November 11, 2025 • 33 mins
What if the United States didn’t just build too many highways—but built a funding machine that makes it hard to stop? We sit down with Erick Guerra, author of Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction, to unpack why capacity keeps growing, congestion doesn’t ease, and budgets bend under the weight of perpetual reconstruction.
We trace the policy DNA from ISTEA through IIJA, showing how well-meaning multimodal language coexists with incentives that still favor widening. Erick explains how “maintenance” often balloons into bigger lanes and interchanges, why induced demand is only part of the congestion story, and how common modeling practices overstate time savings while sidelining external costs like displacement, emissions, and stormwater. The result: urban highways that are wider, costlier, and less effective than promised.
If you care about traffic, climate, safety, or the fiscal health of your city, this conversation offers a clear map for change. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves a good policy debate, and leave a review to help more planners and curious listeners find the show.
Show Notes:
- Further Reading:
- Killed by a Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall
- The Drive for Dollars by Brian Taylor, Jeff Morris, and Jeffery Brown
- Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar
- City Limits by Megan Kimble
- To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Stephanie Rouse (00:12):
You're listening to the Booked On
Planning Podcast, a project ofthe Nebraska chapter of the
American Planning Association.
In each episode, we dive intohow cities function by talking
with authors on housing,transportation, and everything
in between.
Join us as we get booked onplanning.
Jennifer Hiatt (00:47):
Basically, the overview of this book is that we
have overbuilt our highwaysystem.
Erick gives a good backgroundon the history of construction
of highways in general and ourinterstate system.
That basically we ended upfinishing our interstate system
in about 91, if I remembercorrectly, from the book.
Stephanie Rouse (01:07):
Yeah.
So he does drop severalacronyms, kind of an alphabet
soup, which is pretty commonwith transportation industry,
but one of them being thefoundations of modern-day
transportation bills, ICE T,Intermodal Surface
Transportation Efficiency Act.
This was passed in 1991,basically when the interstate
system was completed.
It kind of shepherded a newpolicy for how we fund
(01:30):
interstate highway, roadwayconstruction in the United
States.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:34):
Yeah, it certainly wasn't the only bill
that's ever impacted our highwayfunding, though, has it?
Stephanie Rouse (01:39):
No, if you look at the history, following ICE
T, we had T21, Safety Lou, Map21, the FAST Act, and then what
most of us are probably familiarwith because was just passed in
2021, the InfrastructureInvestment and Jobs Act.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:53):
I do think it's so interesting that such a
refreshing name, ICE T leads toultimately some really crappy
infrastructure building overall.
Stephanie Rouse (02:02):
Exactly.
As we talk about in theepisode, while a lot of these
bills all have kind of this bendtowards sustainability and
trying to create multimodaltransportation systems, they
really just support more roadbuilding, leading us into the
situation where we're at wherewe're highly overbuilt.
And the more we overbuild, themore these bills have to
(02:23):
maintain that infrastructureinto the future, creating some
concerning issues for the futureof transportation funding.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:30):
Yeah, one of the points that you brought up
actually that I'd never reallythought about, and I know that's
coming from your past as atransportation planner, but
maintenance isn't always whatyou think of either.
So when I think of like roadmaintenance, I think of just
making sure that you go back inand repave and make sure that
you get rid of all the potholesand stuff.
But you brought up the factthat maintenance actually often
is increasing lane widths aswell as getting rid of all of so
(02:53):
even if you just think, oh, mydepartment of transportation is
out just doing maintenance,actually, they probably are in
fact widening your lanes aswell.
Stephanie Rouse (03:02):
Yeah, exactly.
And just another sneaky way forincreasing the amount of
impervious service that we havehere in the US.
Jennifer Hiatt (03:09):
Very not climate friendly.
Stephanie Rouse (03:11):
No.
Jennifer Hiatt (03:12):
All right.
Well, let's get into ourconversation with author Eric
Guerrera on his book, Overbuilt,the High Costs and Low Rewards
of U.S.
Highway Construction.
Stephanie Rouse (03:21):
Erick, thank you for joining us on Book Done
Planning to talk about yourbook, Overbuilt: The High Costs
and Low Rewards of U.S.
Highway Construction.
There are books out there thatfocus solely on the construction
of the interstate system, butyour book is more focused on
what has come after it wascompleted.
You do start, though, by layingthe foundations.
So can you briefly explain afew key factors of the
(03:42):
interstate building period thatinfluenced how we build today?
Erick Guerra (03:46):
Thanks so much, Stephanie.
It's really a pleasure to behere.
I guess maybe one of the firstpoints that I'll try and make is
that the interstate system asit was constructed, we we often
kind of talk about larger socialissues like commerce connecting
the country, militarymovements.
I think even uh, you know,there were moments in time where
we were talking aboutpotentially evacuating cities
(04:08):
from from nuclear strikes.
But at the end of the day, thepeople who were planning and
designing the interstate systemuh had really been focused on
urban traffic since about the1930s.
There was a movement to kind ofthinking about accommodating
car travel within cities, and alot of the highway network was
planned with that in mind.
I would say in in terms of theactual interstate legislation,
(04:31):
the main factors were, you know,one, kind of authorizing and
empowering the predecessor tothe federal highway
administration to build thenetwork.
Two was really funding it.
And the funding system, itwound up giving a strong federal
incentive to local governmentsto build large highway systems.
(04:53):
So the overall length of thesystem was capped, uh, but not
the width or the number of lanesor even the cost.
And the federal government atthe beginning of interstate
construction uh matched localdollars on a nine-to-one basis.
So a really strong incentivefor states, municipalities,
localities to want to buildhighways, because for every $1
(05:16):
they would put into it, they got$9 in return.
I also add to that that thepeople largely making the
decisions were highway planners.
So people who had been trainedto build highways, who really
focused on building highways.
That was their kind of primarypurpose, their education.
If you kind of look through orlisten to interviews that are
part of an oral history projectthat was done after the more
(05:39):
around the completion of theinterstate or the originally
planned interstate, you can heara lot of them kind of talking
about they have this convictionin what they were doing.
This was part of a process ofmodernization.
Jennifer Hiatt (05:50):
As our listeners know, but you probably don't at
this point, Stephanie and Ilive in Nebraska.
We both work in Lincoln.
And growing up, my grandfatherowned a construction company
that they built highways.
Like my my dad and my grandpawere the people actually
physically constructing thehighways.
And I remember one time mygrandpa sitting there talking
about the interstate.
Like he was an adult when theinterstate was constructed, and
(06:14):
he very proudly pointed out inNebraska, there are long
stretches of the interstate thatyou could land a fighter plane
on.
