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Megan Kimble – City Limits [Feature Review]

City LimitsWhat are Highways For?

A Feature Review of

City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways
Megan Kimble

Hardcover: Crown, 2024
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Reviewed by Justin Lonas

For the past 5 years, my neighborhood has been in a state of upheaval as the state of Tennessee rebuilds the intersection of Interstates 24 and 75. Bridges connecting our part of town to businesses across the highway have been torn down to allow for widening the highway below. Regular closures reroute semi trucks onto city streets that crumble under loads they were never designed to bear. Construction noise is constant, even at our house nearly a mile away. All this is only from the current work. It’s easy to forget how the sound of traffic and smell of exhaust was already a constant; how communities on either side of the highway used to be connected, seventy years ago when the interstate was just a line on a map in a planning commission meeting. This highway is not primarily for my community, but cuts through it for the benefit of those traveling from elsewhere. 

In the United States in the decades since World War II, the vision of the good life has been defined, even created, by the automobile. Its allure of speed, convenience, privacy, and independence is part of our national culture. In City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, journalist Megan Kimble dives deep into the history of U.S. highway policy to illuminate the seen and unseen costs of how we as a people have enacted our vision. While this at times requires technical arguments, Kimble structures her inquiry around the stories of three major projects in three Texas cities (Houston, Austin, and Dallas) and specific individuals, families, and institutions standing in the way of the seemingly almighty Texas Department of Transportation. Kimble’s narrative engagingly rehearses much of what environmental activists and community development practitioners have been saying for decades. 

Kimble reminds us that interstate highways were originally conceived as ways to efficiently connect cities to one another, not to cut through cities. From the beginning of the project in the 1950s, though, states exploited funding loopholes to build highways that destroyed urban communities and facilitated an ever-expanding halo of suburbs around central business districts. This expansion encouraged ever-increasing housing development farther and farther from places of employment, further encouraging the purchase of and reliance on cars. 

These additional cars created traffic congestion, removing the promise of reasonable commute times promised by highways. So states expand highways, adding lanes to increase capacity. But like a compressed gas, traffic congestion expands to meet the new capacity, eliminating the gains almost overnight. So more lanes are added—wash, rinse, repeat, in an unwinnable game. Kimble points out that highways themselves create congestion by removing other options (walking, biking, transit) from our mind, drawing more and more cars into the space allotted. Federal transportation funding makes this possible, historically allocating some 96% of resources to car-based infrastructure rather than to rail or other more space-efficient methods because the gas tax creates the illusion that highways are “self-funding” whereas mass-transit systems require “subsidy” to function (and many of the existing systems were allowed to go bankrupt during the early years of the car boom).

That time-loss to congestion is among the least of the problems urban highways create. Funneling vehicles together creates massive emissions problems that lead to health issues (asthma and other respiratory problems) for those living nearby. Paving over wetlands and green spaces leads to massive urban flooding. Long-term climate effects are beginning to take hold (1/3 of U.S. carbon emissions are from transportation, and the increase of highway miles driven increases emissions overall even as individual vehicles have become more fuel-efficient). The increase in miles driven and the quest for higher speeds increases the likelihood that the average American may be killed or seriously injured in a highway accident. 

Because urban highways cut through lower-income communities—most often communities of majority Black or Latino residents, which were easy to identify because of redlining, giving cities and states a convenient excuse to disrupt thriving minority business districts and hubs of civil rights activism. This displaces families who previously could live without a car to far-flung suburbs where they must buy a car to get to work, increasing their expenses without increasing their income, making it harder to escape poverty. Highways are practically designed for inequality, raising the cost of living dramatically, bypassing low-income communities to connect wealth to wealth. And all this has come at an alarming financial cost, as all these highways demand billions and billions of dollars to maintain as infrastructure ages—money that could be spent on any number of other social services.

Though Kimble focuses on Texas, she clearly shows how its policies and practices are a microcosm for the country as a whole. Our addiction to highways cuts across the political spectrum, afflicting red and blue states alike. And most of us willingly bear this cost without a second thought. Idols demand sacrifice.

As bleak a picture as this is, Kimble doesn’t leave it at that. The bulk of the book actually deals not with elucidating the problem, but with tracking the stories of those fighting for change. There is the first-generation homeowner in Houston radicalized by the threat of losing her long-awaited dream to eminent domain. We meet a preschool director working to keep a key source of childcare and education for the urban core of Austin safe from the bloat of I-35. In Dallas, a whole collective of neighbors rally around a historic theater to try to convince the state to remove a decaying eyesore of a highway and reconnect historic communities to each other.

These noble warriors take on the closest thing the book has to a villain—the TXDOT—in the most ordinary of democratic ways. There are countless city council and county commission meetings, petition drives, lawsuits, protests at groundbreakings, etc, simply showing up as a voice of resistance against the behemoth. 

But we are made to feel the futility of these efforts, as these groups experience hope (in the form of delaying actions, federal intervention to address violations of the Civil Rights Act, proposed re-designs) only to see project after project get pushed through via loopholes or simply the force of unaccountable inertia. States override decisions of city councils and county commissions making real political opposition to a project seem impossible. Still, Kimble shows their resilience and hope, pointing to examples from the past (the cancellation of the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco before its completion, the removal of part of Rochester, New York’s inner loop) and the recognition that even raising the issue to public consciousness is a small victory, and the compromise of “capping” the Dallas project (partially burying the highway and reconnecting a few blocks of city grid over it) may be at least a tacit acknowledgment from TXDOT that highways do dramatically affect the communities around them.

Kimble’s book isn’t the final say on highway policy by any stretch, but it is an effective introduction to get more Americans thinking critically about the most expensive and expansive infrastructure in our lives. Ultimately, she asks us to consider the telos of highways. When state DOTs and federal policy are all focused on throughput (moving the maximum number of cars per hour at the highest possible speed), she asks “Where do we arrive?” Is every city in America just an obstacle to the transportation of goods and services to someplace else, or is it worth being a destination in its own right and a vibrant community that deserves love and a sense of place?

The other day, Jon Jon Wesolowski—a local pedestrian safety, transit, and urban design activist here in my home city of Chattanooga, widely known on social media as “The Happy Urbanist”—posted that “‘Love your neighbor’ is way easier if you build in such a way as to where you have no neighbors.” The average American Christian probably hasn’t thought much about the theological implications of our built environment or the assumptions about the relative value of people and places operating in our shared (or competing) visions of the common good. How we live and move through a community probably has more influence on our purchasing habits, our politics, and even our church practices than any set of beliefs we might articulate.

I fear we may be through the looking glass already, in a world where the highways on which we rely have so curtailed our imagination for neighbor-love that we can’t even conceive of a world that allows us to flourish without spending half our incomes on vehicles and much of our time sitting in traffic. Kimble demands that we count the cost of our prevailing vision of flourishing so that we might imagine the possibility of a different future.

 

Justin Lonas

Justin Lonas is a poet, writer, cook, hiker, and amateur theologian. He holds an M.Div. from Reformed Theological Seminary. He and his wife Rachel live in Chattanooga, Tennessee with their four daughters. By day, he serves churches and ministry organizations around the world through the Chalmers Center at Covenant College. His writing often explores nature, literature, and the church's ongoing struggle to live out the way of Jesus. Justin's website is jryanlonas.com.


 
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