our author today.

megan kimball is my name. the way i should say this first is gilbert garcia. i'm an opinion writer and columnist with the san antonio express-news, but that's not important. important here is our author, megan kimball. she's an austin based investigative journalist, author of the 2015 book unprocessed. she's a former executive editor of the texas observer. she writes about housing and urban development for texas monthly, the new york times guardian and, bloomberg, citylab. her latest book, which came out a few days ago, is called city limits inequality and the future

america's highways. and it examines the toll that ever expanding urban highways have taken on our communities. and it does so through the prism three texas cities, austin, houston and dallas so please help me welcome our author megan kimple. thank you, gilbert. thank you all for being here. it's really a delight now, megan, you as you point out the book, you were born in austin, you grew up in southern california, and california. and that that area particularly in california, like texas, has a very strong car geographically, big, very spread out. was it during that time period growing up in southern california that if you first started to question the role that urban highways have in or our society, it wasn't really growing up, but i moved back l.a. after college and i was trying to work as a journalist. so i was an editorial assistant at the los angeles times. i made minimum wage and i was

tutoring high school students to like pay rent. and so as a result, i was driving all over los angeles and. it's this was the era before smartphones. so i had this like printout of, you know, mapquest and passenger seat. i would like, obsessively check. siegler econ if anybody remembers that. before i left house to to kind of navigate where i was going. and i often spent three or 4 hours a day in the car. and that's you know, i the impact on my quality of life was enormous. and that's when i really started to kind of wonder like, why, why is this? why we built cities this way? what does this do to us, you know, as drivers, as people, a community and i moved to tucson, arizona, to go to graduate school. and that difference of quality, of life, of moving somewhere. i relied on my car to get everywhere i needed to go to somewhere where i could bike and walk most places was so, so significant that like that is certainly what triggered this interest. i think many of us tend to see highway construction as, a

response to demand. we are the populations of our cities that are growing. we've got more more cars, more wanting to drive, and we're just trying to keep up with that. but your book explores the idea, and it's an idea that's been about for a while that widening our highways, expanding our highways really the effect of inducing demand. and i was wonder if you could talk a little bit about the concept of induced demand and how it works. and i think that, as you describe it, people in texas particularly will it'll sound familiar to them. so the phenomenon of demand has been well understood since 1960s when we started building these highways to begin with. and the basic principle is when you add car capacity, cars will fill that up. it's basic supply and demand. when you make a good, cheaper and for people to access more people will access it. so they will move farther from their. jobs. they will move farther from their schools. they might take more discretionary trips to the grocery store or the mall, more often than they otherwise would have. and that was first documented in 1962. and it has been documented

again, again saying that when add lane miles cars thought those lane miles. researchers at the university of california davis found that when you add 1% of lane miles, 1% more traffic results and, that is controlling for population growth, that has nothing to do with like more people driving. it's just people drive more per capita driving increases. so, again, this has been documented again. again, some people call it the fundamental law of road congestion and. yet we have a department of transportation, the texas department of transportation known as texting, who comes to every major city in the state and says, hey, we're going to fix traffic by widening this highway. all the evidence shows that doesn't fix traffic. and so a lot of that kind of catalyst for my book was learning about a highway expansion in austin where i live, i-35, which runs right through the middle of the city, just as it does here learning that intended to expand that from 12 to 20 lanes, promising to fix congestion and adding lanes would not fix congestion. and so i thought, why are we still doing this is the literal definition of insanity.

yeah. and i think i should out that while you're looking primarily at texas, i mean, texas is probably an extreme example of the phenomenon that you're describing this is this is a national issue. i mean, this is big cities throughout the country with this. yeah, the book takes place in texas. but it is very much like kind of pitched the book as texas is the worst offender of something that everyone everywhere doing every state in the country democrat republican led. it doesn't matter every major city they have a massive highway expansion in the works. so biden's infrastructure bill you know dedicated something like half $1,000,000,000,000 to road what roadways. and a recent study found that about a quarter of that funding is going to highway expansion. so, you know, hundreds of, billions of dollars across the country are laying down more pavement for promising to fix. and like all the evidence shows that won't. i think one of the things that's underappreciated, i think you really emphasize this in the book and i think really i be very important for everyone to

