"City Limits"

[fiefoe]

Megan Kimble's David and Goliath story offers very little hope for inhabitants of three major Texas cities:  Dallas (I-345),  Houston (I-45), Austin (the all-too-familiar I-35).

• I-35 is “the main chokepoint in the major artery of Main Street Texas,” Bugg says, with apparently no sense of irony that Main Streets have historically been characterized by pedestrian access to shops and services. It is the most congested stretch of highway in Texas, fourth in the nation for freight.
• Austin was supposed to be a progressive bastion in conservative Texas. But I didn’t see that city. I just saw branding, a new idea projected onto old infrastructure.
• In 1924, as the automobile became ascendant, Herbert Hoover, then the secretary of commerce, declared that “locality has been annihilated, distance…folded up into a pocket piece.” Our cities reflect that annihilation of locality, the dissolution of the neighborhood unit as an anchoring force. As we built highways through—and away from—cities, we could get anywhere we wanted to go, but we found ourselves increasingly farther away from one another.
• Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for a third of the country’s total emissions. The majority of transportation emissions come from passenger cars and trucks.
• In 2018, the last time TxDOT did an analysis of the greenhouse gases generated on its roads, it found that on-road emissions in Texas account for nearly half a percent of total worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, more than some whole countries.
• the roughly forty thousand people killed every year on our roads and the thousands more who get sick from breathing polluted air. Ten percent of the nation’s traffic fatalities occur in Texas.
• In Texas, as I talked to people displaced from their homes by these highways—then and now—I heard the same refrain repeated: You can’t fight TxDOT. Whatever the state highway department wanted to do got done. You don’t get to keep your house when the highway man wants it. You don’t get to stay when they say go. The highway department spoke from a higher power, and that power was progress.
• Frank Lloyd Wright had articulated a similar vision for this car-focused future four years earlier when he described a new development called Broadacre City. The new American community, he wrote, would be based on a citizen’s “freedom to decentralize.” Land would be redistributed, an acre for every family.
• The same mysterious pattern was plaguing the Triborough, too. The new bridge span was intended to relieve some of the pressure on the Queensboro Bridge, four miles to the south. But four months after the Triborough opened, “the relief of the traffic load on the Queensborough Bridge has not been as great as expected,” reported the bridge’s chief engineer.
• In 1956, Eisenhower had appointed Bertram Tallamy to lead the Bureau of Public Roads, which was then nested within the Department of Commerce. Tallamy was an engineer and a disciple of Robert Moses; he would later tell Robert Caro, Moses’s biographer, that “the principles on which the System was built were principles that Robert Moses taught him.” And Robert Moses believed, often to a ruthless extent, that highways belonged in cities and anyone standing—or living—in the way of highways was standing in the way of progress.
• 1959 Fifth Ward in Houston: The highway happened quickly. Kids went to school and returned home to holes in the sky, the pine trees that shaded the community felled by construction crews. Homes disappeared overnight. Some were bulldozed, but many were moved. Giant trucks rumbled through the neighborhood in the darkness, idling while workers disconnected plumbing and gas lines, and then rolled away with a whole house in tow, leaving behind vacant pits.
• The idea to use interstate highways to remove “slums” and “blight” originated in the 1939 report Toll Roads and Free Roads, published by the highway engineer Thomas H. MacDonald.
• The suburbs and highways were mutually reinforcing: The suburbs justified the highways, and the highways enabled the growth of the suburbs. After World War II, millions of veterans arrived home to a housing crisis—or rather, by arriving home, they created one... In 1947, a U.S. Navy veteran named William Levitt saw the massive housing shortages across the country and wondered why homes weren’t manufactured like cars. He bought seven square miles of potato fields on Long Island and built a neighborhood called Levittown using the same assembly-line techniques that Henry Ford had used to make the Model T affordable to Americans. He built 17,500 homes in just four years, selling two-bedroom homes to returning veterans for just $8,000, no down payment required.