It was a big deal for him.
Erick Guerra (06:23):
I think that's a great, that's a great story.
I, you know, there there were alot of people who were involved
in constructing the interstate.
I think, you know, a lot a lotof the intentions were really
solid and positive.
You know, there were someproblems with how the interstate
was built.
I think there were problems inparticular with how it
intersected with with cities.
I think there were someproblems related to a lack of
(06:44):
local control, a lack ofplanning, and a lack of
alternative ways of thinkingabout how transportation should
be invested in or kind of howcities should develop over time.
But at the same time, therewas, you know, a lot of a lot of
work that happened.
A lot of infrastructure wasbuilt in a relatively short
period of time.
Jennifer Hiatt (07:02):
Well, and to that point, you titled your
book, Overbuilt.
So can you explain what youmean when you say that the
highway system is overbuilt?
Erick Guerra (07:10):
I think from the kind of simplest point of view,
the argument is that we have toomany highways.
We have too many, too highcapacity roadway systems.
And in some ways, I thinkthat's maybe can be a little bit
of a controversial statement.
I think in some contexts thatthat's not going to be
particularly controversial, butin others it might be.
And I think for pretty clearreasons, uh, transportation is
(07:33):
necessary for a functioningmodern society, for a
functioning modern economy.
And without streets andhighways, we would have
extremely limited access tojobs, food, other necessities.
Firms would have troubleattracting uh businesses, things
like that.
But too much highway is is alsoproblematic, or too much
(07:54):
roadway.
And you can kind of think oftwo polar extremes.
One extreme is a place that isentirely made up of highways,
and the other extreme is a placethat has no streets, no
roadways at all.
And they're both kind ofdysfunctional in their own ways.
In one place, there's uh no wayto get where you're going, and
in the other place, therethere's nowhere to go.
And there are very few placesthat are really kind of at that
(08:18):
very extreme end, but you canthink that somewhere between
those two extremes is an idealamount of transportation
infrastructure.
Just as a thought experiment,think about a city that kind of
only has local roadways.
And, you know, the first mainarterial that you build, it's
probably going to create a lotof value.
Uh, you're gonna have shops andbusinesses that kind of line
(08:40):
that first main street.
You're gonna improveaccessibility throughout your
city or region.
The second one probably alsohas quite a bit of value.
Maybe there are even kind ofimportant network effects, but
eventually you hit a point wherethe next kind of roadway that
you expand or build, it hasbenefits, but those benefits
simply aren't worth the cost.
(09:01):
The costs of land, you're justnot creating the same types of
benefits.
A lot, you may just beshuffling land uses around
instead of kind of generatingnew economic activities.
You might be really justencouraging people to drive
longer distances as opposed tounlocking, you know, more
potential within yourmetropolitan area.
And once you hit that pointwhere the costs really exceed
(09:24):
the benefits, every additionalamount of roadway that you
invest in is detrimental.
And the central argument of thebook is that we kind of passed
that point quite a while ago andhave continued to build,
despite building more highcapacity roadways.
So when we completed theinterstate system, kind of, you
know, debates on exactly when ithappened.
(09:45):
But the originally plannedinterstate was largely completed
in around 1990, 1991.
And since that moment, we'veadded about 75% more to the lane
miles of urban highway.
We haven't really stoppedbuilding, we we've continued
building a pace.
But I would argue that most ofthat building has been net
(10:05):
negative when you factor in howmuch it costs.
Stephanie Rouse (10:09):
I think an important point from your book,
too, listeners might be thinkingoverbuilding is just building
new and building extra lanemiles.
You discuss how roadwayresurfacing projects will just
get wider and wider and takingan existing roadway and making
it fit the modern standards thatwe have that you need to have
14 feet of roadway width insteadof 11 foot, which is a much
(10:29):
better roadway to keep trafficdown.
Erick Guerra (10:32):
Yeah, and I think you can kind of you can think of
um road investments in threemain buckets.
One is maybe the initialinvestment, second is the just
general maintenance, repaving.
The third one that I thinkyou're really talking about here
and is an increasinglyimportant part of what we
finance is reconstructing.
Everything we build has a shelflife.
And at a certain point, everyhighway needs to be rebuilt.
(10:55):
And as you're saying, when werebuild, we often we add a lane
here, we add a lane there, weadd some you know bigger and
wider interchanges, we add widerlanes, and the kind of impact
of the roadway increasessubstantially.
Jennifer Hiatt (11:10):
As you point out in the book, and we've already
talked about a little bit here.
I think it's probably safe tosay that most planners and maybe
even some engineers understandwhy building more lanes does not
actually help trafficcongestion, but the general
public overall does not.
And in fact, if you talk tomost people in the general
public, they would actuallysupport the expansion of lanes
(11:30):
on major roads.
We've seen our interstateexpand three lanes between
Lincoln and Omaha.
Now it's expanding three lanesbetween Lincoln and York.
People generally support that.
So can you explain to those whodon't understand why is this
approach so flawed?
Erick Guerra (11:46):
One thing I would say first in response to that is
I'm not sure that people kindof support it to the extent that
we think that they do.
I think one of the large piecesof evidence for this is we have
not raised the gas tax in over30 years.
And that's kind of a firmrejection, I would say, on the
part of voters to expand thesystem.
(12:06):
So as much as people might kindof say, oh, yeah, we we want to
expand highways, we have goodreason to, uh, they don't really
want to pay for it.
And there are instances, ofcourse, where they do want to
pay for it.
But I think there's this kindof view that maybe they're
costless, that it doesn't takemoney, that it doesn't take
land, and and these costs reallyget hidden in the process of
highway construction.
(12:27):
And I think actually faced witha choice of what to spend funds
on, how to use land, I thinkmany fewer people would kind of
choose to go for that highwaywidening.
Kind of in response to thelarger question, I think we we
do have evidence that as youinvest in highways, your average
speeds tend to increase, youknow, but much, much smaller
than your investments inhighways.
(12:47):
But you do see if you have aregion where you're investing in
more highways, people aretypically moving faster.
That said, they also typicallymove further.
And when you look at actuallycongestion, which you could you
can think of congestion in anumber of different ways, but I
think a pretty simple way is thedifference between how long it
takes you to go where you'regoing when there's no traffic at
(13:08):
all, and how long it actuallytakes you to get there.
And that's what people reallyinteract with.
And that's what's not reallychanging.
That's what in in uh many partsof the country have kind of
steadily gotten worse despitemassive investments in building
new highways and wideninghighways.
