(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 590: Coulda Built 36 Paris Metros

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re chatting with Dallas Developer, DART Board Member, and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about his recent publication, An Atlas of Intercity Highway Impacts (Available Here). We discuss the tax base removed from cities by highways, what we could have done for cities with federal transportation funding, and the long term value lost.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find our archive of all episodes including this one here.

A full transcript is below the fold:

Wow. Or 587 I should say. So yeah, it’s, uh, it’s been a bit. Uh, what have you been up to in the last few years?

Everything is a lot slower, um, than you would like it to be. But, you know, you get to be involved with sort of all aspects of the projects, which I think is something I’ve been looking forward to.

Yep …

Um, Megan Kimble wrote a book that was amazing. There’s just been a lot of discussion about it. And so it’s been interesting to see how you started kind of agitating towards this movement, and then where the discussion is now, which is they haven’t done it yet necessarily, but, uh, it feels a little bit like y- you’ve moved the needle in terms of the discussion and the economics of it.

And we have to discuss honestly, basically the, what are the facts on the ground? What are the impacts? Is this highway even functioning well as, as a piece of transportation? And so at first, you know, I looked around at the entire highway loop of downtown Dallas, and Klyde Warren Park was under construction, you know, the deck park over the north side of downtown.

And there were plans for 30 on the south side and 35 and the Horseshoe Project on the west side, but there was no discussion about 345. And the more I looked into it, the more I found out that that highway was structurally failing. It’s an elevated freeway. And there was just, had been no plans or no discussion about any kind of replacement for it.

And so I decided, hey, what if I just do a hypothetical removal scenario because all of the land around it was effectively surface parking lots and vacant land, right? It was basically fallow, unproductive land not participating in the city’s tax base. And so basically it was just, hey, what if we tore it out?

And, um, ended up getting something like 19,000 hits on the first day that the Morning News covered the website that we put up. I showed up at TxDOT’s first meeting when then they started talking about replacing 345, and they said, “Oh yeah, we looked at a removal, but that would be too expensive. It would be $2 billion.”

And I was like, “What are you talking about?” “If we put it below grade.” And I was like, “No, I’m not talking about a tunnel. I’m not talking about below grade. I’m talking about complete removal.” And they were like, “That’s crazy.” But I, I said, “You’ve got…” ‘Cause I went there and, you know, I brought the Morning News reporter and everything and said, “You’ve got nine scenarios here, but they’re nine different ways of rebuilding it as an elevated freeway.

Those are not really scenarios to me. Those are just methods of construction.” And so, you know, we got that story written in the Morning News, and then the commissioner over TxDOT, Victor Vandergriff at the time, reached out to me and said, “What are you talking about?” And he ended up meeting with me, uh, in the rain under the bridge for, you know, two hours.

We ended up having lunch and talking about it And I said, “You know, the impacts of the highway is beyond just its right of way, right? You have– we have to be looking at what are the real estate impacts of it, what are the environmental impacts.” And he said, “You know what? You’re right.” And that’s when he had TxDOT do that city map study that you were talking about.

Mm-hmm. And it came back in twenty sixteen, was adopted by TxDOT, and it did say the removal would have negligible impacts on traffic. You know, have a negative impact on surface level traffic, but I argued that we actually need cars on the streets because we can’t have empty streets be- you know, retailers aren’t going to put their businesses where there’s empty streets.

But neg-negligible impact on the highways, and that it would be the least cost and, and most benefit to the economy to have the removal. But TxDOT had also said, “Well, we just repaired it for, you know, twenty million dollars. It’s gonna stay until twenty forty, so we’re not gonna do anything about it until twenty forty.”

Shortly thereafter, around twenty nineteen, headed into the pandemic, that’s when the property owners along it reached out to me like, “Hey, what’s going on? We need to make decisions with our, you know, investments right now.” And that’s when we circled the property owners around together and, and said, “Hey, let’s pool your money and do an updated version of city map to see if we can expedite this process.”

