and say hey if we really want to address. GAS emissions and all the other negative things that happen in our transportation system, we should spend more federal funding on transit. That is why in Texas, most transit agencies are fund through funded through sales tax. That there is like not like a dedicated federal pot a lot of money going to op

erate these systems when There is an enormous amount of money going to maintain and operate our road system. Yeah, really interesting to learn more about that parity and how it does really impact what states can do at the local level. Alright, we have another question here from Dorothy who is asking What's the most effective way to keep track of highway projects in my state? She's from Iowa. At the beginning of the discussion slash process and I'll just kind of expand that to talk to ask you a l

ittle bit more about. What do activists have to do to kind of start to interpret the big documents that come out of these expansion projects. Yeah, so to keep track of I mean often Highway Expansions again begin at your MPO or that's where they will first kind of surface because state.is typically need the support of an NPO. Well, the NPO is supposed to like propose the project, but typically it's DOT that's telling the NPO to propose the project, but I would say paying attention to your local N

PO is a great way to kind of find out what's in the pipeline. So the massive expansion in Houston was initially kind of rubber stamped and approved by the NPO in 2,019. So. A lot of these projects begin by these, again, their metropolitan planning organization. I had never paid attention to that until I started covering highways. They're like. Really wonky. Governmental bodies and they are like made up of elected representatives from across a region. But I think they are incredibly important for

transportation planning. And in fact, in Houston so this again I was the I mentioned that the expansion bubbled up from the NPO which is called the Houston Galvestonary Council. Well, the, you know, activists with Stoptextant. I. 45. Kind of saw that that this NPO is dominated by suburban interest. The city of Houston has something like 2 votes on a 27 member transportation policy council don't quote me on that but it's somewhere it's something absurdly low when the city of houston contains mos

t of the region's population. So they actually this last year put a ballot initiative to the voters to say, hey, we want to make the Houston Gaussian area council have proportional voting. So to say that the Hughes, the city of Houston should have a number of votes that are proportional to its population and suburban counties that have way higher voting proportionality right now should have less. And they pass that. It's called Fair for Houston. It's like currently big trying to be implemented.

There's a fight around that but Hi, I find that to be like a very hopeful and compelling. Win for activists that like You know that you can fight a highway expansion, but what they did is they tried to go to the root cause, which is this like local governmental body that is like approving these projects to begin with and say actually this body needs to represent us. That this population center and try to really like get to the like. How do we prevent this from happening next time? So I would say

the short version is good to your NPO. Lauren, remind me what the second part of your question was. Oh, I was just wondering about I know that a lot of these expansions and everything come with very long complicated documents. NEPA reviews, things like that. And I was just wondering if you in your research for this either engaged with that or learn from any activists kind of how they deal with. The technical side of these expansion projects. Yeah, I mean that I think to me I think it's like int

entionally technical so that it off you can off you skates what's happening that in the sense of like it feels like something you have to have a lot of technical expertise to understand and participate in. And I think I think that's very much intentional. So I would say like Read it, you know, like you like I think they published 8,000 page documents, you know, it's required by the National Environmental Policy Act. There's a whole conversation around like whether that's effective, but. I would

say like you can actually still find I when I start reporting on this like I had never read an environmental impact statement but I think like you can read it and like the things that jump out of you is illogical in fact might be like There are some sections of an environmental impact statement that like I had learned to just ignore because they're like boilerplate language. They're in every EIS. You can just like ignore them. And then when you get into like the purpose and need of a particular

project is when you can start to look at the assumptions that the.is using to push a specific project. And most of the ones that I've covered in Texas, you know, the assumption is like traffic congestion is going to be cataclysmic unless we expand this highway. And like they use traffic modeling to project into the future what is the like what are the number of cars are going to be on this highway with like the population growth for example coming to Austin. So in the I 35, yes, there's a sectio