• The “blight” that urban highway planners sought to eliminate had in fact been created by the federal government decades earlier. In the early 1930s—around the same time O’Nari’s parents moved to the Fifth Ward—the Mortgage Rehabilitation Division of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, sent an appraiser to Houston... But appraisers also considered the racial and ethnic makeup of the people who lived in those houses and downgraded neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Black and Hispanic people. Standardized maps rated neighborhoods by color: green for the “Best,” blue for “Still Desirable,” yellow for “Definitely Declining,” and red for “Hazardous.”
• Four years later, The Dallas Morning News noted that the connection would be known as Interstate 345. Before the elevated highway opened in 1974, a highway department engineer promised that it would become “one of the most imposing structures in Texas and probably the South. It will be a real landmark for Dallas.” <> But if anyone had listened to Bragdon, it never would have been built.
• In the aftermath of the earthquake, when it was revealed that fixing the Embarcadero would cost as much as rebuilding it, the newly elected mayor, Art Agnos, argued that the city shouldn’t squander “the opportunity of a lifetime.” While city leaders debated what to do, drivers maneuvered around the highway and got where they were going without noticeable delays. People drove less. Transit ridership increased 15 percent. Public opinion turned: Maybe the Embarcadero wasn’t so necessary after all. In 1990, the board of supervisors voted 6–5 to demolish the broken structure.
• Erected in the 1930s under the gaze of Robert Moses, the West Side Highway was once a “gleaming new concrete ribbon” that spanned the western edge of Manhattan. Four decades later, the highway was decaying. One day in 1973, a truck carrying sixty thousand pounds of asphalt on its way to repair the elevated highway instead fell through it, when a portion of the bridge collapsed under the truck’s weight. Just as in San Francisco, while officials closed the highway and debated about how to rebuild it, people made other choices. Traffic volumes on nearby streets decreased by 53 percent.
• To date, eighteen North American cities have either replaced or committed to replace a limited-access highway with an urban street. In 1998, a global study of more than a hundred projects that reduced road capacity found an average traffic reduction of 25 percent, “even after controlling for possible increased travel on parallel routes.”
• Unfortunately, although the highway runs through the heart of Austin, today’s opposition is largely rhetorical. TxDOT owns I-35 and TxDOT answers to the state, not the city. Still, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, is conspicuously absent. Adler was a year from terming out of office, and he’d spent much of his time as mayor on defense as Governor Abbott stripped authority from Texas’s liberal cities.
• Kirk Watson:  In 2019, he’d filed a flurry of bills trying to get the funding allocated to expand I-35 in Austin. “There is no highway fairy, money doesn’t grow on trees and we can’t get something for nothing,” he said at the time. “Talk is cheap. Roads are not.”
• Suspended over eight lanes of highway, the park held more than three hundred trees, two buildings, a water fountain, and the capacity for ten thousand people. The park was a miracle, a conjuring of public space from a polluted highway, a suture over a scar. Sinclair and Heyden wanted TxDOT to build Klyde Warren Park in Austin—but bigger, spanning four miles instead of two blocks.
• He was familiar with Patrick Kennedy’s campaign to tear down I-345 in Dallas; he’d been impressed by the studies showing the financial benefit of highway removal. And Reconnect Austin was itself a compromise, an acknowledgment that TxDOT would never remove an interstate from the fastest-growing state’s fastest-growing city. Adam talked to Heyden and Jay Blazek Crossley, and they agreed that there should be a campaign for full removal, shifting the Overton window on what was possible in the corridor.
• a building on the I-35 frontage road near Thirty-Second Street in Cherrywood,... There’d already been a lot of interest in the building, the leasing agent told her. It was owned by the movie director Richard Linklater, ... weekly news stories about the future of Las Manitas and Escuelita. She’d just put in a bid for a new building, Dina told the woman, but she didn’t yet know if they’d gotten the lease. The woman asked where the new building was located. “It’s right on the northbound access road, at 35 and East Thirty-Second Street,” Dina said. “And she goes, ‘Oh, my husband owns that building.’ ”... Dina got the lease. Richard Linklater’s nephew got a school.