So we brought in, uh, Ian Lockwood, who was somebody I interned for in the early two thousands, who’s a longtime friend and also advocate for highway removals. And we looked at the highway again, we looked at the city map plans and said, “What if we did better versions of what they did?” Which is instead of a full wide trench, what if we had a narrower trench so it’s easier to span, it’s easier to build over for only four lanes because we calculated that was the pass-through traffic, right?

Everybody else was coming to the greater downtown area, so we wanted to get them off the highway as soon as possible, upstream and downstream. And so that was the better version of the trench option, then we did a better version of the city grid. So we actually expanded the, uh, removal much further south.

And, you know, that would have a significant impact. But what that did do is that got the MPO director, Michael Morris, to say, “Hey, we can do this in seven years.” And so that’s when they put it into the feasibility study phase, and then they redid their scenarios, came back with a bigger trench and called that the hybrid version

And so basically got all the city departments to say, “Hey, yes, that’s the best version,” and that’s what is supported currently but not funded. And so after that, that’s when I said, “You know what? I’m gonna take this fight nationwide and give my knowledge and my research essentially to the entire country because it’s too hard to do these fights against…

You know, it’s David versus Goliath as much as it can be,” and say, “I wanna give out as much data and research as I can to the country.” And it became the Atlas of Inner City Highway Impacts that I posted for free to, uh, view and download earlier this year.

What was the process like for putting together all these maps, all these data points, making sure that you were on the right track in terms of the story that you were trying to tell?

And, you know, that’s when Megan Kimble was working on her book, City Limits, and I talked to her about that. She ended up going to the Eisenhower Library and digging through the notes for that book. And I was talking to a friend, uh, Scott Polakoff, about this too, and he was like, “Nobody cares about history.

Focus on the actual, like, data. What was the impact? And focus on the future.” And that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m gonna focus on the data. I had been talking to some book publishers, and they were more interested in black and white text than images. So I was like, that’s not what this can be, right?

This has to be maps, and this has to be data. So that’s when I was just like, I’m just gonna go my own way, just do it, and just do it for free and post it And so that’s when I just focused on, okay, what were the real world impacts to every city that was– What I started was every city in the Yellow Book, and that’s when I realized that was not enough, and that was something like 90 cities, and that’s when I expanded it to, like, 142 because no cities in North Carolina were in the Yellow Book.

I don’t think Phoenix… Phoenix might have been in the Yellow Book, but San Diego wasn’t. So I just wanted to keep adding cities. And I just was assembling data and data and data, and I was interested in, okay, what happened to population density since 1960 once we started, like building in earnest? Uh, what happened to population since 2000 to present?

Because, you know, that’s when I found kind of an inflection point in demographics where millennials were entering the workforce and looking to come back to urban environments and walkable environments. And so I just started keeping this huge database of these things. And during the pandemic, I came across a, a report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, which their study suggested that within three-mile radius of downtowns, that’s when highways become a disamenity and devalue property up to about a half mile away.

And that was kind of the key point where I started building these databases and said, “Okay, real estate values in most cities is generally not as valuable in a three-mile radius.” So I built a one-mile radius and a three-mile radius, and I used that to collect all my sort of population data points and my real estate data points of, okay, how much is recent development worth on the assessed tax rolls in all these cities?

So I went through, found new development, looked it up on the tax rolls, and basically aggregated the total amount of highway right of way in each of these cities, in those geographies, the one-mile to three-mile radius, and said, “Okay, if I developed these highway right of ways at 50% to 55% efficiency,” you know, you’d have tax-exempt surface roads and schools and whatever else.

55% of private development, what would that be worth to the city? And saying, “Okay, every city then has this value multiplied by the amount of land that highways take up in those one-mile and three-mile geographies.” And that’s what I used to come up with. One, the economic development potential of removals, and two, how much theoretical tax base was removed from each of these cities because of that development potential that was lost by building highways.

Which actually, that brings up another book that was kind of the impetus to this, and that was The Elephant in the Bedroom, which was a book about California highway building from the early ’90s, I think, and it was a couple of engineers. And when I was researching, thinking I was doing the book on the history of highways, that’s when it came across the line where they said the 210 freeway through Pasadena wiped off 10% of the property tax rolls right off the map.