be able to to to read and understand stories is the fact that these highways are, again, not only dealing demand and trying to deal with traffic issues cities, but they're shaping our cities. you know, they're not this is always responding sprawl in many cases. if you look historically they have led to sprawl. they've contributed to sprawl and they have it which you talk about with houston and austin they contributed segregating the city and. i think if you would talk a little bit about i-10, how i-10 cut through fifth ward in houston and the impact that that had on and on the community there. yeah. i mean it's a kind of an adage that development follows roads roads don't development roads open up new land for development. and we have seen that in almost every city in texas. but when these highways were first built in the 1950s and

sixties. so the interstate highway passed in 1956 under president eisenhower. lots federal money became available to build highways and urban planners and cities across the country saw this opportunity not only kind of accommodate all the demand for cars also get rid of quote unquote blighted neighborhoods. those neighborhoods that had been made blighted by the federal government a decade earlier through redlining, which is the practice of systemically denying access to credit to neighborhoods simply because black and hispanic lived in those neighborhoods. so a decade later, as were drawing these interstate routes, they to these neighborhoods, which there were lower property that people there had did not have the political capital to resist highway construction. and i came across a study that a modern day study found that red line neighborhoods, again, like neighborhoods that were denied access to credit just because they had minority populations in them were three times more likely to have an interstate highway routed through them than the best rated neighborhoods. it's you can see it again and again in the historical documentation. i spent a lot of time in library archives.

i went to the national archives in washington, d.c. to look at the bureau public roads, which is the predecessor of the federal highway administration. it's written in the record that these highways were an opportunity to of clean up, quote unquote, putting that big air quotes blighted neighborhoods. this coincided with the era of urban, which is a like a very acknowledged policy by the federal government to to demolish black and hispanic communities and the kind of the engine driving all of that was the creation of the suburbs. we, through our federal housing policy, incentivized white homeowners to move far from city centers they could access, you know, really great government, more government backed. so these white families were kind of flocking out to the suburbs and to get them there we built these massive highways. and a great example is you mentioned interstate ten in the fifth ward and houston. the fifth ward was then and a black community in the 1950s. you know, i talk to people who grew up there who remember it in the 1950s and sixties. it was like complete community.

people walked everywhere. they needed to go. most people didn't have cars. they didn't lock the doors on their houses. people just came and went, you know, it was like everyone knew everyone. so there was just really no reason to leave before integration. well, you know, one day people started hearing rumors about a highway that was going to come through their neighborhood. this is before the voting rights act passed this before the civil rights act passed. people, you know, got their mail one day and it said, hey, we need land for highway. we need your home for highway. and people had basically no way to resist or or do anything except move. so i talked to this one woman. her name is honoree guidry. her family was in middle school when her family got that letter. the texas highway department needs your home. and so they move, you know, three miles north of where they had lived before. but she was determined to graduate from phillis wheatley high school, which is like one of the most prominent black high schools, houston. so she walked to school day three miles to school there through high school because her

family had been displaced by that highway. you know, i talked lots of people like her, that highway just like plow through the community. it demolished more than 1200 structures, took three full city blocks, and it just like emptied out the community, people started leaving, you know, the neighborhood they knew gone, the their friends, people's friends were gone. people themselves like own area had been displaced. and so just like really like literally cut barrier through that community. and so it's like split in half now people call the southern half of the fifth ward the bottom because it's below the freeway. it was an example of someone who was a cheerleader and was forced to go to the dedication just, kind of celebrate the dedication of something that had really decimated this neighborhood where she grew up. yeah. so i was looking for people who had been by the highways original construction. so i just started talking to the kind of like neighborhood leaders in the fifth ward, and i had barbecue one day with this woman, jane, who was telling me about the highway's construction, and she happened to be like a majorette in the

