City Limits

November 1, 2023

Highways offer a singular meditation point for high emissions, urban sprawl, broken communities, and loss of green space. Southwest Book of the Year winner Kimble's newest, a mix of history, investigative journalism, and nonfiction storytelling, was shortlisted for the 2023 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from January 8, 2024
Journalist Kimble (Unprocessed) sets forth an immersive account of three ongoing “freeway revolts” in Texas cities that aim to block further urban highway expansion. Marshalling decades of evidence, she explains how highways built within cities have destroyed neighborhoods, increased air pollution, exacerbated racial segregation, generated sprawl, siphoned funds from mass transit, and increased traffic congestion despite promising to do the opposite. Focusing on the stories of people whose homes and businesses have been or are in danger of being seized and destroyed via eminent domain for further city highway expansion (including Modesti Cooper, a homeowner who refused to sell as her neighborhood emptied and began to receive whiny postcards from government contractors cajoling her to leave), Kimble tracks the legal and political battles of activist residents in Austin, Dallas, and Houston who have organized in opposition to the powerful Texas Transportation Commission. These groups hope either to compel state and city governments to halt expansion or, better yet, to reimagine their city highways as surface-level boulevards stitching together currently divided neighborhoods. Kimble intersperses these activists’ struggles with snapshots of the “first wave” of freeway revolts that occurred in 1960s New York City; Portland, Ore.; Rochester, N.Y.; and San Francisco. By seamlessly combining an expansive history of urban anti-highway organizing with an intriguing up-close look at present-day Texas politics, Kimble delivers an invigorating window onto American grassroots activism.

February 15, 2024
An extended argument against car culture and the continuing proliferation of highways. Austin-based journalist Kimble has been witnessing firsthand the consequences of living in the country's fastest-growing metropolitan area, with its lack of affordable housing, sprawling urban footprint, and increasing traffic gridlock. Traveling through the eight miles of downtown via the north-south interstate used to take eight minutes, but by 2019, that had stretched to 32 minutes; in 2045, it is expected to take 223 minutes. The more sensible alternative would be improved public transit, but "transit functions best when it connects people across densely occupied places," which doesn't describe so much of urban Texas, with metro Dallas-Fort Worth "covering more area than the states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined." Kimble's case studies center mostly on Texas cities, with forays into the experiences of highway architects and anti-highway activists elsewhere. While the book is full of solid information and sometimes appalling data, to say nothing of sound arguments for such things as reenvisioning the federal government's role in funding, it's overlong and could have benefited from a little less purely anecdotal, human-interest journalism. Still, Kimble capably proposes a sustained rethinking of urban infrastructure, untangling highways from cities that serve as chokepoints and recognizing more widely the long-established fact that traffic expands to fill such motorway space as is made available to it, so that no road, however new and shiny, ever does a thing to ease the jam. We've been going at it in exactly the opposite direction, notes the author. "Between 1993 and 2017," she writes, "the hundred largest urbanized areas in the United States spent more than $500 billion adding new freeways or expanding existing ones"--and the resulting congestion far outstripped the rate of population growth. A convincing case for removing highways and shaping cities meant for people, not cars.

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