And that’s where I was like, “Oh, okay, there’s a number for every city,” and I wanted to know what it was.

Mm. Um, but there’s all these off-ramps that we could have taken over time, and we continue to go along the route that we’ve chosen. Um, which, as you may know, and I, I know, or feel, or feel like, is a negative way we’ve taken building infrastructure in the country. But those inflection points are really fascinating.

I’m wondering, like, kind of how the Bragdon kind of information spoke to you. You talked about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve information. There’s a lot of, like, little things that, in the past, kind of shaped how you’re thinking, but also kind of shape the politics of, of the way that things are going now.

And I think if people are this, you know, wonky and interested, his 1960 interim report is kind of fascinating because, you know, he argued that the interstate highway system was for interstate commerce. It was not to serve local traffic, and that if we were to build the highways to the scale they would need to serve the traffic projections in 1980, some of the highways through the bigger cities would have to be 40 lanes plus.

And he said it’s far better use of our dollars for that to go to actual high-capacity transit And, you know, his job, part of his job was to keep the entire interstate system under budget. Well, it ended up going about five, six times over the original budget, and I calculated that in today’s dollars, the interstate system ended up being something like $750 billion.

And when he was arguing it, he said the inner city highways, which were one-tenth of the lane mileage of the system, cost 10 times per mile to build. And so it was the most expensive part. Roughly half the cost of the entire interstate system was just the property acquisition and construction of the inner city, uh, highways.

And what I ended up calculating was, hey, Montreal was building its first legs of its subway in the 1960s as well, and we could have built the equivalent of 36 Paris Metros for that $375 billion at the cost that Montreal was building its subway. And so part of this is just creating like an Earth 2 in my mind of like, what if we had gotten it right?

We could have a Paris Metro system in Cincinnati and in Kansas City serving local traffic and not de- devaluing the downtowns and basically wrecking a lot of the local economies around the country.

And the people- Mm … the, in, at a certain density create more value for each other, and building infrastructure for them is a public good, right? And just thinking about how much value we’ve extracted and then also dispersed because we’ve created these suburban systems that, you know, take away from that. So you’re calculating based on a way that makes sense in terms of, like, land values.

You have what could be lost, you have the land totals that could be used for development and things like that, but it doesn’t account for all this other extraction- Yeah … that happened, which is- Right … all these, these highways that let people go through a place instead of to a place, right? And so there’s that that always strikes me as well is that in Earth 2, there is even more value that we’ve lost because of that.

And it’s not just the value of land and the value of property and those types of things, but it’s, like, people paying bills. It’s the rise of insurance because our cars are getting more expensive and we’re have to be focused on them, and, uh, it costs more to replace them now, and there’s natural disasters like hailstorms that are breaking people’s windows that maybe they wouldn’t even have to have that car if they didn’t have it.

So all these things, like, I feel like are additive and it just, you know, there’s all kinds of cost to sprawl studies. There are all kinds of stuff like that. But we’ll never really know what we lost in value from this decision to go with highways through cities versus, you know, 36 Paris Metros.

And I wanted to just focus on what is tangible and calculable because I even left out how much value was lost adjacent to highways and land that’s currently still private. Like, I could not come up with a way to defend that, and that was, it was gonna be a different number in every single city, so it was, it was gonna be difficult and very time-consuming.

Yeah. Perhaps many, many decades to even figure that out. But so I wanted to figure out, okay, what were the costs to households too, i-in terms of car dependence, like presently? And so what I ended up calculating too for every single city and metro was What is the cost per household annually of car dependence, of having to drive based on the amount of mileage driven per household?

And then I also added in life cycle and replacement costs annualized over 30 years based on all the highway infrastructure, and found that there was a range per household across the country of about 15,000, 16,000 for the very low car dependent places like New York City to upwards of 40,000 a year per household in places like Nashville, Asheville, you know, basically Sun Belt and Appalachian cities that are very car dependent.