marching band at phillis wheatley high school. and so as part of that, you know, all these highways were big celebration. so there was a ribbon cutting when this highway opened. and the phillis wheatley high school marching band performed. and so she marched down that highway. you know, it's it's totally clean. no cars have ever been on it, and it's supposed to be this big celebration, right? like progress has come to the fifth ward and she's, like, this wasn't progress. like my neighborhood has been demolished like i'm not celebrating yet. i'm a teenager. i can't. what can i except like trauma button on this highway go about my life and so like even at the time, i think, you know, a lot of people were really troubled by the creation of these highways. and in cities across the country, people revolted like there was a mass movement of against highway construction. the original freeway revolts in the the 1960s. you know, tens of thousands of people protested in golden gate park, san francisco, in washington, d.c., you know, black and white people together, multiracial coalition of people protested highway construction. and a lot of these people

effectively stopped highways like freeway fighters in the sixties, erased highway lines from maps before they could be built. you talked about the 1956 interstate highway act signed into by president eisenhower. and one of the many things i learned in this book that both president eisenhower and i think his chief advisor kind of helping to implement this this law, they were kind of appalled at the way this was being implemented in the various states in the country. their for this was this is going to be something that's going to connect all the states of the country. they did not see it as this is going to be by states to deal with traffic congestion. and the idea of routing these highways through cities. this was not something that they envision right? no. i'm like, i love this story. i mean, i don't love it. it makes me angry. but like, i loved finding as a reporter because it really kind of cracked the book open for me. so i went to the eisenhower presidential library, which is in beautiful abilene, kansas,

and to try to find out like what was kind of narrative around the creation of the interstate system and indeed, you know, it's called the national highway national defense highway act. so sold it to congress as means to connect the country in case of nuclear attack, in case of war. let's move goods and produce and, you know, economic across the country while at the same time the of this interstate, the interstate act passed was a $25 billion law. the biggest public works project ever attempted in american history. and the federal government agreed pay 90% of the cost of construction of these highways. meanwhile cities like san antonio and dallas and you know, people were buying cars were so many more cars on, city streets, car car registrations jumped from like hundred thousand to 25 million in a couple of decades. so city planners like, oh, my gosh, we have to do something to accommodate all these cars. and so had this tons of money coming in from the federal

government and basically no strings attached. so they started doing what i just described, houston's fifth ward. they started building massive interstate highways right through the middle of cities to solve this kind of newly created problem of urban congestion. so the interstate highway act passes within a few years. it's running wildly over budget $11 billion over its $25 billion budget. and eisenhower appoints general john bragdon to look into the program. how is it being implemented? he wanted a report back on like what's happening with the implementation of the interstate highway program. so this guy bragged, looks into it and he realizes that the program is running wildly overbudget, largely because of urban route. that's much more expensive. build a highway in the middle of a city than it is out in farmland. and so he congress, hey, when you pass act did you intend for states to build highways through the middle of cities. the department of commerce goes and looks into it. they produce report and bragdon basically synthesizes all of this in a report that he he gives to eisenhower and actually that like a notecards of the

presentation he gave to eisenhower. they've got cursive writing on them. you know, his his notes to himself. and the short answer is congress not intend for highways be built through the middle of cities when they passed the interstate highway system, the interstate highway act. it was not intended to solve urban congestion. and bragdon gives this really remarkable speech to eisenhower and a group assembled, you know, high ups in the government saying. basically, all of the experts, the way to solve urban congestion is by building transit systems. and yet across the country, what cities are doing are actively out transit to build. you know, this guy is a republican he's an engineer. this is not a political conversation. this is pure geometry, like people take out more space than cars do. like all of us in our cars would not be able to fit in this room. but here we are. and so he gives this presentation to eisenhower and others to say, you should tell the bureau of public roads to instruct states to stop using our money, federal money, which was designated to connect the

country to, solve this new problem of urban congestion. so he gives this very compelling presentation. and like eisenhower's response to that is captured in like a memorandum written few days after the meeting. and he was really -- that his program being used in a way that he had not requested. so he responds, apparently in frustration, that the manner of running interstate routes through cities was against his wishes and those who had implemented it that way had done so against his desire. so so i found that i was like, it wasn't supposed be this way. this was not the intent of the program. this was never what was supposed to happen. but like, okay, well, why they change anything? well, i think i found, like, eisenhower as secretary as daily notes in the archives. and she has this note that. you know, these guys were in for a meeting on the interstate highway program. bragdon thinks that cities should directed to to not build highways through the middle of their cities, but like general