So we do tend to see higheraverage speeds from from
highways, but the effects oncongestion are pretty limited.
(13:28):
Uh, and I think that'ssomething that people kind of
feel in many ways.
People experience that thatcongestion.
Stephanie Rouse (13:35):
So, in your history of highway building,
there's a clear feeling from theengineers of the time that were
building the originalinterstate highway system that
they knew best, and they seem tohave some unchecked power for
designing and building highways.
And this seems to still pervadethe field today.
A previous author pointed thisout, and it never occurred to me
really until he said it, butengineers building roadways
(13:56):
don't have any local boards orany commissions that have to
approve the projects theydesigned, unlike planning parks
and even health departments thatall have advisory boards that
are often reviewing andimproving projects.
Do you see this ever changing?
Or what are your thoughts onthis?
Erick Guerra (14:10):
I guess I I would maybe push back a little bit on
that, in that I think that manyhighway engineers, if you kind
of listen, listen to theirstories, many of them fit the
description that you're sayingof people who are kind of, you
know, you can't make an omeletwithout breaking a few eggs, and
people are complaining toomuch, and we're doing this for
the good of everyone a lot.
However, when you kind of hearthem talk about their trajectory
(14:32):
of their careers, they'll say,I wish I knew then what I know
now.
So I think there are quite afew who are a little more
retrospective about or think alittle bit differently about
urban highways and really feltlike they hadn't received the
training and that they were kindof given a task to do, but
maybe not the right tools to doit, or it hadn't been fully
thought through.
So I think that there's a mix,but I do think in many ways
(14:54):
there are still highways thatare being built that people
really don't want.
And I think you can kind of seea little bit of that throughout
the history of urban highwaybuilding.
We had multiple instances wherepresidents asked highway
builders to do something andthey didn't really do it.
FDR asked the predecessor tothe Federal Highway
(15:15):
Administration, the Bureau ofPublic Roads, to look into how
could we finance the interstatesystem with tolls.
And they kind of didn't reallydo it.
You know, they said, oh, wecould never build this with
tolls.
Let's do this other thinginstead.
They were also asked to kind oflook at, well, you know, if
highways are generating value,that value ought to translate
into more valuable land.
So they were asked to look intousing a value capture mechanism
(15:39):
to fund highways and say, well,you know, let's instead of
buying the land for thecorridor, let's buy the land for
the corridor and a few thingsaround the land for the
corridor, and we'll use theincreased value of that other
land to pay for the highway.
And the response was kind of,that's great.
Let's buy up extra land andlet's save that for widening the
highway when people want todrive more on that highway in
(15:59):
the future.
I think also even even withEisenhower, you know, I
Eisenhower appointed acommission to look at ways in
which the interstate program hadderailed and were doing some
things that were not kind oforiginally intended.
So I think that there's alwaysbeen this kind of maybe
disconnect between what wethought we were doing, maybe,
and or what politicians at leastwere kind of asking highway
(16:22):
planners to do and what highwayplanners had had chosen to do.
And I think at the point wherethey started receiving large
amounts of money, it was it waskind of too late.
Once you had that 90-10 match,there's just this real strong
incentive to go through and andbuild uh ever more, ever wider
highways.
Jennifer Hiatt (16:42):
Speaking of the financing of highways, obviously
money plays a major role in howour highways and our inter
system got built and continuesto be expanded.
But I'm not sure a lot ofpeople understand how they're
actually paying for theirhighways.
So can you provide an overviewof the current funding
mechanisms?
Erick Guerra (16:59):
I mean, it shifted quite a bit over time.
So the way that we pay forhighways is is now a bit
different than it was in the inthe 1970s, but kind of writ
large, we still have a systemwhere we generally are raising
revenues through, you know, theprimary source is the gas tax.
There are there are othersources, but that's state and
(17:20):
federal gas taxes, that theseoften go into a dedicated, in
the case of federal governments,the federal highway trust fund.
It varies by state, kind of howthe funding works, but we wind
up with these pots of money thatare dedicated to the surface
transportation system.
And then there are differentways that they can be allocated.
So, you know, currently acertain share can go to transit,
(17:42):
a certain share can go todifferent types of projects.
But at the end of the day, it'smostly raising dedicated funds
through the gas tax and othertaxes, and they're mostly set
aside for building, rebuilding,and maintaining roadways.
And over time, the share thatwe spend on new construction has
(18:03):
diminished, but everyadditional kind of lane mile of
highway puts us on the hook formore reconstruction and more
maintenance in the future.
Stephanie Rouse (18:12):
On the funding piece and kind of the historic
funding piece, as part of theNational Interstate Defense
Highway Act 1956, and you'vementioned this in the episode
already, there was a nine-to-onefunding match.
So states had hardly anythingto come up with in order to fund
these highways through theircommunities.
What do you think our citieswould look like today if there
hadn't been this substantial ofa match?
Erick Guerra (18:34):
So, so different.
You can even look at some ofthe early highway investments
that were happening right beforein the 40s and 50s, and you can
see kind of how challenging itwas to build urban highways.
Uh, the land acquisition costsin particular were you know so
high that it it would have beennearly impossible to build that
(18:54):
large of a system.
So I think we would have had amuch more conservative highway
system without that kind ofmatch.
You know, fewer highways, lesswide, much better integrated
with existing land uses.
You know, it's expensive totear down hundreds of thousands
of homes and businesses, and youreally need some sort of strong
financial mechanism to enablethat.
Jennifer Hiatt (19:15):
I sit on the board of a land trust here in
Lincoln, and some of our boardmembers went to the Midwest CLT
conference, and one of the landtrusts there was talking about
how their sole purpose is to tryto mitigate the harm of a
highway that came through.
They lost 700 homes and 300businesses just for a highway.
Erick Guerra (19:36):
Yeah, I think people and and I I would guess I
count myself among them.
When I teach about the historyof highways, I often talk about
the freeway revolt as somethingthat happened in the past.
So movements within cities tostop urban highways.
I grew up in Boston and I tella story in the beginning of the
book kind of about some of myinteractions with highways that
(19:56):
were built or or were neverbuilt, and how you kind of grow
up not really thinking about it.
So I often think about this asa movement that happened in the
past, and you look at citieslike San Francisco and Boston,
New York, it's maybe talkedabout a little bit less, but
these highways were not builtthrough Manhattan.
You know, thinking about theFrench Quarter in uh New
Orleans, all these places wherehighways were stopped, think of
(20:18):
as this kind of larger uhfreeway revolt.
But there's still a lot ofhighways that are being built
around the country that areresulting in the loss of homes,
the loss of businesses.