• But the federal agency was understaffed, with fewer than a dozen people reviewing Texas’s highway projects. And TxDOT had a lot of projects. So in 2014, the Federal Highway Administration gave Texas the authority to enforce its own NEPA compliance—essentially, to self-certify that it had followed the law. California already had the authority to self-certify its environmental review; six other states would eventually join the program, called NEPA Assignment. Although the arrangement allowed the state to move more quickly on projects, reducing cost and unnecessary delays, it also meant that TxDOT operated with essentially no federal oversight.
• If FHWA found that discrimination had occurred—that the highway expansion “creates potential disparate, adverse impacts to the predominantly African American and Hispanic communities within the project area”—it could stop the project entirely. <> The letter sent a shock wave across Houston: The federal government had intervened to pause a massive highway expansion. It was unprecedented—“a really huge deal,” said the former head counsel at FHWA. Menefee was thrilled; suddenly Harris County had leverage. Advocates were overjoyed.
• Transit ridership peaked in the early 1940s and began a steady decline as the automobile ascended. The prevailing view was that if transit companies happened to lose money, well, that was their problem—a signal from the market that their services were no longer required. And the government didn’t interfere with the market by subsidizing private companies. “Because it had always been private, there was little concern over transit as an activity for the government to take action
• In the early 1970s, facing the collapse of the nation’s transit companies, advocates and lawmakers began to agitate for federal support for urban transit systems—to make transit a public enterprise. “Critics of the automobile’s long supremacy in the nation’s transportation system are out to break the Trust Fund,” reported The New York Times Magazine in 1972. “They believe that this easy, automatic flow of money to the states from the Trust Fund for the sole purpose of highway construction has a profoundly distorting effect on the nation’s transportation priorities and, indirectly, on the present and future development of cities and their suburbs.”
• John B. Anderson, a representative from Illinois and the chairman of the House Republican Conference, testified on the floor of the House in support of the amendment. “Through the rigid and unyielding insistence that this Nation must spend $5 billion a year, come rain or come shine, whether needed or not, for new highways, they may unleash a wave of popular revulsion that truly will bring the great highway machine to a halt,” he said. The idea that the Highway Trust Fund should be used to pay for highways and highways alone—the notion that the program was “self-financing”—betrayed a misunderstanding of how government worked. Should the alcohol tax be used only for substance abuse rehabilitation programs? he asked.
• Reagan didn’t succeed in turning the federal transportation program back over to states, in part because states did not really want it back. But the promise of dismantling a federal program opened Reagan to the possibility of a tax increase. By 1982, there was bipartisan support in Congress for increasing the gas tax, which seemed to be the only option if the trust fund was to remain solvent.
• It was a huge win for public transportation. But it would be the last big win for decades. “The dedicated revenues acted as a spending ceiling as much as a spending floor,” says Jeff Davis, a researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation. With few exceptions, adjusted for inflation, federal spending on public transportation has remained essentially flat since 1982. The gas tax has since doubled to 18.4 cents a gallon. But the ratio agreed upon forty years ago—a political deal for a tax increase that has long since become obsolete—has remained. Highway programs receive 80 percent of federal transportation funding, while transit gets only 20 percent.
• Working at the DOT was eye opening. She’d spent years on Capitol Hill working to pass legislation to fund programs focused on equity and sustainability. Only once she got to DOT did she realize she’d been working on the margins. The Highway Trust Fund was the center, sacrosanct and untouchable. Through formula funding, billions of dollars flowed directly to states to do with what they pleased. The 1998 surface transportation reauthorization had created a formula funding system that guaranteed states would get back just over ninety cents for every dollar they paid into the Highway Trust Fund through fuel taxes. Until and unless the federal government put conditions on that funding, a state like Texas could do whatever it wanted, so long as it didn’t violate civil rights or environmental law. If Texas wanted to expand every highway in the state to twenty-six lanes, it very well could. “We have a federally funded, state-run program,” Beth says. “The states are the emperors.”
