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Interpretations, prices vary based on how you buy. Science Friday is supported by Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. Mathworks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. The State of the country spends billions on highway construction projects that don't relieve congestion. Now some cities are rethinking the future. I have only ever grown up in cities wrapped by highways.
It's hard to imagine anything different. But like a lot of cities are tearing down highways and building something else in their place. It's Monday, November 11th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Sci-Fi producer, D.P. Derschmitt. Have you ever been stuck in traffic and had to thought, if only this highway was a little wider so it could fit more cars? Well, you aren't alone. In 2022, federal, state, and local governments in the US spent $127 billion on highway construction.
Their transportation departments say expanding highways is necessary to use traffic and to encourage economic development. The decades of research shows the opposite effects when highways are expanded. That travel times actually increase when more lanes are added, not to mention the extra pollution that comes along with them. So how does this happen? And why do we keep expanding highways even though the research says it doesn't work? Here's I Reflator with Moore.
Here to explain the science behind highway widening and how some states are actually rethinking their approach to traffic is Megan Kimball. She's a journalist and author of the book City Limits, Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways. She's based in Austin, Texas. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Lots of highways in Austin, right? Lots of highways. I'm one mile from I-35 right now. Well, let's get to the point.
It does seem logical that if you want less congestion, you just widen the road. But the data shows that widening actually makes traffic worse, right? Yeah, it's certainly intuitive. Like you said, if you're sitting on a highway and traffic, you think, you know, one more lane will get me this traffic flowing more quickly. But yeah, it's actually been well understood for decades that when you add capacity to a highway in the form of new lanes, more cars will rush to fill up that capacity.
So that was first articulated in 1962. So just a few years after the Interstate Highway program began, an economist looked at all these new highways that were being built in American cities and saw that as, you know, the lanes were added as capacity was added. The total traffic was increasing. And this is because travel is a good, like any other, it follows the rules of supply and demand. So when you increase supply, demand also increases. So people change their behavior.
They maybe move farther from their job and they take on a longer commute because they think they can get there quicker. Or they take more discretionary trips. So they go to the grocery store three times instead of one time. And overall traffic volumes increase. So the sort of stated goal of fixing traffic congestion by adding lanes fails in project after project city after city when highway departments widen highways travel times actually increase. Right.
But you know, states are also talking about climate goals, you know, we're going to reduce smog and pollution and greenhouse gases. But more cars are just the opposite, right? When you widen the highways, you're having an environmental impact. Yeah, you're measurably increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
A stat I found when I was reporting my book that absolutely floored me is that on road emissions in Texas, so you know, the emissions generated by our cars and trucks account for half a percentage of total worldwide carbon dioxide emissions. So like the highway expansions that I profile in my book, like whether those go forward will have a measurable impact on like global climate emissions, like every one of these highway expansions contributes to that number.
There's been a lot of research lately that shows that, you know, highway widenings are the number one lever for states to pull to either reduce or increase their greenhouse gas emissions. So you have a lot of governors saying, you know, we are committing to ambitious climate goals and then their state DOT are funding highway widenings. Right. Well, can you point to any benefits of highway expansion? I mean, you certainly can allow more cars on the highway, right?
So you do in fact increase the total number of people that can drive on a road, right? Like if you expand something from two to four lanes, more cars spend on that road. But I think the like question is, do we want to encourage driving? Like do we want our public policy decisions and public funding to be spent in such a way that it encourages people to drive? So, you know, the highways enabled the growth of the suburbs.
They allowed people to buy more affordable housing out in the fringes of cities because they promised, you know, speedy access back to job centers and schools. But like what is often not factored is that has come an enormous cost. So there is certainly a benefit in the sense of like, it is allowed kind of cheaper housing.
But when you combine housing and transportation, when you factor in the cost of gas and car insurance and the externalities of greenhouse gas emissions, it actually is not so cheap anymore. Yeah. And these highways are also pretty expensive to maintain, right? They're expensive to build and they're expensive to maintain.
Yeah. I started reporting this book because I learned that the state of Texas had allocated $60 billion dollars, that's billion with a B, to expand highways in five major Texas cities. It's an extraordinary amount of money to be spent as we started talking about not actually solving the problem we set out to solve.
Yeah. And you point out in the early days of thoughts about highway expansion that when it was studied, there were even recommendations that the money would better be spent on public transportation. Yeah. This is one of my favorite stories that I encountered while reporting my book. So when Eisenhower sold Congress on the Interstate Highway program, he promised it is one of national defense.
So it was going to connect the country in the case of an atomic bomb or nuclear attack and also build economic prosperity that we were going to enable trade across this vaccination of ours. So very much was a program to connect the country. And what the Interstate Highway program did is that enabled $25 billion, the largest public works project ever attempted in American history. And the federal government would pay 90% of the cost of construction of these interstate highways.