parsons and others think would be murder to move in an election year. so it's an election state. money has been allocated to states. eisenhower, is this like the states would rise up in arms if. we took away this money. the states electoral votes. the states have electoral votes. he wants, you know, his party to win reelection. and so is done. well, you know, we've talked about sprawl. we talked about displacement and how communities have been affected. businesses affected housing by what you're describing. one of the the mind blowing facts that is appears this book and comes from a texas department of transportation study was the the fact that on road emissions in account for almost one half of 1% of total carbon dioxide in the world. and don't know if you if you were aware of that when you started on the book but i if you

didn't have it were you shocked i mean because i was when i read it i, i mean i know we've got issue with this, you know, with the emissions in texas. but that's that's an amazing statistic i was shocked and i wrote a story for the texas observer where used to work a cover story about highways in texas and that led to this book. and so when i was reporting that story, i was looking through like texas dot environmental and there's you know in this you know it's like on road assessment of greenhouse gas. it's super wonky, super technical. and there's this like whatever this graph showing, texas emissions, it's like worldwide emissions on road texas. and i think the point of the graph is to say we sure aren't emitting that much on our roads. look at this little circle. and i interpreted as we drivers in texas are responsible for half a percentage. all the emissions in the whole world. that's like absolutely staggering to me that like that honestly fueled a lot of my

reporting for the book is like that gives it the urgency like highway expansion is going to take people's homes it's going to pollute our air. all of those things are terrible. but what we absolutely know is it will significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and it's not going to solve the problem set out to solve. so we are like drivers in texas, these highway expansions that i profiled in the book have a measurable impact on global warming worldwide like that is really staggering to me and also is like an opportune city to be like, hey, we, we in texas if we stop these like that could also have a material impact on worldwide global climate emissions. one of things you document in the book this movement that has grown in opposition to of the the assumptions that were made about expanding highways. and you you look the opposition to expanding i-35 in austin the opposition to expanding in houston and. a movement to remove. 340 4345. the elevated highway in dallas and it in the book it really

felt like this something has really been building here over the last several years and it's become of a coordinated multi-state movement. could you talk a little bit about how you've seen grow and and why you think that it is it has become the movement that it that it is now? yeah, i absolutely sort of think we're in a new wave of freeway revolts today. i started reporting on this in houston called stop text on i-45 and that's this grassroots group just normal people learn about this massive expansion of a $10 billion project that will displace 1200 homes, 300 businesses and take 450 acres of land. it's absolutely. and this group. no, we don't want that. and they started going door to door across houston, knocking on doors of people lived in the footprint of the expansion or who the expansion would suddenly be in their backyards of it. a lot of them didn't know about it. text out, had not done outreach to them. and so they started this like pretty remarkable grassroots

opposition movement text and they successfully stopped that expansion for two years. so members of the group filed civil rights complaints alleging that the project violated title six of the civil rights act because it so disproportionately impacted black and hispanic people. and the people in the footprint of the expansion, according to texas own analysis, are predominantly low income and minority populations. and so they filed civil rights complaints and the federal fha said, hey, text out, we need you to pause what doing on this project while we investigate these complaints complaints? you know, you can find out more about what happened with that in the book. but as a result of that, they really were like, we're able to negotiate with texas that they had leverage. so it was like and this is just again, like young people in their twenties and thirties who really see the connection between highways and climate change, particularly houston highways, and increased like you laid out more concrete your city will flood more so kind of concurrently. as i was reporting the book, there's a group in austin, it's called rethink 35 and they sort of grew up of the opposition to

the i-35 expansion that i mentioned earlier. and there has been for about a decade in dallas a campaign to remove i 345 which is this like elevated stretch of highway that bounds the eastern edge of downtown dallas and it impacts an enormous amount of land and the argument there is like we could put land to better use we could build housing on it, we could build affordable housing, we could build offices like whatever the community needs and wants. it is absolutely like a wasted opportunity to use that for a highway. so those campaigns are kind of happening separately. and what was very cool for to observe as a journalist is like over the four years i reported this book, they started talking to each other. they coordinating and realizing that the locus of power was not at the city council. it was not at their text on district. it's at this entity called the transportation commission, which oversees three that four people appointed by the governor. and so they started like organizing. they have biweekly zoom calls and they have organized several statewide protest in austin at the texas transportation

