Houston is divided by highways today, but does it have to be that way tomorrow?
Downtown Houston Skyline with Interstate 45 in the foreground.
Note: This was originally published on April 3, 2024 on the Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research’s blog, the Urban Edge. A pdf of the original article can be found here.
The way highways cut through and loop around cities like Houston — disconnecting, disrupting and displacing communities, businesses and people and reinforcing racial and economic segregation — can feel like a fact of nature. But as Megan Kimble recounts in her new book, “City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, And the Future of America’s Highways,” this hasn’t always been the case.
While it has become increasingly accepted that highway expansions do not achieve their stated purpose of reducing traffic congestion, even some of the architects of the Interstate Highway System were aware of this over 60 years ago. As Kimble explains in “City Limits,” Maj. Gen. John S. Bragdon, appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to oversee the implementation of the system, concluded that highways should go around cities, not through them.
“One of the findings was ‘highways are not going to solve inner-city congestion,’” said Kimble. “It's a simple geometry, cars take up lots more space than people do, and moving people is more efficient than moving cars. It's not political — it's engineering.”
Nothing came of Bragdon’s recommendations. Across the country, neighborhoods such as Houston’s Fifth Ward were bulldozed to make way for interstates, displacing at least a million people and businesses, but traffic has only gotten worse since. “And here we are 60 years later, insisting that building more highways to cities will solve congestion,” said Kimble.
As a journalist and former executive editor of the Texas Observer, Kimble has covered highway expansion in the state and efforts by “freeway fighters” who have pushed back. In “City Limits,” she examines the true cost of highways and how, beyond stopping their expansion, some should be removed.
The Urban Edge spoke with Kimble to learn more about Houston’s history with highways. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What led to a city like Houston having so many highways built through its center?
When the car and the automobile sort of gained popularity in the ’20s and ’30s, it was this magical machine. I think it's very understandable that people were so taken and captivated by all that the automobile offered, which was to say, you could move autonomously, you didn't have to be connected to a transit line. People flocked to them, and planners responded accordingly.
There are all these historical quotes from people in newspapers in the ’40s and ’50s, saying the automobile is going to save cities from ruin. There's some racism in that, but there's also the truth that cities were pretty dirty places — there was no basic sanitation. And so we were going to pave them over and have these gleaming concrete ribbons, and it was going to be the city of the future. There was a real incentive to accommodate the automobile because there was demand.
That said, the federal government passed the interstate highway act in 1956, and that funded interstate highways above almost any other form of transportation. The federal government paid 90% of the cost for the construction of interstate highways, so that meant that there was this huge influx of cash to highway infrastructure at the expense of transit systems. Most cities had pretty robust transit systems before the interstate highway act and that sort of disproportionately subsidized highways and road infrastructure over transit. And that's why you see today a lot of cities like Houston, Austin and Dallas don't have very robust transit, because we support car infrastructure with all of our federal funding.
What were the negative consequences of building highways through cities as opposed to around them?
The costs of building highways through cities were myriad. One, planners intentionally routed them through redlined neighborhoods, and so they destroyed over half a million homes, most of them occupied by Black and Hispanic people and immigrants. So there was a huge racial impact that highways tore apart communities of color. One of those was the Fifth Ward in Houston. I spent a lot of time in that community, learning how I-10 impacted what was once a very coherent neighborhood that people could walk around. So that was one huge impact.
Another one is that it encouraged sprawl, it encouraged people to move farther and farther out from city centers and drive back to their jobs, schools, places of worship and wherever they needed to go. And that kind of development has huge environmental consequences. And so today, greenhouse gas emissions are the leading contributor to climate change in the U.S., and that is largely attributable to passenger cars and trucks.
So it created huge greenhouse gas emissions, which we sort of didn't understand in the ’60s. But what we did understand is that the sprawl pattern of development would consume open land — it was just much more costly to develop. There were people even in the ’60s saying, “This is not sustainable, these cars bring air pollution, they're noisy and they split apart cities.” It really didn't take very long for the negative consequences of highways to become apparent.