And so the money flow directly to state departments of transportation, which were called highway departments, with essentially no oversight by the federal government. And so what states started doing because they had lots of money flowing into their coffers and people were buying cars and record numbers is they started building massive highways in the middle of cities. And so they started trying to use that federal money to solve this sort of local problem of urban congestion.
Yeah. I just thought what Eisenhower wanted it for, right? Yeah, that's not when Eisenhower intended. And we know that because he appointed this guy, John S. Braggden, as a specialist assistant of the president to oversee the implementation of the Interstate Highway program. And Braggden looked into the matter a few years after the program passed and found that it was running significantly over budget.
And it was running over budget because states were using this federal money to build urban highways, which are much more expensive to build than rural ones. And so he asked Congress, was that your intent of the program was to solve this problem of local congestion? And he presents his findings to Eisenhower in the spring of 1916. It's like a really remarkable presentation. I found the actual note cards in the Eisenhower presidential library of the text that Braggden presented to Eisenhower.
And in it, he says practically all the experts on the traffic problem of cities agree that the way to solve urban congestion, rush hour congestion is through transit. It will take up less space than cars. And urban transit is the solution. But what cities are doing currently is they are using this federal money through the Interstate Highway program to rip out existing transit systems and build massive highways in their place. And Eisenhower responds and he agrees.
He says those who had implemented the project, the program in this way had done so against his wishes. You know, he had never intended these massive highways to be built through the center of cities. Right. And when they started ripping out places to build these highways, the demographics were not quite equal for black and white. Were they?
No, I mean, this coincided with the era of urban renewal in which city planners, you know, we're looking at quote unquote, blighted neighborhoods, predominantly occupied by black and Hispanic families, neighborhoods that have been blighted by the same federal government a couple decades earlier through the practice of redlining. And they saw an opportunity to clear those neighborhoods.
So it's very clear in the historic record that planners intentionally routed interstate highways through black and Hispanic neighborhoods and displaced half a million people from their homes along the way. And so it very much had a disproportionate impact on those neighborhoods. And that impact is still being felt today. You know, people who live next to highways suffer higher rates of respiratory diseases. And those are still mostly communities of color. Right.
And as you say, specifically in Texas, and I didn't know they have the largest highway in the country, 26 lane Katie freeway in Houston. Yeah. The Katie freeway is like the textbook example of induced demand. It's 26 lanes, including French and drones. It is this massive highway and text out expanded it about a decade ago. And within five years, rush hour travel times got worse. And people in Houston like drive on that highway, they understand that. Like I was really struck reporting my book.
I went door to door with, you know, a lot of activists who were trying to stop a different highway expansion. And people in Houston understand the phenomenon of induced demand. You know, they don't necessarily call it that. But when you live in a place that is covered by highways and you still sit in crushing traffic, like you might wonder why do we keep doing this? Yeah. And let's talk about that. You wrote about the efforts of into a highway expansion groups in Texas.
And there were some successes. Yeah. So a group in Houston called stop tech said I 45 started going door to door to stop this massive highway expansion. It's called locals call it the I 45 expansion, but it actually impacts three interstate highways. And we'll rebuild and reroute the entire downtown loop in Houston along the way, displacing 1200 people from their homes, consuming 450 acres of land. And it's currently an 11 billion dollar project.
And a lot of the people who are in the footprint of the expansion didn't know that their homes would be taken. They didn't know they had any way to fight back, you know, the authority of imminent domain is absolute. Text.can say, Hey, we want your home and all they can do is negotiate on the price. But this group of just volunteers started going door to door and those neighborhoods impacted by the expansion saying, Hey, do you want this?
Hey, do you know that you can say, you know, you can voice your opposition? Text.own analysis found that the people impacted by this highway expansion were predominantly minority. And so a few of those people filed civil rights complaints saying this project violates the title of the Civil Rights Act because it disproportionately impacts black and Hispanic people. And as a result, the federal government actually underpiputed judge intervened to pause that project.
So they said, Hey, text out, we need you to stop work on this project where we investigate these serious civil rights complaints. And those were filed by normal people, you know, people who I spoke with, who live in the footprint of the expansion and said, Hey, this isn't fair. This is unjust. After the break, why some cities are deciding to take down their highways and what's being built in their place? Science Friday is supported by Mint Mobile.
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The guide is free to you at NetSuite.com Slash Friday. WNYC Studios is supported by the John Templeton Foundation, funding interdisciplinary research and catalyzing conversations to inspire awe and wonder. Dive deeply into the wonders of the universe at Templeton.org. 40% of the male population is considered big and tall. 40%. Now imagine there was a place where those 40% can buy clothes that fit them. DXL. Where would you want? DXL Big and Tall. Now open in Lakewood, 329th South Teller Street.
Enjoy 20% off on your first DXL purchase. The promo cannot be combined with other offers. And this is happening in cities across the country, people fighting back and cities are some of them actually taking down their highways. Yeah, I mean, there's this kind of new resurgence of freeway revolts, which people might remember in the 1960s, there was this massive resistance to highway construction.