• In the spring of 2021, Crowther organized a virtual “freeway fighters” social hour. More than ninety people signed on to the call.. Until then, Adam Greenfield didn’t know about Jordan van der Hagen’s campaign in Duluth—that on opposite sides of the same interstate, they’d conjured nearly identical visions. The call revealed the movement to itself, Crowther says.
• at the beginning of this formal consideration, it’s clear to Patrick that TxDOT is not taking the removal option seriously. For one, TxDOT’s redesigned street grid “looks as if it was designed and planned to maximize travel delay,” Patrick tells me. To replace the car capacity lost from the highway, streets should run north-south, he says. Instead, they squiggle and swerve, dumping capacity east and west. “Somebody more cynical than me would say, are they presenting plans that they know have poison pills in them?”
• In the 1920s, the Dallas chapter of the Ku Klux Klan reportedly counted 13,000 members in a city with a population of only 160,000—one of every three eligible white men was a Klan member.
• North of I-30, the average life expectancy is twenty-two years longer than south of it. Southern Dallas accounts for 64 percent of the landmass in the city of Dallas but only 10 percent of the city’s assessed property value. The area has lost 17 percent of its jobs since 2000, even as the Dallas–Fort Worth region led the nation in overall job growth;
• The highway did not create segregation, but it reinforced it, siphoning opportunity away from Black neighborhoods. The cost of admission to that opportunity was a car.
• “I think traffic engineers tend to think traffic is like a liquid. If the pipes aren’t big enough, then it gets plugged up and overflows. The solution is building bigger pipes,” Goodspeed says. “But all of the evidence says that that’s not true, that instead [traffic] is much more like a gas, meaning the volume of traffic congestion will expand to take up the capacity allowed.” And if traffic can expand, it can also contract.
• After high school, Elizabeth’s swim teacher had changed her name to Erykah Badu, and, after releasing two platinum records and winning a few Grammy Awards, she decided to lease the theater and bring music back to South Dallas. For years, Badu fought to make the Forest Theater profitable,
• Ever the nurse, Molly has excellent bedside manner. She’s direct and to the point, adept at swiftly explaining complicated procedures. She knocked on a hundred doors a day when Beto O’Rourke ran for Congress, and it shows: She is indefatigable, unintimidated. “Don’t you think TxDOT should have to go door to door, just like we’re doing, sweating on the streets?” she says to me,
• Mattress Mack, famously, gives away mattresses when the Houston Astros win the World Series. Year-round, a sign outside Gallery Furniture announces, if the astros win it all, your mattress is free... that’s not what he finds offensive. “It’s for the fat cats: the highway department and the contractors. Not the people on the Northside who are grinding out a living. These people are on the edge. They don’t need more grief coming at them.” A $9 billion highway was the last thing the government should be spending its money on. “It’s a boondoggle for everyone. How much more money can we waste?” He’d heard about TxDOT’s survey. “I guess the newest thing is an either-or,” he says. “Either you do everything or you get nothing. That’s a mafia pitch. An offer you can’t refuse.”
• He does not mention how many people participated in this hastily assembled public survey—just over 8,000 in a city with a population of 2.3 million—but to him the mandate is clear: The project should remain. Still, there is an elephant in the room. “Until the FHWA reauthorizes TxDOT to start this project, TxDOT cannot do so on its own,” he says. “I’m pleased to say the mayor of Houston as recently as just yesterday came out publicly in favor of this project.” So he gives the Federal Highway Administration a deadline... Two weeks later, at a city council meeting, Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, corrects the record. He does not support the highway expansion, he says.
• Jay was a public policy nerd, a native of Houston, and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He was in his mid-thirties and had just taken over as executive director of Houston Tomorrow, a smart-growth nonprofit his dad founded in the 1990s (“the origin story is that my dad learned about climate change and freaked the fuck out”).
• Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building. The building is a gorgeous art deco structure, designed by a San Antonio architect named Carleton Adams. After he got the commission, Adams traveled across the country seeking inspiration for his skyscraper, the first in the state to hold public offices.
• When they saw the agenda, city officials in San Antonio were stunned. “Huh?” wrote San Antonio’s mayor, Ron Nirenberg, on Twitter. “State is preparing to claim Broadway is part of the TX highway system, 6 years after transferring control to the city. Amid a remodel that was approved by over 70% of SA voters, txdot is trying to put a halt to the project. govabbott—what happened to small government?”
• Soon, developers started buying up land along Broadway and submitting rezoning requests for new apartment complexes and office buildings. By 2022, more than $760 million had been invested along the corridor.
  And then, six years later and seemingly overnight, TxDOT changed its mind. It turned out the state agency had never actually signed the order giving San Antonio ownership of Broadway. It seemed like a minor technicality, as TxDOT’s own staff had been working with city officials on the redevelopment plan for years. Why take it back now?
  “I would like to present some background information on this agenda item before the commission votes on it,” Bugg says. In 2015, Governor Abbott asked the commission “to directly address the top choke points in our major metropolitan areas, giving this commission a clear policy directive to reduce congestion on Texas roadways,” Bugg says. This was the only mandate the governor had given the commission.
• Abbott said at a TxDOT forum a year earlier. Conveniently, some of the governor’s top campaign donors were highway contractors. J. Doug Pitcock, Jr., the ninety-four-year-old founder and chief executive of Williams Brothers Construction, Texas’s largest highway contractor, had given the governor $4.3 million since 2002. Incidentally, it was Pitcock’s company that won the contract for the $2.8 billion expansion of Houston’s Katy Freeway.
• As he talked with Molly and Neal Ehardt, Michael had an idea. “Hey, how many units did they account for here?” he asked. The demolition company had confirmed it was tearing down all three buildings, even though only the front building was in the footprint of the highway expansion. Neal pulled up TxDOT’s final environmental impact statement. Buried in an appendix, hundreds of pages deep, there was a table listing the sixteen multifamily housing facilities that would be demolished, including the total number of units displaced. On the last row of the table, the Lofts at the Ballpark was listed at 165 units. But now, it seemed, TxDOT was tearing down all 375, 210 more than it had been authorized to remove.
• “Tearing down dense housing next to transit for a highway is the opposite direction we should be going as a city,” Michael says. “These are valuable apartments. They were touted as the new urbanism when they were originally built in the early 2000s and now TxDOT has decided they’re not worth anything.”...  “It was March when they were supposed to stop with the project, and it was March when they started telling us all that we had to get out. Why were they so aggressive?” Rebecca asks, as we walk up St. Emanuel. “Why did they have to push it so hard?” It seemed like such a waste—all the time and energy and money spent relocating tenants who could have just stayed put.
• On the patio, the elevated highway is visible through globe lights strung between poles. Faint electronic dance music wafts from a rooftop club a block away. People on green scooters whiz through the intersection. Couples walk, arms looped loosely around waists, flashing summer skin. So many other cities are desperately trying to bring this scene back to their deserted city centers: the casual chemistry of a late Tuesday night in midsummer. And yet, in Houston, leaders are prepared to pave it over.
• Of the eighty-two people who have traveled to testify, all but a few oppose dedicating $85 billion to highway expansion. But the speakers do not have a vote. More than two hours after public testimony began and less than thirty seconds after it concludes—before the last speaker has made it back to their seat—Bugg calls the item to a vote. The UTP passes unanimously.
• But increasingly, TxDOT was using the promise of deck parks to sell highway expansions. In Austin, the transportation agency had agreed to rebuild I-35 so that, structurally, it could be capped. But TxDOT wouldn’t pay for it. Instead, the City of Austin would have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to cover the freeway with so-called caps and stitches. Now, it appeared, TxDOT was making the same pitch to Dallas. Let us widen this highway, and we’ll let you pay to put something on top of it.