And at the end of the day, Idon't think that there's really
a strong, clear justificationfor doing it.
We're largely justifying thisbased on some modeling practices
(20:41):
that are, you know, over ahundred years old, like the
general practice, and are highlycriticized, are deeply flawed,
and just the the logic is reallypoor.
They have kind of faulty logicto assess the benefits of
highway investments in the inthe first place.
But because we're still usingthe same general funding
mechanisms, because we're stillusing the same general
(21:03):
evaluation mechanisms that weused 50 years ago, I think that
there are places where it itremains pretty easy to justify
these takings of privateproperty for highways.
Jennifer Hiatt (21:14):
I was surprised in reading your book that even
the Infrastructure Investmentand Jobs Act, which was 2021, I
think, recognizing theimportance of multimodal
transportation and climatechange and the impacts of
transportation on climatechange, still allocated massive
amounts of funding to buildingand widening highways.
I feel like in the planningindustry, we're getting the
(21:36):
shift into smaller roadsoverall.
I think even engineering ispicking up on that.
But how do we shift thisperspective with our elected
officials?
Erick Guerra (21:45):
I think that you know, many elected officials
may, you know, they may agree,they may disagree on kind of
finer points, but I thinkwithout addressing the funding
mechanisms and withoutaddressing the evaluation
mechanisms, it's going to bereally hard to shift us away
from that practice.
And and I would say in in manyways, I talk a lot about iced
(22:06):
tea in the book, which is kindof you you can view as the first
post-interstate highway law.
And I would say all the lawsthat have have followed or all
the acts that have followedreally kind of follow that model
of iced tea, where you talk alot about sustainability, you
talk a lot about a conservativenetwork, you talk a lot about
health, safety, accessibility,uh, physical access.
(22:29):
But at the end of the day, theprimary purpose, if you kind of
track what we do, our primarypurpose is to continue to build
and rebuild an ever-expandinghighway and arterial network.
Stephanie Rouse (22:44):
So you discussed the cost-benefit
analysis, which is often donewith new road projects and how
flawed they really are.
One way to improve them is tomeasure external costs and
opportunity costs of theproject.
Can you discuss what these areand whether they're actually
making them into projectanalysis?
Erick Guerra (23:01):
I mean, one thing I would say is often most road
projects are not doing anextensive cost-benefit analysis.
So where they are, if you lookat kind of a regional
transportation plan, often whatthey'll do is you'll kind of
forecast what's going to happento traffic over the next 25, 30
years.
If you have a prettysophisticated region, you're
(23:22):
going to model that.
You may also follow thepractice of just assuming that
traffic increases on allroadways by 3% every year.
That leads to a doubling ofkind of traffic every 20 years,
roughly.
Those are the basic practices.
And then you kind of look atthat future and then you model a
future in which you add a bunchof highways, you know, probably
(23:44):
also transit projects, probablyalso, you know, a series of
different projects in a region.
So you kind of model thatfuture with and without those
transportation investments.
And typically you're kind ofassuming really similar demands
for traffic, like people aretraveling the same amount,
whether or not you double, youknow, or add 20% or 10% or 5% or
(24:05):
remove highway lane miles.
You assume kind of this fixedamount of traffic.
And then you kind of look at,well, what's the difference in
travel time if we build thisversus if we don't build it?
And then you kind of justmultiply that by an estimate of
people's value of time and yousay though that's the benefits
of all these investments.
And it's a really inflatedestimate of benefits because
(24:28):
that's not really what happens.
And we see that over time, ifyou look at the history of these
large transportation plans,congestion's not going down
after them.
We kind of predict and provide,and we we provide for a certain
amount of traffic, and in someways it's a self-fulfilling
prophecy because we spreadthings out, there's more and
more travel.
And at the end of the day, wespend as much time, or
(24:51):
potentially, depending on whereyou are, more time in traffic
and in cars than we did prior tothese investments.
Jennifer Hiatt (24:57):
If the system is now overbuilt, what does
unbuilding look like?
And do you have any real worldexamples of it?
Erick Guerra (25:04):
One, I would say I think unbuilding is really
challenging and it's going to bea slow process.
So I just want to kind of startwith that.
One main takeaway from thisbook, I would hope that it would
be hey, maybe we should stophaving construction be the
default.
Like maybe we should slow down,and that should be a policy of
last resort.
So even before stopping, youknow, starting to unbuild, I
(25:28):
think we need to think about notmaking the problem worse.
Step one is stop contributingto the problem.
Then from there, I think we canmove on to thinking about
unbuilding with this kind of, Ithink an important caveat that
this is going to take decades.
I don't think there's a silverbullet.
It took us decades to get wherewe are.
We've had decades ofoverbuilding.
(25:49):
And I think the idea that wecan kind of correct in five
years or 10 years isproblematic.
And I think if we tried tocorrect things that quickly, we
would produce a lot of pain aswell.
That said, I think that we canstart to unbuild slowly over
time.
I think we do have someexamples of urban highways that
are narrowed or taken down.
My favorite examples always uhrelate to land use as well.
(26:13):
I talk about transportationsometimes as the kind of
negative space of a city.
And I don't mean negative as init's bad.
I mean negative as in like apainting.
You have negative and positivespace.
You can't have positive space,you can't have figure without
ground.
The figure is really the housesand the businesses and the
negative space, the ground iswhat connects them.
I think the the most successfulprojects are one where we are
(26:36):
opening up more parcels and Iideally kind of reintegrating
them into cities.
I think that there are someexamples that maybe are a lot
less successful than they couldbe.
For example, the you know, thebig dig in Boston, essentially,
you know, as soon as the centralartery was was built, people
were talking about how do we putthis underground?
(26:57):
The second phase essentiallywent underground because the
first phase was so destructiveand people saw how destructive
it was.
And then, you know, decadesafter that, we we put it
underground.
By the way, at the same time,we put it underground, we we
widened it.
And then, but that that's noteven that's not really my my
main complaint.
My main complaint would be thatwe didn't do anything of real
(27:19):
value on the surface.
There's a nice linear park, butthat used to be blocks of city.
And I would much rather seeprojects where we start to
encourage the kind of reuse ofland that's been used for
highways for other kind ofproductive uses like houses and
businesses and start to rebuildsome of the things that we
(27:39):
destroyed when we built thesehighways in the first place.
Stephanie Rouse (27:43):
So you said it'll take decades and a lot of
coordination at different levelsof government in order to
unbuild.
Who are the key organizationsor agencies that will help make
this happen?
Erick Guerra (27:54):
I think ultimately you need to have a partnership.
You need to have, you know, thefederal government enabling
some of this to happen.