n where it's like, And their purpose in need basically like so it's an eight-mile search of highway and 2019 to traverse that 8 mile stretch of highway. It took 31 min something like that. Is the population growth that time is gonna take be longer people are gonna be stuck in traffic for more hours and they the agency uses that like time loss and traffic to calculate the like. Second benefit of the project. But in Austin, the one it was like, it was a 2035 number, but then by 2050, if we don't e

xpand this highway to traverse the 8 miles from South Austin to North Austin will take 300 227 min. And it's like, so I kind of like looked at that and I was like, that's a lot of minutes. That's 3.7 h. Like I can walk 8 miles in 3.7 h. Most like reasonably fit people can walk 8 miles. And to me that like I, it like reveals that their assumptions are based on faulty logic. Like no one is going to spend 3.7 h in traffic. They like either won't go. Or they will find a different way to get there. A

nd like, yeah, text out is sort of selling lots of NPOs or like, excuse me, lots of DOTs are selling these projects. It's like inc, incontrovertible truth that if we don't do this thing, your life will be made worse. But like you look it to me like that is so revealing because it's like. That's not true. It's just a justification for the project. No one is going to sit in traffic for 3.7 h. Yeah, that is really interesting. Yeah, their assumptions. Yeah, I don't think I could sit in traffic to g

o. Or 3 h to go 8 miles. Yeah, you just wouldn't go and that is the like reduced demand. Like phenomenon is like a rational person will be like, I'm going to be my friend for happy hour. It's going to take me 3.7 h to get there. Like I guess I won't go. I guess we'll meet somewhere else. I guess we'll catch up at a different time. Like No one will do that. It's just like people, I think the.is kind of the assumptions and the traffic models are that like people are just gonna mindlessly remain on

their route. And that is true when they look at when text out looks at like the, and Dallas the Boulevard option, so the removal of I 300, and, 45, they predicted there will be this like cataclysmic traffic congestion, 19,000 h of delay if we remove this highway. But I think, you know, I haven't seen the models, but my assumption is like what they are assuming in those models is that people are gonna stay on the same route they've always taken. They're gonna instead of being on a highway, they'

re just gonna go to that boulevard. It's like, well, Dallas is a city full of highways. And like, any time I go anywhere, I like pull up Google Maps and I just like look at my different options for getting there. Like I'm not a mindless consumer of travel. Most people aren't there rational. They look at what is the most convenient option for them. It's not that boulevard they will choose something different. Absolutely. And that is what we are always talking about here at CNU. And then kind of w

e have another question from Gordon in the audience who is just more interested in the impacts of removal. In places like Rochester. They were specifically wondering if you had done any research on either the work done in Boston or the work done in Seattle. I don't know about the one in Boston. I think the highway, I think he's talking about the, Alaska way viaduct in Seattle, I'm assuming. Yeah. Hmm. The last way by IT was not actually fully removed. It was buried and was created as a tunnel. S

o I don't actually consider that an example of full removal, but in other cities like San Francisco removed it's embarked at our freeway in the early ninety's and Milwaukee removed a section of the Park East Freeway. Again, Rochester, removed a stretch of highway and then all of those cities like there were not measurable increases in traffic that like we have built so many roads in the US that it's like there is enough the surrounding road network can absorb a lot of the the excess demand and I

think or like a lot of the capacity that was once on highway. So I would say like and I'm gonna forget this specific statistic but there's a study that I cite in my book that looked at like high wake or road capacity. Removal. I'm sorry, wrote like when agencies removed road capacity, they're highways or just city streets across the world. And control, even controlling for population growth. Traffic accounts decrease 25%. So it is very much true that like I had a traffic engineer explain it to

me this way once which was helpful to me is like I think traffic engineers think of of highways like pipes that like water goes through it and if that pipe is clogged you need a bigger pipe so that more water can fit but in fact traffic is more like a gas which is to say it expands to fill the capacity allotted to it so when you narrow that capacity it will also I'm just. Very true. That is that is a pretty good analogy. I like that a lot. Well, that was the end of our audience questions and I k

now that you are busy today as your book is now out. So I will go ahead and wrap us up for all of our audience. Thank you for joining us today.