You know, those are huge numbers that, that is calculating what would it take to repair, maintain, and replace all this highway infrastructure if we could, right? So that number exceeds what we actually do spend, and so we’re in this constant state of decay, which kind of gets back to, you know, the 1950s and how we funded the interstate system to begin with.

And it was just interesting finding that it was the fiscal conservatives in Congress that wanted a pay-as-you-go system rather than, you know, borrowing and taking out, you know, bonds to build it because they, they assumed that, you know, pay-as-you-go would be the right way to go. It wouldn’t cost too much money.

But it just kept filling the Interstate Highway Trust Fund in perpetuity. So we just end up, we’re on this, like, roller coaster that never ends, and so we just keep building and building and building for, to what end? Right? We’re just basically chasing the dragon’s tail of, of traffic congestion. And that was the other thing that I found when I started calculating, like, the impacts on downtown and where highways work the best and where they work the least.

And where they work the best are all the low GDP cities, and where highways work the worst is all the high GDP cities in the country. And so it’s like, what are we trying to solve here?

Like, what are we- Uh-huh … trying to do with this money that we’re spending? And, um, you know- Just

And so, you know, what are we trying to do for people when we do and make these investments? And I, I feel like after going to China the last two years with my wife for a month at a time and visiting both the north and the south, there is an actual investment and a plan there for building something that benefits the residents.

Um, the high-speed rail network that’s now 50,000 miles. And it’s not just high-speed rail. They’re building a road network that they didn’t build before. They have all these technological stuff. There’s economic development programs where they’re trying to think even further past just what a city looks like or what infrastructure they’re investing in, but what economic development plan they have for a city and how the infrastructure can benefit that, right?

So I’m seeing this happen on the other side of the pond, and it makes me despair a little bit when I think about how we just, like, have a block grant program for cities- … to build, you know, another highway to nowhere, you know? Here in the Bay Area, we’re trying to build a highway or rebuild a highway along a, a floodplain, uh, that’s probably in the next 30 years gonna be underwater.

And so, like, what, what are we doing? What are we doing here?

It’s like, well, creates short-term jobs in construction, but if that highway wasn’t there, how many jobs would be in the development along it? How much, you know, real estate value was lost because of what this land takes up and the limited access nature of the network devalued the rest of the street network and its, its ability to actually serve social and economic exchange, which is what I think is the primary purpose of, of cities, and that infrastructure should, should be subservient to that.

Unfortunately, we basically focus on the infrastructure, and the cities have to basically bend their entire systems around that infrastructure.

And at the time, in the 1870s and 1880s, there was a discussion about whether you should extend the subways in, actually into the 1900s, we should extend the subways outside of their profitable realm, which was in Manhattan. And, uh, that economic development paradigm won, but basically it set up this r- like, rampant speculation, right?

And- Mm … it allowed the city to decide that it was going to run infrastructure, pipes, and transportation, and all this stuff to these pieces of land because it would allow the developers to build on the land, and then they could tax that property, right? But then there’s another economic development paradigm, which was the one that was H- Henry George was pushing, which was that, you know, you could use the land and the value that you created for the city itself instead of allowing the developers to build wherever.

And so there’s a speculation aspect to this as well that I think is really fascinating, and a framing that we haven’t really discussed when we’re talking about the economic development strategies or the building of infrastructure. It’s, it’s like, why are we building this infrastructure? Is it for the speculators on the edge of a, of a region?

Is it for, uh, those land developers? And what are we gonna get out of it? We’re gonna get a couple of tax dollars because we can tax the gas station or whatever, but it’s not real value. It’s, it’s actually just, uh, you know, w- it’s like you were talking about the jobs program. We’re just building to build and, and we’re, we’re getting something out of it, but we’re not getting the best thing out of it.

The highest and best use, right? So I think that’s fascinating, too, and I’m, I’m curious your thoughts on, like, the idea of rethinking the way that we think about economic development and value and the building of infrastructure for that purpose.