Um, I think we probably need tohave some shifts in in how we
finance and evaluate projectsand highways at the federal
level.
That's also going to requirestate departments of
transportation to be on board.
But at the end of the day, assoon as you're getting into
issues of land use, it's reallyabout local localities, cities,
(28:18):
towns are the ones who manageland use and and who deal with
land parcels.
So I think you need to have apartnership between all three.
Stephanie Rouse (28:27):
Do you see this being able to happen sooner
rather than later just becauseof the the kind of core
financing mechanism is the gastax.
And with the shift over to EVsand the pace that the gas tax is
just not keeping up, we aren'tgoing to have as many funds.
So it's going to really have tobe limited on the amount that
the federal government issupplying.
Erick Guerra (28:46):
In that respect, I think it's a really interesting
moment.
I think we we have anopportunity to reframe how we
fund transportation systems.
I think there's a realopportunity to move towards
charging more for the mostexpensive types of trips.
And what I mean by that is ifyou're you know driving on a
rural highway at at 1 a.m.,you're not very expensive.
(29:10):
Your vehicle is kind ofcreating some wear and tear,
you're emitting some greenhousegas emissions, you're emitting
some local emissions.
But when you think of thatrelative to a trip that's going
into a downtown at a reallycongested, really busy time of
day, that's an extremelyexpensive trip.
And that's the type of tripthat kind of encourages the
widening of a highway to try andmeet that demand.
(29:32):
And those should be moreexpensive.
It should be more expensive todrive.
You know, I think that thatsometimes can be framed in kind
of a negative way.
It's all about charging people.
But at the end of the day, it'sabout preventing a highway
widening and about thinkingabout well, you know, instead of
having this be a 10 lanehighway, maybe it doesn't need
to be five lanes in eachdirection.
(29:54):
Maybe it could be three in eachdirection, and we're paying a
little bit more for it.
But now that's freeing up anawful lot of land.
And it's a lot easier.
There's more things to kind ofgo to.
So ideally, we can kind ofshift a little bit more towards
funding from, you know, raisingfunds from these more expensive
trips.
I think at the end of the day,a lot of people are talking
about moving towards a kind ofvehicle miles travel tax and
(30:17):
simply replacing the gas taxwith that.
And I think that would be areal missed opportunity to
rethink overall funding becauseanything that's kind of raising
about the same amount ofrevenues from the cheapest trips
to the most expensive trips,and then dedicating all of those
resources or most of thoseresources to the really
expensive trip is going toreally distort travel behavior
(30:38):
and travel patterns.
And it is part of what got usinto this overbuilt system that
we have.
Jennifer Hiatt (30:45):
As this is booked on planning, always our
last question is what bookswould you recommend readers
check out?
Erick Guerra (30:51):
Of course.
I love Wes Marshall's book,Killed by a Traffic Engineer.
If you haven't read that yet,it's it's absolutely terrific.
I think it does such a good jobof framing the history of how
certain practices gotinstitutionalized over the last
uh hundred years, and reallydoes a good job of explaining
kind of why and how the U.S.
(31:13):
has done such a poor job ontraffic safety.
Other books I would recommend,I kind of recent.
I like uh The Drive forDollars.
That's uh Brian Taylor, EricMorris, and Jeff Brown.
That's really focused onhighway finance.
I think that came out in maybea cut, maybe two years ago,
maybe three years ago.
Like that book a lot.
Pay Paradise, if you've readthat, that's uh Henry Graber.
(31:36):
It's really cool book.
A lot of it, you know, ifyou're familiar with parking
practice in general, you'll bepretty familiar with it.
But then kind of intersect withthat.
There's some great stories onpractices of kind of how parking
regulation has made it so hardto develop housing in certain
situations.
Uh, stories about mafiainvolvement in parking garages,
(31:57):
and just you know, it's reallygreat, fabulous look at parking
that I think kind of really addsto the body of knowledge on
that that topic.
City limits.
That's um sorry, I is it MeganKimball?
Yeah, Megan Kimball.
I don't know her personally, soI I lost her name there for a
moment.
But yeah, it's a great book.
Really liked it.
It's about kind of contemporaryfreeway, like fights against
(32:18):
freeway expansions in in Texascities.
She was reporting, you know, inthat in that area for a while.
I think it's a really, a reallygreat book.
What else have I read recentlythat I really liked?
That's four, right?
That's a that's a good number.
Yeah.
Stephanie Rouse (32:30):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We had uh Wes on last year talkabout Killed by a Traffic
Engineer, and our last episode,right before this one, was
actually Pave Paradise.
We had Henry Gabor actuallyhere in Nebraska at our fall
workshop and did a live podcastrecording with him.
Erick Guerra (32:44):
So terrific.
Stephanie Rouse (32:46):
A lot of great book recommendations.
We'll add the the two new onesto our list that we don't have
yet.
Eric, thank you so much forjoining us to talk about your
book, Overbuilt (32:55):
The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S.
Highway Construction.
Erick Guerra (33:00):
Thanks, Stephanie.
Thanks, Jennifer.
Jennifer Hiatt (33:03):
We hope you enjoyed this conversation with
author Eric Herrera on his book,Overbuilt: The High Costs and
Low Rewards of U.S.
Highway Construction.
You can get your own copythrough the publisher at Island
Press by supporting your localbookstore or online at
bookshop.org.
Remember to subscribe to theshow wherever you listen to
podcasts and please rate,review, and share the show.
Thank you for listening, andwe'll talk to you next time on
(33:23):
Bookdown Planning.
You're listening to the Booked On
Planning Podcast, a project ofthe Nebraska chapter of the
American Planning Association.
In each episode, we dive intohow cities function by talking
with authors on housing,transportation, and everything
in between.
Join us as we get booked onplanning.
Jennifer Hiatt (00:47):
Basically, the overview of this book is that we
have overbuilt our highwaysystem.
Erick gives a good backgroundon the history of construction
of highways in general and ourinterstate system.
That basically we ended upfinishing our interstate system
in about 91, if I remembercorrectly, from the book.
Stephanie Rouse (01:07):
Yeah.
So he does drop severalacronyms, kind of an alphabet
soup, which is pretty commonwith transportation industry,
but one of them being thefoundations of modern-day
transportation bills, ICE T,Intermodal Surface
Transportation Efficiency Act.
This was passed in 1991,basically when the interstate
system was completed.
It kind of shepherded a newpolicy for how we fund
(01:30):
interstate highway, roadwayconstruction in the United
States.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:34):
Yeah, it certainly wasn't the only bill
that's ever impacted our highwayfunding, though, has it?
