The Texas Freeway Fight with Megan Kimble
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2024
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the 20th century, planners and policymakers smashed Interstate highways through the middle of every major city in the United States. In the 21st century, we understand the many ways that urban freeways were economic, environmental, and racial justice disasters. And yet, incredibly, the State of Texas is planning to spend over $64 billion in the next few years to widen highways through the middle of its three largest cities, Houston, Dallas and Austin. Journalist Megan Kimble has been reporting on the Texas freeway fight for years now. Her new book -- published today -- is City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways. In it, she tells the stories of the communities in the path of TxDOT’s bulldozers and the brave Texans fighting against long odds to save their homes, neighborhoods, and cities from a seemingly implacable foe. What if, instead of expanding the aging and outmoded urban freeways dividing our cities, we tore them down?
LINKS:
Megan Kimble’s new book is City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways. It is excellent! Find it in The War on Cars store on Bookshop.org or get it from your neighborhood bookseller.
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This episode was recorded by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. It was produced and edited by Aaron Naparstek. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 70 years of evidence shows when you add lanes to a highway, cars fill it up. |
| 0:05.0 | Why are we still doing this? |
| 0:08.0 | And I will say I've spent like four years reporting that and like don't know that I have a good answer beyond |
| 0:15.6 | people still persistently believe that driving creates prosperity. with my co-host Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear. |
| 0:34.0 | Hey, how are you? |
| 0:35.0 | How's it going? |
| 0:36.0 | Good, how are you guys? |
| 0:37.0 | It's good. |
| 0:38.0 | I would have been here earlier, but the highway was not wide enough |
| 0:40.0 | and I was standing traffic. |
| 0:42.0 | Build another lane, build another. wide enough and I was standing traffic. |
| 0:43.6 | Build another lane. |
| 0:44.5 | Build another lane. |
| 0:45.3 | That's what we need. |
| 0:46.2 | That'll do it. |
| 0:47.6 | So look, so ever since we started this podcast |
| 0:50.5 | back in the fall of 2018, we have had an item on the agenda that just |
| 0:54.8 | says Texas do a Texas episode so here we are we're doing the Texas episode okay |
| 1:01.6 | but it can't be like the Texas episode. |
| 1:04.3 | It just has to be a Texas episode because Texas is big. |
| 1:09.3 | Everything's bigger in Texas, even podcasts. |
| 1:12.1 | There are a lot of episodes to be done in Texas, |
... |
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