When you look at the, you know, 2050 plan or whatever, it’ll basically say, “You know, we’re eight and a half million people now, we’ll be 12 million people then. Here’s the growth pattern.” It just expands further outward, so therefore we have to build all these roads out on the edge. We’ve gotta expand the roads, you know, in between.

It’s like, wait a second, these are hypothetical future people that we’re spending present taxpayer dollars on rather than reinvesting back where people currently live, where we don’t actually have the tax base to maintain the roads and infrastructure that we’ve built. We don’t have the density to actually support the ridership of the transit system that we’ve built.

Why don’t we take all those dollars and program and say, “How do we redirect that growth back inward and do it in a way that actually attracts the growth back inward, too?” So it’s not like we’re trying to force people in there, but we’re actually rethinking how we use those infrastructure dollars to build, you know, walkable, pleasant neighborhoods instead of letting the neighborhoods and the infrastructure decay, and then in turn the schools decay, and then everybody wants to move further and further away.

And so until we change that sort of cycle of inertia of leaving things behind to just build new rather than reinvest in, in the old and improving the old, I mean, at some point in time the music has to stop, I assume. But maybe it won’t. I don’t know. I mean, my, my theory has been we’re not gonna keep growing in perpetuity in population, uh, but I could be wrong.

Atlanta and all that, which is fascinating. And the sprawl that’s being built there is basically untenable over the long term. But there was a, a research paper, and I’ve, I talked to these folks, too, uh, Anthony Orlando and Chris Redfern wrote about Texas and California development paradigms. And California and Texas are very different in the way that they allow development, but they’re on the same path.

And California- Mm-hmm … is just 30 years ahead. Mm-hmm. And when Texas catches up We’re basically running out of land. With the car-oriented paradigm, we’re, we’re basically running out of land, and that doesn’t mean that we’re running out of land to build on. It means that we’re running out of land near employment centers and activity centers that people want to live around and, and access.

And so at some point, that merry-go-round stops, and there’s no more space for a 10,000-unit sprawling development where you can get 10,000 housing units right away, and so you have to go back inward. And what their paper also said was that in those inner neighborhoods, it’s very sclerotic, and they don’t allow new development, and so you can’t build those 10,000 units in there, and so it creates this gridlock of development that happens.

And I think that’s actually what’s pr- part of the problem with our housing costs these days is that we can’t necessarily go out and build these massive developments on the outskirts of town anymore. We have to go look inward, and the inward isn’t happening ’cause we’re not allowing it to happen. And so at some point, it feels like Dallas and Phoenix and, uh, places in Central, the Central Valley in California, the gears are gonna grind to a stop, and something else is gonna have to happen.

And in my opinion, that thing is high-speed rail because the distance that people are traveling in cars is not tenable anymore, and so you need some other economic development infrastructure that can build cities in a different way than they’re being built now.

here in Texas because, you know, obviously we’re like an anti-tax state, but if that ever happens, it’s like, “Oh, boy,” then you’re gonna have the wrong effect just like California did.

But I find it fascinating that we, you know, we get so much California migration to Texas, and that’s a, you know, a big story. People sell their house for however many millions and then upsize to Texas, and then they get their property tax bill in Texas. Like, well, we’re gonna get you one way or another.

Yeah, we don’t have an income tax, and you retired off what you just earned, uh, on your property transaction, but we’re gonna get you on the property side here. And that’s why I’m concerned about some kind of Prop 13 level bill. Yeah. But we’re following California’s footsteps with a lot of pro-housing state legislation.

We had a lot of positive movement last go around. SB 840 passed last legislative session, which is allowing residential by right up to four stories on all commercial properties. And there’s a mixed bag of which cities actually think that’s a good thing and which one think it’s a bad thing. It’s the areas that are growing that thinks it’s a bad thing, where a place like Dallas, which population decline, is like, “Yeah, go for it.”

We, we want that because we’re trying to circumnavigate that nimbyism that pr- prevents that inward growth. But now we just have to sort of, we have to solve the demand side problem too to actually bring that growth as well.