Stephanie Rouse (01:39):
No, if you look at the history, following ICE
T, we had T21, Safety Lou, Map21, the FAST Act, and then what
most of us are probably familiarwith because was just passed in
2021, the InfrastructureInvestment and Jobs Act.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:53):
I do think it's so interesting that such a
refreshing name, ICE T leads toultimately some really crappy
infrastructure building overall.
Stephanie Rouse (02:02):
Exactly.
As we talk about in theepisode, while a lot of these
bills all have kind of this bendtowards sustainability and
trying to create multimodaltransportation systems, they
really just support more roadbuilding, leading us into the
situation where we're at wherewe're highly overbuilt.
And the more we overbuild, themore these bills have to
(02:23):
maintain that infrastructureinto the future, creating some
concerning issues for the futureof transportation funding.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:30):
Yeah, one of the points that you brought up
actually that I'd never reallythought about, and I know that's
coming from your past as atransportation planner, but
maintenance isn't always whatyou think of either.
So when I think of like roadmaintenance, I think of just
making sure that you go back inand repave and make sure that
you get rid of all the potholesand stuff.
But you brought up the factthat maintenance actually often
is increasing lane widths aswell as getting rid of all of so
(02:53):
even if you just think, oh, mydepartment of transportation is
out just doing maintenance,actually, they probably are in
fact widening your lanes aswell.
Stephanie Rouse (03:02):
Yeah, exactly.
And just another sneaky way forincreasing the amount of
impervious service that we havehere in the US.
Jennifer Hiatt (03:09):
Very not climate friendly.
Stephanie Rouse (03:11):
No.
Jennifer Hiatt (03:12):
All right.
Well, let's get into ourconversation with author Eric
Guerrera on his book, Overbuilt,the High Costs and Low Rewards
of U.S.
Highway Construction.
Stephanie Rouse (03:21):
Erick, thank you for joining us on Book Done
Planning to talk about yourbook, Overbuilt: The High Costs
and Low Rewards of U.S.
Highway Construction.
There are books out there thatfocus solely on the construction
of the interstate system, butyour book is more focused on
what has come after it wascompleted.
You do start, though, by layingthe foundations.
So can you briefly explain afew key factors of the
(03:42):
interstate building period thatinfluenced how we build today?
Erick Guerra (03:46):
Thanks so much, Stephanie.
It's really a pleasure to behere.
I guess maybe one of the firstpoints that I'll try and make is
that the interstate system asit was constructed, we we often
kind of talk about larger socialissues like commerce connecting
the country, militarymovements.
I think even uh, you know,there were moments in time where
we were talking aboutpotentially evacuating cities
(04:08):
from from nuclear strikes.
But at the end of the day, thepeople who were planning and
designing the interstate systemuh had really been focused on
urban traffic since about the1930s.
There was a movement to kind ofthinking about accommodating
car travel within cities, and alot of the highway network was
planned with that in mind.
I would say in in terms of theactual interstate legislation,
(04:31):
the main factors were, you know,one, kind of authorizing and
empowering the predecessor tothe federal highway
administration to build thenetwork.
Two was really funding it.
And the funding system, itwound up giving a strong federal
incentive to local governmentsto build large highway systems.
(04:53):
So the overall length of thesystem was capped, uh, but not
the width or the number of lanesor even the cost.
And the federal government atthe beginning of interstate
construction uh matched localdollars on a nine-to-one basis.
So a really strong incentivefor states, municipalities,
localities to want to buildhighways, because for every $1
(05:16):
they would put into it, they got$9 in return.
I also add to that that thepeople largely making the
decisions were highway planners.
So people who had been trainedto build highways, who really
focused on building highways.
That was their kind of primarypurpose, their education.
If you kind of look through orlisten to interviews that are
part of an oral history projectthat was done after the more
(05:39):
around the completion of theinterstate or the originally
planned interstate, you can heara lot of them kind of talking
about they have this convictionin what they were doing.
This was part of a process ofmodernization.
Jennifer Hiatt (05:50):
As our listeners know, but you probably don't at
this point, Stephanie and Ilive in Nebraska.
We both work in Lincoln.
And growing up, my grandfatherowned a construction company
that they built highways.
Like my my dad and my grandpawere the people actually
physically constructing thehighways.
And I remember one time mygrandpa sitting there talking
about the interstate.
Like he was an adult when theinterstate was constructed, and
(06:14):
he very proudly pointed out inNebraska, there are long
stretches of the interstate thatyou could land a fighter plane
on.
It was a big deal for him.
Erick Guerra (06:23):
I think that's a great, that's a great story.
I, you know, there there were alot of people who were involved
in constructing the interstate.
I think, you know, a lot a lotof the intentions were really
solid and positive.
You know, there were someproblems with how the interstate
was built.
I think there were problems inparticular with how it
intersected with with cities.
I think there were someproblems related to a lack of
(06:44):
local control, a lack ofplanning, and a lack of
alternative ways of thinkingabout how transportation should
be invested in or kind of howcities should develop over time.
But at the same time, therewas, you know, a lot of a lot of
work that happened.
A lot of infrastructure wasbuilt in a relatively short
period of time.
Jennifer Hiatt (07:02):
Well, and to that point, you titled your
book, Overbuilt.
So can you explain what youmean when you say that the
highway system is overbuilt?
Erick Guerra (07:10):
I think from the kind of simplest point of view,
the argument is that we have toomany highways.
We have too many, too highcapacity roadway systems.
And in some ways, I thinkthat's maybe can be a little bit
of a controversial statement.
I think in some contexts thatthat's not going to be
particularly controversial, butin others it might be.
And I think for pretty clearreasons, uh, transportation is
(07:33):
necessary for a functioningmodern society, for a
functioning modern economy.
And without streets andhighways, we would have
extremely limited access tojobs, food, other necessities.
Firms would have troubleattracting uh businesses, things
like that.
But too much highway is is alsoproblematic, or too much
(07:54):
roadway.
And you can kind of think oftwo polar extremes.
One extreme is a place that isentirely made up of highways,
and the other extreme is a placethat has no streets, no
roadways at all.
And they're both kind ofdysfunctional in their own ways.
In one place, there's uh no wayto get where you're going, and
in the other place, therethere's nowhere to go.
And there are very few placesthat are really kind of at that
(08:18):
very extreme end, but you canthink that somewhere between
those two extremes is an idealamount of transportation
infrastructure.
Just as a thought experiment,think about a city that kind of
only has local roadways.
And, you know, the first mainarterial that you build, it's
probably going to create a lotof value.