How do highways create inequality in cities, and what have been the long-term effects in this regard decades after their construction?
Highways segregated cities by building literal physical barriers between communities of color and white neighborhoods or central business districts. In Houston, I-10 went through the middle of Fifth Ward — it took out three city blocks through what was a very, like a thriving, densely occupied Black neighborhood. It split that community from itself, so people who live on the north side of the highway are separated from people who live on the south side. I talked to people who were children who suddenly had to cross this massive highway to get to school, and that was really dangerous.
Highways segregated communities of color from white communities, and in addition to the displacement and destruction of homes and businesses, they literally split apart Black and Hispanic communities alike from each other.
The Kinder Houston Area Survey has found that a majority of Houstonians would prefer improving rail and buses over expanding highways, and other research has shown highway expansions have negative consequences, so why do Texas leaders keep insisting on doing the latter?
That is the question at the heart of my book. It's been well documented for 60 years that expanding highways does not fix traffic because of induced demand. And people in Houston know that. I went out canvassing with a lot of activists and I was really struck by the fact that almost every person, in like the most sort of diverse set of neighborhoods, understands the phenomenon of induced demand. Even if they don't call it that, they understand what that is.
I think like most things in America, it's ideological. There has been this belief, not just in Texas, and not distinct to the Republican Party, that economic development and prosperity are tied to being able to drive anywhere that you want quickly. There's this belief that is long outdated, and long disproven, that driving increases prosperity and driving creates choice, it creates freedom. And you know, all the evidence disproves that. So why do we keep doing it? The status quo has a lot of inertia, and there's a lot of money embedded within it, highway contractors, etc., who want to keep (people) driving.
We have also built a world in which people cannot imagine living our lives without a car. And it's very hard for ordinary people who drive to work and drive to school and drive to the grocery store to imagine a different world. Even if everyone tomorrow were to agree, “we want a different world,” that will take a couple of decades.
It's fundamentally political since other countries have done this, like in Amsterdam. There are great examples in Europe of cities that were car-dominated, and their leaders decided to fund something differently. And you look at them today, and they are no longer car dominated — it's fundamentally a funding question. We continue to fund car infrastructure above all other forms of transportation. And until that changes, we will continue to get car infrastructure above all other forms of transportation.
What are the lessons for concerned citizens who want to have a say in what transportation infrastructure is built in their communities? And what role can highway removal play in making those communities better places?
I think one answer is that the decision-making process is a little obscure and byzantine, and it's sort of hard to understand who is deciding what. So, for example, people think they should go to their city council to protest the highway expansion, while, as we just talked about, it's actually really coming from the state legislature. What activist groups have done pretty effectively and powerfully is mapping out the power structures, which is to say, if you are a concerned citizen, where do you go to raise your concerns?
And so, for example, readers of this blog might know of the Houston-Galveston Area Council, but I would guess a lot of Houstonians do not show up to those meetings. And I think advocacy groups have done a good job of bridging the divide of, like, what meeting, when is it happening, where is it happening and who is talking about what? Like, understanding the democratic process that leads to these decisions. And people need to show up early. Transportation is a very slow-moving sector because the (state) agencies have to follow the National Environmental Policy Act, so getting involved early is important.
I think car infrastructure is very hard to fight because it permeates everything about our built environment. How do you retrofit a city like Houston, that is just completely woven by highways, so you don’t need a car to get everywhere? The thing that is so captivating to me about highway removal is that it demonstrates that very tangibly and concretely in a specific area. Like, you can remove a mile stretch of highway and build housing or parks and begin to actually inhabit a different kind of world where we're not isolated, which has huge impacts for the community and how we interact with each other.
Highway removal is a way to begin the project of rebuilding our cities so that we are not stuck alone in our cars all day, every day. It's a daunting problem but you have to start somewhere.
“City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, And the Future of America’s Highways” is available wherever one can find books. Kimble will speak about and sign copies of the book April 5 at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet St, Houston.