Um, one was that the speeds on, on the roads in daylight basically, uh, between morning rush and, and evening rush are basically what you’d get on a surface arterial. And so the investment in highways or expansion of highways seems silly, and especially in the high GDP cities you mentioned because of this.

And so I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that. I mean, you wrote about it in, in the piece, but I’m curious your thoughts on like those speeds that happen on the roads that we’ve built for higher speeds, but they just don’t happen because there’s too many cars on them.

They either wreck the local economy or the economy is still functioning okay, uh, but the highways do not move, right? Because they, they fail at transportation then. And so one thing I found was, uh, a report that’s done annually by the American Transportation Research Institute. Uh, they publish the top 100 bottlenecks, and it shows the average speed by hour.

And I pulled up 45 in Dallas, 35 in Austin, 45 in Houston, all right in downtown. They’re all moving like 15 to 25 miles an hour a day for about 12 to 14 hours a day, right? These things are not functioning in their one and only job, which is to move cars. So the question is like, why have them? And that’s kind of the fundamental point.

And then when I started comparing INRIX data that shows like peak hour speed versus off-peak hour speed, I was interested to see, okay, what’s the ratio there? What places function the worst during the day? What places function the best all hours of the day? And that’s when it gets to when you start comparing the economic data of the cities.

And those are things that are interrelated, right? A worse economy is gonna have less trips and all those things. But I can’t help but think that there’s some causal effect from the highways displacing economic activity from the center to the edge, and the amount of tax base that was removed, and people that were removed from the city, and the city’s ability to maintain itself once you wipe out a certain portion of its revenue.

Mm-hmm. But I’m wondering if there’s anything that you noticed from overlaying highways on these neighborhoods from the 1970s where it showed the Black population, if there’s anything that stuck out to you.

And, you know, the, in the research is that the feds generally didn’t care, but there are some quotes from the oil gas car lobbying group that they were basically appalled by the level of racism that they would hear from the local officials. But certainly that there were, there were some that had very little impact, but there were some where it looks extremely intentional.

And, and we know that that is probably the case. For a while I used to sugarcoat it and say, “You know, the nicest thing that we could say about the routing of these is that it was just the cheapest alignment possible.” But the cheapest alignment was just to stay in Greenfield, right? Once you think about it.

It’s like, no, these were, these were intentional because they were very expensive. At first, they didn’t have to pay the relocation costs for moving people out, uh, which didn’t happen until after Kennedy took over. But then I think there’s some cities were truly appalling when you flip through and see where they built the roads.

It’d be much more functional and, and ideally, we would’ve invested that money into, uh, public transit support because we’ve starved that from every city. I mean, even New York City has been starved of, of transit improvements for 80 years. But you know, we’re talking about property tax dollars. What we haven’t talked about is the amount of equity and value lost in those neighborhoods from the actual individuals, right?

Yeah. So there was a lot of wealth lost as well, and I think, you know, we, we talk about the Tulsa Race Massacre of the 1920s. Well, they, they rebuilt Greenwood, and they rebuilt that economy until a highway came through and just obliterated it entirely, basically finished the job.

His book, Know Your Price, talk about the loss of generational wealth for Black families, and it’s huge. I mean, it’s such a huge loss, and it’s not just that one moment in time. It’s, it’s cascading, right? That’s the biggest problem- Mm-hmm … is it cascades throughout history until now, and so we’re still seeing the effects of that, uh, which is, is super frustrating.

Were there any, uh, cities that kind of fared well from the process that might have gone the way that they shouldn’t have but ended up in, in a good position? I mean, too, like relative to everybody else.

You know, there’s a handful that have stuck out to me that it’s like, oh wow, they did not build much or any highways to the center of the cities. And, and one of the stories that popped up, and this was actually … It came up in a book on the history of the DC Metro system And it turns out that there was a highway commissioner in South Carolina who believed that it was a better in- investment to just invest in the rural, the roads through the rural areas rather than through the cities.

