Author Megan Kimble argues that expanding highways only makes traffic congestion worse, while tearing communities apart.
In urban Texas, highways have been central to the way we move from place to place. Giant roadways bisect or loop around a city, commuters whizzing down ribbons of concrete and steel at top speed.
Yeah, a lot of these highways were initially built through Black and Hispanic communities. This happened in the 1950s and ’60s. The Voting Rights Act had not yet passed, and city planners very intentionally routed highways through redlined neighborhoods. Which means neighborhoods that were denied access to credit from the federal government a decade or two earlier simply because they had populations of Black and Hispanic people in them.
And in recent years, the plan to expand I-45 and uproot hundreds of homes and businesses got unexpected pushback from Houston residents. What are the plans to expand the highway now and how did the residents affect that? started knocking on doors across the city to say, “hey, do you know about this highway expansion that’s either going to displace you or your neighbors?” And a lot of people were appalled to hear about it. They didn’t know it was coming.
So I would say on the whole, the community got really important concessions from TxDOT because of this fight that wouldn’t exist without this grassroots opposition.Austin's I-35 is one of several highways in Texas that TxDOT is looking to expand. The initiative has drawn opposition from groups who say the move would displace residents and do little to ease congestion.
So in Dallas, the solution was to tear down that old elevated highway and dig a replacement underground? Yeah, the reason why more lanes does not actually fix congestion is because of a phenomenon known as induced demand, which basically says when you add capacity to a highway, cars will fill up that capacity.
That has been documented decade after decade after decade and city after city. And yet our transportation department is still kind of promising to fix congestion by widening highways.
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