As these highways came into American cities, tens of thousands of people poured into the streets and said, we don't want this. And they stopped highways from being built in Baltimore and Portland and Seattle. I mean, across the country, there were really successful examples of freeway revolts. And there is this sort of burgeoning movement today of kind of this new generation of freeway fighters, many of whom are galvanized by climate who see the climate impacts of these highway expansions.
And they're really trying to stop highway expansion across the country. And you've mentioned in your book that there are cities that are actually taking down their highways. What cities are those? Yeah, about 18 cities across North America have either taken down highways or committed to doing so.
So one of the ones I've profound in the book is the city of Rochester, New York, which had this interloop highway circling in downtown, this kind of moat, the sunken highway that really cut off downtown from the surrounding neighborhoods. And that highway enabled people to actually leave the central business district. And so the downtown had been kind of hollowed out. And starting about two decades ago, city leaders started talking about, what if we just took that highway away?
You know, what if we removed it? And in 2017, the city got a grant from the Obama administration and they filled in the interloop highway. They brought it up to grade and they made a two lane city street in its place. But this really wide, beautiful sidewalk and bike lane. So there are now apartments built on land that used to be a highway. Most of those apartments are rented to families earning below the median income, you know, three or four story buildings.
And it's pretty remarkable to go walk. You can see part of the interloop highway remains the city of Rochester's in the process of actually filling in the rest of it now, but you can go today and see this like sunken highway and then walk to blocks and see like a neighborhood, a city. It's populated. People are walking. They're riding their bikes. There's a brewery right there. And it's really remarkable to see like we can reclaim that space.
Like, I think a lot of people, myself included like, I've only ever grown up in cities wrapped by highways. It's very hard to imagine them gone. It's hard to imagine anything different. But like a lot of cities are tearing down highways and building something else in their place. And that can happen over like five years. That can happen very quickly. And Colorado is actually taking a different approach, right? What are they doing? Yes. So that really shows how this is a climate story.
So Coloradans elected a governor, Jared Polis, who made climate a top priority of his administration. And the legislature passed a bill requiring all state agencies to make a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050. And so the Colorado DOT looked at its portfolio projects, which included widening I-25 through the heart of Denver and said, hey, we can't actually widen this highway and meet our greenhouse gas targets. And so they took that widening off the books.
They said, we're not going to do this. And we're going to allocate that money to something else. And that's something else is bus rapid transit. So basically, we're going to help build a more robust transit system in Denver so that people can ride the bus, which lowers greenhouse gas emissions, and get people where they're going without a car. And that is like a really remarkable example of climate policy dictating transportation funding. Very interesting.
You've been reporting on this issue for a long time. You've written the book, City Limits. What's your biggest takeaway on this topic after all of these years? Yeah. I mean, I started reporting the book with like kind of the same question that you have in this program, which is like, if widening highways doesn't work to fix traffic, why are we still spending billions of dollars to widen highways?
And like the answer I have come to after four years of reporting is that there is this persistently in the US that cars help create prosperity, that cars enable economic development and that like without a car, our economy will collapse. And so many other countries disprove that. Lots of cities in the US disprove that. There's so many different ways to kind of tilt at that narrative, but that is like this persistently from politicians to both parties that cars create prosperity.
And like until we counter that, we're going to keep making the same mistakes. Do you think that that might be changing? Are people thinking differently starting to look at highways in their neighborhoods in a different way? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like I said, it's definitely becoming a climate fight. People are realizing that widening highways is only increasing our emissions. But I think it's also becoming a quality of life fight. You know, young people don't want to drive.
They want to live in places that are walkable. They want to not spend the money on cars. You know, a car is often the largest share of a house that's disposable income after housing. And so people don't want to spend the money and they don't want to spend the time driving. So I think there is a real shift, particularly as like younger generations move into the housing market. They don't want to just live in the suburbs and drive everywhere they have to go. Yeah, this is a fascinating book.
I mean, again, as someone who loves to read about highways and traffic and stuff, you've done a wonderful job here explaining the whole thing to us, especially the history of it, which is fascinating itself. Thank you very much for taking time to view with us today. Oh, thank you, Arra. Thanks for having me. Megan Kimball, journalist and author of the book, City Limits, Infrastructure, Inequality and the Future of America's Highways.
And you can read an excerpt from that book on our website, science Friday.com slash highways and speaking of highways and books every month, members of our Sci-Fi book club read a fascinating science book and next month's book is crossings how Rodeology is shaping the future of our planet by Ben Goldfarb. It's an investigation of how our roads have transformed the planet and the innovations that can minimize their threat to wildlife.
You can join our online community of book lovers and science nerds and enter to win a free book just go to our website science Friday.com slash book club. And that's the show for today. A lot of folks help make it happen, including Emma Gomez and E Nero George Harper Santiago Flores. On tomorrow's episode, your doctor might be taking your blood pressure wrong. We'll find out what to do to get a good reading. I'm Sci-Fi producer D.P. Thank you for your time.
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