And it turns out when you look at the South Carolina cities that are in here, Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston, there’s very negligible impact to the cities, and you actually see it when you visit those towns too, is the downtowns are, are quite pleasant in South Carolina. And so they were spared because of that, and the connection back to the DC Metro is that a transportation commissioner’s brother happened to be the longtime chair of the House DC Committee, because the Congress governs DC, right?

And that person, they, they believe that that person was instrumental in preventing the highway loop from wiping out part of DC. Um, at least that was the theory in the book. Um, but I found that pretty interesting. And then you just come across some other cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana, of all places, that built its beltway.

You know, you’ve got the loop around, but no highways through the center of cities. And so I was interested in posting, you know, the Yellow Book maps as well as the existing network maps to say, okay, did they veer from the Yellow Book? And that’s not to say the Yellow Book was right, because the Yellow Book had problems as well.

But I was interested to see how did they change their plans from the Yellow Book versus did they end up overbuilding from the Yellow Book or d- basically just understanding, you know, what the differences were from the initial plan to once free money started flowing to these cities. Uh, which is always fascinating because there was a…

The initial Yellow Book map for Dallas is very different from what the highway map plan was in 1964, which was basically just highways everywhere, most of which ended up getting stopped, luckily.

Not all cities, most cities.

That’s why they funded your plan.” Even though Eisenhower was opposed to the idea, he never ended up acting on it.

who ended up losing anyways.

But then also, you know, what can we do going forward? You know, I think to me, I believe that, that Earth Two is possible, right? Where we are removing the highways from where they don’t belong, where they don’t function as transportation, and where they hurt our local economies. These are places where we could actually build housing, build affordable housing in and around cities, near jobs, near transit, and that we should be systematically removing all these highways where they were incorrectly located and replacing it with actual cities.

And so, I mean, the next project I’m gonna do ba-based on this is to release something like the top one hundred highways that should be removed, basically the forward-looking version. But also that people can do something, right? So I talked about speaking to the Charlotte Planning Commission. They asked me to come speak because there was a battle over widening, uh, seventy-seven through downtown Charlotte and, you know, I don’t know what effect I might have had, um, but so all credit to those on the ground who stopped it, or at least potentially stopped it, where the city voted against the widening, and then the MPO voted against the widening, and now the state is, is threatening to withhold dollars from the city because of their bravery, basically.

And so when I spoke to them, I was like, “Yeah, um, seventy-seven is a problem, sure, but you should also be focusing on your downtown loop, which makes no sense whatsoever. So start getting rid of that and not widen seventy-seven for now.”

Like, Charlotte’s is just, like, around the … It’s a ridiculous loop around this downtown. Yeah. And you saw what happened when they extended the Blue Line, uh, or at least they built the first part of the light rail line down to the south through all of the old textile mills, that it blew up because they connected the place that had been disconnected by the highway.

And so it’s fascinating to see even a small investment could do to push back on that initial, you know, loop that was built around these cities.

And then once you, like, make that connection, you say, “Wait, if they don’t need the highways, why do the other parts of town need those highways then through, in the center of Charlotte?” And, uh, bringing it back to Bragdon, you know, he argued there should be no inner-city loops, and that any kind of interchanges need to be at least two miles apart.

And so I use that to look at the actual traffic patterns in Dallas, which has one of the tightest inner loops that there is. And looking at the traffic, there’s actually only about 580,000 cars per day coming in and out of the loop. But when you look at the traffic counts of the loop, it’s over 880,000 because the cars are making multiple segments, and so it’s essentially a congestion creator machine- Hmm

because you’re putting more cars into a smaller area. And you see it happen every single day that one interchange cascades into the next interchange, and then just the whole thing radiates out just red on Google Maps. And so it fails from a transportation perspective and, you know, it’s once again where it’s like Bragdon was right.

No inner loops.

Yeah, so I keep a link for free to view or download. It’s a big document, so beware. You may just wanna view it and not download it.

Um, so the.city on Bluesky, no longer on the Bird app, and of course I’m on LinkedIn. I teach at SMU. I do some real estate development. I sort of dabble here and there, and I do these fun projects like this that just kinda pique my curiosity.