commission. and i think like seeing that kind of like growing coordinated movement in texas, that's also happening nationwide. there are freeway fighters in almost every city america. and they actually convened in cincinnati this fall. and i went to cover it for bloomberg. and like there are grassroots campaigns talking to each other, trying to figure out how to get to the root cause of these highway expansions. why do they keep happening? how can we change policy to prevent them? as you pointed out, i mean, the real power, it comes to transportation in texas is the texas transportation commission. and it it it's really amazing to to read some of the accounts in the book and to get the sense that they're they're really sort of disinterested or in the sentiment of people in the communities that are going to be affected by some of these projects, whether it was the i-35 expansion. in the case of the i-45, you had someone that you write about ultimately filing a rights case

with the federal government, put a pause on the project and my reading of it was that the texas transportation commission kind, they were kind of vengeful about it and said, well, okay, parts of this project you might want, we're going to, we're going to we're going to just didn't give that up. you're like, i get that because you're trying to block this this expansion i-45 and along those lines in san antonio we had an experience very similar where we had a project that was overwhelming only approved by voters it was a project dealing with broadway street, which runs north south from in san antonio. and the was going to provide bike lane for a stretch of of a broadway it was going to you widen sidewalks the texas transportation commission had essentially turned over control of broadway to the city of san antonio. but i guess technically they still had ownership of it.

so there were no objections from the texas transportation commission after the bond was passed while the plans went forward and then suddenly at a certain point, the chairman of the texas transportation, bruce bugg, decided this wasn't this wasn't going to happen. and we had the mayor of san antonio adamantly in support of this. as i said, the voters of san antonio adamantly in support this. and the chairman of the texas transportation commission did not care. i want to get kind of your thoughts about it. you wrote about this very well in the book. and as you point out in the book, there were a lot of questions, suggestion is that bruce bugg had had heard governor greg abbott and that had affected because we hadn't really heard any objections to this for a long time and suddenly we did. yeah, that was remarkable to me when happened like watching that unfold, as you said, the voters of san antonio approved this

bond that, would have narrowed that road and added bike and pedestrian. so it would have taken away two lanes to add bike lanes and infrastructure that the voters overwhelmingly approved. and there was some technicality, like you said that the and they had not actually turned over ownership despite working texan engineers in san antonio and the city of san antonio and so like some some random meeting in february of 2022 there's an item on the agenda around about broadway and in a kind of the meeting was really remarkable kind of before he puts it to a vote says you know i want to give some context for this agenda item and says, you know, governor abbott has given us one directive. so all these commissioners are by abbott. they answer only to abbott. and the director of abbott has given us is to fix congestion abbott ran office promising to fix traffic and texas when he was elected he created this $5 billion program called texas clear lanes, which is kind of responsible for all of these needs across the state. and he said, i think that we're

moving capacity on this roadway would go against governor abbott's directive to us therefore we must take this facility back and keep it as a six lane road and it's it's absolutely undemocratic. yeah. i don't i'm like speechless even now. i'm like, i think, you know, everyone in san antonio was shocked by that. and i and like, it was sort of a mystery. lots of people speculated i was never able to prove. governor abbott called bruce back. but like bruce lives in san antonio like to mention like shout out if he's listening he know you can look in the property tax appraisal district and find out where he lives. lives pretty close to broadway like he he knew about that project. there was absolute no way he was unaware of was happening and what the city of san antonio was planning and to just have this sort of vindictively removed from this project removed from the voters of san antonio like i found to be remarkable and i got

a little bit of clarity on a few months later at texas tribune festival in austin, like a high up guy at textile was on a panel and there was a local reporter from texas tribune who said, like, hey, what happened? i was up with that and he was like, there's this quote and it's in the book. and i still find it stunning. he said, like, you know, part of the the bond was to make that road safer. lots of people injured or die on that road because it's not well-designed for bike or pedestrians. cars move very fast on it. and so that part of the project and he said something like you know we understand the need to make texas roads safer but not at the expense of vehicular capacity because that's that should be the priority, right? because that's our highest priority not texans lives. it is moving texans quickly. a car. well, i mean, i'm going to pause to think about that for a minute. you know, one of the things that that i think that many of us

ha