• Transit functions best when it connects people across densely occupied places. But in Dallas–Fort Worth, space was abundant, luxuriously occupied. The metroplex sprawled across more than nine thousand square miles, covering more area than the states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined. The area had some of the lowest rates of public transit use in the country, with just over 1 percent of workers using transit to commute to work.
• If not having a car—or a highway to drive on—disadvantaged the most vulnerable, then so did continuing to build a city in which you had to have a car to access opportunity. “A landscape that demands vehicles is a demanding landscape for the poor, for the simple reason that driving is expensive,” they conclude. Nationally, the poorest households spend almost a third of their income on transportation—which is to say, on driving.
• “Come on, Sam,” she says. “I don’t have time, buddy, we have to get across town.” The highway that rumbles overhead feeds this rush—the desire to arrive, a scarcity of time instead of its minute-by-minute presence. The grown-up world is contoured by concrete monoliths. It’s hard to reconcile these two worlds: a place where there is a container for every small object, a room where everything happens, sleeping and eating and dancing and reading; and a highway where nothing happens except in-between time.
• In June, Rethink35, along with the Texas Public Interest Research Group and Environment Texas, filed a lawsuit against TxDOT, alleging it had violated NEPA by splitting the I-35 expansion into three separate projects with distinct environmental reviews. The I-35 Capital Express project was in fact three projects, extending across twenty-eight miles. The eight-mile-long central segment had gotten the most attention, given how significantly it would change the heart of the city. But in north and south Austin, TxDOT also intended to expand I-35, adding two lanes headed north and four lanes on the stretch of highway that extended south from Ben White Boulevard all the way to the suburb of Buda... Rethink35’s lawsuit alleged that TxDOT had illegally segmented the I-35 expansion, completing lesser environmental reviews for the north and south segments when it should have considered the entire project holistically.
• The city could claim prominence in both the women’s suffrage and the abolitionist movements as the once home to both Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. By the 1940s, Rochester was a thriving, growing city.
• On the south end of Union Street was the Strong National Museum of Play, one of the world’s only museums dedicated to the history and exploration of play. The museum had been planning a major expansion; the Inner Loop removal gave them the land to do it on. As soon as the land went out for bid, Konar contacted the museum. What if they developed a parcel together? They could build a “neighborhood of play”—a museum district anchored by apartments and town houses and restaurants, lining a new city street called Adventure Place.
• A highway is a hard thing to perceive. The physical structure is indisputable—concrete and beams, struts and supports, the persistent rumble. On a city map, a highway is a contour line, defining the shape of a place—this, here, is the edge of downtown. It is the artery that circulates energy, the skin that communicates an edge. But highways aren’t designed to be experienced or absorbed at human scale. On a highway, we are our cars, contained in the hum and clack of suspended rubber wheels, speeding so fast that we can’t absorb anything except paint on pavement and the giant green signs that announce where we are going. But highways are similarly hard to see outside our cars. The structures defy human scale, overpasses soaring 125 feet aboveground, the height of a twelve-story building. A highway is a wall of noise, so loud it dulls every other sense.
• TxDOT would be taking GNDC’s land. It would demolish two brand-new affordable homes to build a twenty-lane highway. The city would put a park on top and call it justice. <> The justice was in the land. “Buy land,” Mark Twain once famously wrote. “They aren’t making it anymore.” Removing I-35—or burying it—did just that. Reconnect Austin had calculated that the city could reclaim thirty acres of land if TxDOT tunneled the highway and built a boulevard over it. GNDC was preparing to build twenty-seven apartments on a fifth of an acre. Imagine what it could do with thirty acres.
• “The idea that a freeway is going to address climate change. Do you think we’re stupid?” Since then, it has become clear: Rodney Ellis has no power. Despite Harris County’s lawsuit—despite the federal government’s intervention—TxDOT holds all the cards. TxDOT has the sovereign authority of eminent domain. It controls the state’s transportation funding, and local leaders, it appears, are unwilling to let $9 billion walk away from Houston.