Uh, you're gonna have shops andbusinesses that kind of line
(08:40):
that first main street.
You're gonna improveaccessibility throughout your
city or region.
The second one probably alsohas quite a bit of value.
Maybe there are even kind ofimportant network effects, but
eventually you hit a point wherethe next kind of roadway that
you expand or build, it hasbenefits, but those benefits
simply aren't worth the cost.
(09:01):
The costs of land, you're justnot creating the same types of
benefits.
A lot, you may just beshuffling land uses around
instead of kind of generatingnew economic activities.
You might be really justencouraging people to drive
longer distances as opposed tounlocking, you know, more
potential within yourmetropolitan area.
And once you hit that pointwhere the costs really exceed
(09:24):
the benefits, every additionalamount of roadway that you
invest in is detrimental.
And the central argument of thebook is that we kind of passed
that point quite a while ago andhave continued to build,
despite building more highcapacity roadways.
So when we completed theinterstate system, kind of, you
know, debates on exactly when ithappened.
(09:45):
But the originally plannedinterstate was largely completed
in around 1990, 1991.
And since that moment, we'veadded about 75% more to the lane
miles of urban highway.
We haven't really stoppedbuilding, we we've continued
building a pace.
But I would argue that most ofthat building has been net
(10:05):
negative when you factor in howmuch it costs.
Stephanie Rouse (10:09):
I think an important point from your book,
too, listeners might be thinkingoverbuilding is just building
new and building extra lanemiles.
You discuss how roadwayresurfacing projects will just
get wider and wider and takingan existing roadway and making
it fit the modern standards thatwe have that you need to have
14 feet of roadway width insteadof 11 foot, which is a much
(10:29):
better roadway to keep trafficdown.
Erick Guerra (10:32):
Yeah, and I think you can kind of you can think of
um road investments in threemain buckets.
One is maybe the initialinvestment, second is the just
general maintenance, repaving.
The third one that I thinkyou're really talking about here
and is an increasinglyimportant part of what we
finance is reconstructing.
Everything we build has a shelflife.
And at a certain point, everyhighway needs to be rebuilt.
(10:55):
And as you're saying, when werebuild, we often we add a lane
here, we add a lane there, weadd some you know bigger and
wider interchanges, we add widerlanes, and the kind of impact
of the roadway increasessubstantially.
Jennifer Hiatt (11:10):
As you point out in the book, and we've already
talked about a little bit here.
I think it's probably safe tosay that most planners and maybe
even some engineers understandwhy building more lanes does not
actually help trafficcongestion, but the general
public overall does not.
And in fact, if you talk tomost people in the general
public, they would actuallysupport the expansion of lanes
(11:30):
on major roads.
We've seen our interstateexpand three lanes between
Lincoln and Omaha.
Now it's expanding three lanesbetween Lincoln and York.
People generally support that.
So can you explain to those whodon't understand why is this
approach so flawed?
Erick Guerra (11:46):
One thing I would say first in response to that is
I'm not sure that people kindof support it to the extent that
we think that they do.
I think one of the large piecesof evidence for this is we have
not raised the gas tax in over30 years.
And that's kind of a firmrejection, I would say, on the
part of voters to expand thesystem.
(12:06):
So as much as people might kindof say, oh, yeah, we we want to
expand highways, we have goodreason to, uh, they don't really
want to pay for it.
And there are instances, ofcourse, where they do want to
pay for it.
But I think there's this kindof view that maybe they're
costless, that it doesn't takemoney, that it doesn't take
land, and and these costs reallyget hidden in the process of
highway construction.
(12:27):
And I think actually faced witha choice of what to spend funds
on, how to use land, I thinkmany fewer people would kind of
choose to go for that highwaywidening.
Kind of in response to thelarger question, I think we we
do have evidence that as youinvest in highways, your average
speeds tend to increase, youknow, but much, much smaller
than your investments inhighways.
(12:47):
But you do see if you have aregion where you're investing in
more highways, people aretypically moving faster.
That said, they also typicallymove further.
And when you look at actuallycongestion, which you could you
can think of congestion in anumber of different ways, but I
think a pretty simple way is thedifference between how long it
takes you to go where you'regoing when there's no traffic at
(13:08):
all, and how long it actuallytakes you to get there.
And that's what people reallyinteract with.
And that's what's not reallychanging.
That's what in in uh many partsof the country have kind of
steadily gotten worse despitemassive investments in building
new highways and wideninghighways.
So we do tend to see higheraverage speeds from from
highways, but the effects oncongestion are pretty limited.
(13:28):
Uh, and I think that'ssomething that people kind of
feel in many ways.
People experience that thatcongestion.
Stephanie Rouse (13:35):
So, in your history of highway building,
there's a clear feeling from theengineers of the time that were
building the originalinterstate highway system that
they knew best, and they seem tohave some unchecked power for
designing and building highways.
And this seems to still pervadethe field today.
A previous author pointed thisout, and it never occurred to me
really until he said it, butengineers building roadways
(13:56):
don't have any local boards orany commissions that have to
approve the projects theydesigned, unlike planning parks
and even health departments thatall have advisory boards that
are often reviewing andimproving projects.
Do you see this ever changing?
Or what are your thoughts onthis?
Erick Guerra (14:10):
I guess I I would maybe push back a little bit on
that, in that I think that manyhighway engineers, if you kind
of listen, listen to theirstories, many of them fit the
description that you're sayingof people who are kind of, you
know, you can't make an omeletwithout breaking a few eggs, and
people are complaining toomuch, and we're doing this for
the good of everyone a lot.
However, when you kind of hearthem talk about their trajectory
(14:32):
of their careers, they'll say,I wish I knew then what I know
now.
So I think there are quite afew who are a little more
retrospective about or think alittle bit differently about
urban highways and really feltlike they hadn't received the
training and that they were kindof given a task to do, but
maybe not the right tools to doit, or it hadn't been fully
thought through.
So I think that there's a mix,but I do think in many ways
(14:54):
there are still highways thatare being built that people
really don't want.
And I think you can kind of seea little bit of that throughout
the history of urban highwaybuilding.
We had multiple instances wherepresidents asked highway
builders to do something andthey didn't really do it.
FDR asked the predecessor tothe Federal Highway
(15:15):
Administration, the Bureau ofPublic Roads, to look into how
could we finance the interstatesystem with tolls.
And they kind of didn't reallydo it.
You know, they said, oh, wecould never build this with
tolls.
Let's do this other thinginstead.
They were also asked to kind oflook at, well, you know, if
highways are generating value,that value ought to translate
into more valuable land.
