Book Review: City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequity, and the Future of America’s Highways
When I wrote about the book Crossings at the end of January, I said, “the book could have been greatly expanded to talk about how the growth of road networks in our cities over the past century have transformed our cities and society.” City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequity, and the Future of America’s Highways by Megan Kimble is the follow on to Crossings that I was looking for. City Limits focuses on highway development and opposition in Houston, Dallas, and Austin. While all three of these cities are obviously in Texas, their stories are diverse enough that they can be instructive for cities outside of the Lone Star State as well.
Much of the first part of the book talks about the social ills of ever-expanding highways. This feels like old information for folks who have been interested in cities for a while, but for people just being introduced to the freeway fight this is useful background and history. This first part of the book also introduces us to many of the personal stories that will carry us throughout the book as various aspects of highway widening and the first against them are explored.
These personal stories are really the focus of the book. Sharing the lived experiences of the people in the path of highway widening is the heart of this book. These stories illustrate the real human impact of highway widening projects. In fact, these stories are such a focus that we often miss the wider perspective and data that can be useful in opposing wider freeways elsewhere.
As the book progresses, it starts tracking the current fight against proposed future highway expansion in these three Texas cities. The book looks at the various ways groups have opposed freeways at every level of government. Unfortunately, the book clearly demonstrates how many of these fights may delay wider freeways, but rarely stops them.
One bit of hope is the explanation of how highways are funded and how it compares to other transportation infrastructure projects. Simply stated, the Federal government picks up a much larger portion of the cost of highway construction than other transit projects. This implies that there is a clear lever to pull to drive a re-prioritization of transit projects by state Departments of Transportation and local transit agencies.
Unfortunately, City Limits only focuses on the harm of cutting highways through cities. It does not talk about the other harms caused by car dependency in our cities. There is no mention of how car dependency harms local business or how wide fast roads dictate every other aspect of our built environment. While the book does talk about how highways divide communities, it does not address the more insidious ways car dependency isolates us.
Overall, City Limits is a good continuation of the conversation started this year with Crossings. I’m looking forward to it continuing with Killed by a Traffic Engineer next month and the War on Cars book sometime in the near future. Hopefully, at least the War on Cars book, will take a 40,000 foot view of car dependency and really round out the conversation.