• “This transportation infrastructure project can serve as a model for our country in a world where disagreements are often deal breakers.” <> Really? Molly thinks, sitting quietly in her chair. You think anyone is watching us to learn? She felt crazy, as if she were the only one who could see the emperor had no clothes. Whatever TxDOT had agreed to, it wasn’t enforceable.
• With Laura Ryan on one side and Christian Menefee, the Harris County attorney, on the other, Turner signs and dates the city’s memorandum of understanding. <> After the press conference, Molly approached Menefee. “What happened?” she asked. “He was like, ‘Look, the feds have no appetite for this.’ ” Molly was devastated. “It’s so disappointing that they came down here and said all that stuff, acted like they care about Black and brown communities, acted like they care about carbon emissions,” she says. “Come to find out that they were never going to do much.”
• It was ludicrous—the idea that you “should” be able to get from one side of the country’s fastest-growing city to the other in only eight minutes. But more than that, the models were simply wrong. No rational person would spend 223 minutes driving on a highway to travel eight miles... The models did not predict the future. They simply justified the expansion. And yet TxDOT’s authority was absolute. What layperson could challenge the premise of a bad traffic model, especially when it was so meticulously documented and professionally presented?
• Austin: It felt like a bait and switch. TxDOT had sold its highway expansion with the promise of a reconnected Austin. But unless the city council could conjure $325 million in less than two years, the city would end up with nothing but a wider gash cutting across it.
• Sixty years earlier, on Long Island, Judah’s grandmother had pointed a shotgun at Robert Moses when he showed up on her doorstep, trying to buy her land to build a freeway through her backyard. “You know what? She won.” Despite what TxDOT wanted Austinites to believe, the expansion of I-35 was not inevitable.
• In late February 2023, Molly Cook wakes up early and drives west. Over the past year, she’s made a habit of driving the two and a half hours to Austin every month to give a three-minute testimony at the Texas Transportation Commission.
• But after FHWA paused the project, even the NHHIP’s most vocal proponents were forced to admit they didn’t want downtown torn up just as people from across the world descended upon Houston... Houston’s World Cup committee chair, Chris Canetti, is copied on this correspondence. In speaking this morning, he agreed that it is in our collective best interest to open a discussion about the potential timing of the project in coordination with the games.” And so TxDOT had agreed to delay the project even further.
• FHWA had concluded its audit of the state’s compliance with the NEPA Assignment program. The FHWA team had not identified any issues with the North Houston Highway Improvement Project’s environmental review process. Instead, the federal agency commended TxDOT “for working with Harris County and the City of Houston to resolve their concerns about many elements of this project as it proceeds to construction.”
• The easiest—and quickest—way to reduce driving and lower emissions is to stop widening urban highways. A 2021 study by the Georgetown Climate Center and Rocky Mountain Institute found that the funding enabled by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act could increase greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 2 percent over the coming decade if states continued to prioritize highway expansion over maintenance. Another study looked at the ten states with the highest gasoline consumption and found that “minimizing further highway expansion was the most important lever to avoid putting upward pressure on transportation emissions.”
• A 2021 study found that less than 4 percent of philanthropic funding dedicated to fighting climate change went to transportation, despite its representing a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, state agencies were backed by the abiding, indissoluble Highway Trust Fund.
• “Houston and Harris County are vastly underrepresented. That manifests itself negatively. We’re left out of funding. Or we’re forced to endure freeway expansions that benefit rural and suburban counties.” <> Houston and Harris County made up nearly 60 percent of the population served by the Houston-Galveston Area Council, and yet city and county representatives controlled only 11 percent of the council’s seats... In 2022, when the council allocated $488 million in federal flood mitigation money, just 2 percent had been allocated to Houston. And the Houston-Galveston Area Council had consistently endorsed the I-45 expansion