Megan Kimble’s Myopic Anti-Freeway Mantra

By Duggan Flanakin ~

Investigative journalist, or rather, anti-highway activist Megan Kimble’s City Limits, is a very passionate tome built on the thesis that the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 is the primary reason that communities of color today face insurmountable challenges. She has a point, as there is plenty of evidence that freeway planners tended to choose routes that disrupted cities’ poorest neighborhoods. Her preferred solution is to tear down every urban Interstate highway in the U.S.

Kimble is based in Austin, Texas, a city with a decades-long history of opposing highway construction. Austin is the largest city in the United States without an Interstate bypass that might have alleviated the flow of traffic through its downtown. Her book is chock full of personal stories of loss, frustration, and occasional victories against the all-powerful Texas Department of Transportation, which she characterizes as eager to pave over the entire state with highways.

She writes of past displacements in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and cities across America that, in her view, have permanently crippled minority communities by destroying existing businesses, homes, and entire neighborhoods, turning thriving (though comparatively poor) communities into wastelands. She is part of a movement across Texas and the nation to remove all urban freeways.

She claims that “there is essentially no urban highway in the United States that didn’t unleash similar violence on Black and Hispanic people so that white people could get home faster.” Thus, urban highways are symbols of “systemic racism” that, like statues of Confederate generals, must be torn down.

Kimble’s iconoclastic tome focuses first on Robert Moses, the urban planner whose projects transformed New York City starting in the 1920s. Moses oversaw construction of Jones Beach State Park and the New York State Parkway System. Several smaller American cities hired Moses to design freeway networks. Oddly enough, Moses never learned to drive an automobile.

Decades later, Robert Caro condemned the bridges and highways Moses built as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority as “racist.” New Deal urban renewal replaced aging tenements with massive public housing projects. Moses’ infrastructure projects and his philosophy of urban development influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners.

Kimble rightly states that the “blight” urban highway planners sought to eliminate had been exacerbated in the 1930s by the New Deal’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation. HOLC appraisers tended to downgrade minority neighborhoods when considering eligibility for federally insured mortgage loans, including Houston’s Fifth Ward.

That downgrading set the stage for building highways through “blighted” areas, which further lowered property values. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimated that highway construction ultimately forced more than a million Americans from their homes and bankrupted private transport companies, leading to subsidized, impersonal government buses where passengers are just numbers.

More recently, some urban freeways, viewed as significant barriers to revitalizing neighborhoods, have been torn down, even in Texas. One highway Kimble wants torn down and replaced with an urban boulevard is Interstate 35 through the city of Austin, which today carries 200,000 vehicles a day, the vast majority of which are local traffic.

By contrast, the Texas Department of Transportation’s master plan, already being implemented, is to replace the existing six- to eight-lane highway with 20-plus lanes, destroying multiple businesses and homes and causing years of increased traffic disruption. The project promises to be a multi-year nightmare – but removing the overcrowded highway could be even worse.

The IH 35 corridor today is the fourth largest carrier of freight in the nation, hauling more than $750 billion worth of goods annually. The only option is State Highway 130, a toll road that bypasses the city and ends up at Interstate 10, 45 miles east of San Antonio, or drivers can take SH 130 to State Highway 45 to reconnect to Interstate 35 south of Austin.

Both these toll roads, built with private funds, were bitterly opposed by Austin’s anti-highway activists. The state could purchase the highway, which has room for expansion, but to date, nobody has proposed that option or calculated how much traffic could be diverted. Kimble seems unconcerned as to how shutting down Interstate 35 would affect suburbanites’ lives.

Far too many of the suburban neighborhoods that first whites, and more recently people of all racial backgrounds, have “escaped” from the crowded cities lack the same amenities – nearly stores and shops, even parks – that Kimble has found for herself in Austin’s Mueller development. Their jobs, too, are far from their homes, and their freedoms are often curtailed by restrictive homeowner associations.

Kimble’s proposed solution, which includes government-owned transit, leaves commuters driving to and from park-and-rides to avoid blistering heat and heavy rains. Bus and train routes almost always involve extra trips to get home. In some cities, crime and filth make public transit an unwelcome choice. The alternative, driving through narrow city streets, poses threats of carjacking, increased travel times, and wear and tear on vehicles.

Kimble also rails against alleged increased carbon dioxide emissions as more vehicles use freeways. She calls electric vehicles a false promise because they use the same highways she wants to dismantle. So, even zero-emission vehicles are a threat to neighborhoods.

Communities may continue to tear down obsolete freeways, regaining land and storefronts that can result in an economic boom. But highways are only one element in the totality of urban life. Driving through neighborhood streets has become increasingly dangerous in cities plagued by carjackings, especially for drivers needing assistance after an accident or breakdown.

Kimble has a lot to say about what constitutes the “good life” in urban areas. Walking to parks, stores, restaurants, and neighbors’ homes builds a community culture lacking across much of America today – as much in suburbia as in broken-down inner cities.

But guilt-tripping suburban commuters as beneficiaries of past racist decisions does not build the coalitions needed to transform the American landscape away from the government-created isolation that the pandemic only made more evident.

Kimble provides no projections of the disruptions to through traffic, which has no other routes available other than driving at 35 miles an hour through cities, adding time and cost to their travels (especially for through trucks). She provides no projections for increased maintenance costs for local roads not built for heavy truck traffic.

Kimble’s biggest failing is not looking at the impact of freeways on inner cities in the broader context, which considers how solving one problem often leads to creating other problems. She portrays “white people” in the suburbs as enemies to be brought to heel, not as potential allies in building a better environment for all citizens.

Still, City Limits is a worthwhile read for anyone who cares about the impacts of a century of government planning on minority communities whose residents for decades had little or no say in the decisions that affected their lives. It can serve as an entry point for suburban residents and urban planners to “walk a mile” in the shoes of their constituencies.

 

Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundations, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas.

Read more excellent articles at CFACT  http://www.cfact.org/

Tagged: CFACT (Duggan Flanakin), Interstate Highways, Leftist Hypocrisy, The Race Card, Urban Planning

Posted in: Blundering Bureaucrats, Leftists (In the USA a.k.a. as Liberals-Progressives-Socialists-Communists) Usually Democrats, Media Mind Manipulators, Politics, Race Card