So they were asked to look intousing a value capture mechanism
(15:39):
to fund highways and say, well,you know, let's instead of
buying the land for thecorridor, let's buy the land for
the corridor and a few thingsaround the land for the
corridor, and we'll use theincreased value of that other
land to pay for the highway.
And the response was kind of,that's great.
Let's buy up extra land andlet's save that for widening the
highway when people want todrive more on that highway in
(15:59):
the future.
I think also even even withEisenhower, you know, I
Eisenhower appointed acommission to look at ways in
which the interstate program hadderailed and were doing some
things that were not kind oforiginally intended.
So I think that there's alwaysbeen this kind of maybe
disconnect between what wethought we were doing, maybe,
and or what politicians at leastwere kind of asking highway
(16:22):
planners to do and what highwayplanners had had chosen to do.
And I think at the point wherethey started receiving large
amounts of money, it was it waskind of too late.
Once you had that 90-10 match,there's just this real strong
incentive to go through and andbuild uh ever more, ever wider
highways.
Jennifer Hiatt (16:42):
Speaking of the financing of highways, obviously
money plays a major role in howour highways and our inter
system got built and continuesto be expanded.
But I'm not sure a lot ofpeople understand how they're
actually paying for theirhighways.
So can you provide an overviewof the current funding
mechanisms?
Erick Guerra (16:59):
I mean, it shifted quite a bit over time.
So the way that we pay forhighways is is now a bit
different than it was in the inthe 1970s, but kind of writ
large, we still have a systemwhere we generally are raising
revenues through, you know, theprimary source is the gas tax.
There are there are othersources, but that's state and
(17:20):
federal gas taxes, that theseoften go into a dedicated, in
the case of federal governments,the federal highway trust fund.
It varies by state, kind of howthe funding works, but we wind
up with these pots of money thatare dedicated to the surface
transportation system.
And then there are differentways that they can be allocated.
So, you know, currently acertain share can go to transit,
(17:42):
a certain share can go todifferent types of projects.
But at the end of the day, it'smostly raising dedicated funds
through the gas tax and othertaxes, and they're mostly set
aside for building, rebuilding,and maintaining roadways.
And over time, the share thatwe spend on new construction has
(18:03):
diminished, but everyadditional kind of lane mile of
highway puts us on the hook formore reconstruction and more
maintenance in the future.
Stephanie Rouse (18:12):
On the funding piece and kind of the historic
funding piece, as part of theNational Interstate Defense
Highway Act 1956, and you'vementioned this in the episode
already, there was a nine-to-onefunding match.
So states had hardly anythingto come up with in order to fund
these highways through theircommunities.
What do you think our citieswould look like today if there
hadn't been this substantial ofa match?
Erick Guerra (18:34):
So, so different.
You can even look at some ofthe early highway investments
that were happening right beforein the 40s and 50s, and you can
see kind of how challenging itwas to build urban highways.
Uh, the land acquisition costsin particular were you know so
high that it it would have beennearly impossible to build that
(18:54):
large of a system.
So I think we would have had amuch more conservative highway
system without that kind ofmatch.
You know, fewer highways, lesswide, much better integrated
with existing land uses.
You know, it's expensive totear down hundreds of thousands
of homes and businesses, and youreally need some sort of strong
financial mechanism to enablethat.
Jennifer Hiatt (19:15):
I sit on the board of a land trust here in
Lincoln, and some of our boardmembers went to the Midwest CLT
conference, and one of the landtrusts there was talking about
how their sole purpose is to tryto mitigate the harm of a
highway that came through.
They lost 700 homes and 300businesses just for a highway.
Erick Guerra (19:36):
Yeah, I think people and and I I would guess I
count myself among them.
When I teach about the historyof highways, I often talk about
the freeway revolt as somethingthat happened in the past.
So movements within cities tostop urban highways.
I grew up in Boston and I tella story in the beginning of the
book kind of about some of myinteractions with highways that
(19:56):
were built or or were neverbuilt, and how you kind of grow
up not really thinking about it.
So I often think about this asa movement that happened in the
past, and you look at citieslike San Francisco and Boston,
New York, it's maybe talkedabout a little bit less, but
these highways were not builtthrough Manhattan.
You know, thinking about theFrench Quarter in uh New
Orleans, all these places wherehighways were stopped, think of
(20:18):
as this kind of larger uhfreeway revolt.
But there's still a lot ofhighways that are being built
around the country that areresulting in the loss of homes,
the loss of businesses.
And at the end of the day, Idon't think that there's really
a strong, clear justificationfor doing it.
We're largely justifying thisbased on some modeling practices
(20:41):
that are, you know, over ahundred years old, like the
general practice, and are highlycriticized, are deeply flawed,
and just the the logic is reallypoor.
They have kind of faulty logicto assess the benefits of
highway investments in the inthe first place.
But because we're still usingthe same general funding
mechanisms, because we're stillusing the same general
(21:03):
evaluation mechanisms that weused 50 years ago, I think that
there are places where it itremains pretty easy to justify
these takings of privateproperty for highways.
Jennifer Hiatt (21:14):
I was surprised in reading your book that even
the Infrastructure Investmentand Jobs Act, which was 2021, I
think, recognizing theimportance of multimodal
transportation and climatechange and the impacts of
transportation on climatechange, still allocated massive
amounts of funding to buildingand widening highways.
I feel like in the planningindustry, we're getting the
(21:36):
shift into smaller roadsoverall.
I think even engineering ispicking up on that.
But how do we shift thisperspective with our elected
officials?
Erick Guerra (21:45):
I think that you know, many elected officials
may, you know, they may agree,they may disagree on kind of
finer points, but I thinkwithout addressing the funding
mechanisms and withoutaddressing the evaluation
mechanisms, it's going to bereally hard to shift us away
from that practice.
And and I would say in in manyways, I talk a lot about iced
(22:06):
tea in the book, which is kindof you you can view as the first
post-interstate highway law.
And I would say all the lawsthat have have followed or all
the acts that have followedreally kind of follow that model
of iced tea, where you talk alot about sustainability, you
talk a lot about a conservativenetwork, you talk a lot about
health, safety, accessibility,uh, physical access.
(22:29):
But at the end of the day, theprimary purpose, if you kind of
track what we do, our primarypurpose is to continue to build
and rebuild an ever-expandinghighway and arterial network.
Stephanie Rouse (22:44):
So you discussed the cost-benefit
analysis, which is often donewith new road projects and how
flawed they really are.
One way to improve them is tomeasure external costs and
opportunity costs of theproject.
Can you discuss what these areand whether they're actually
making them into projectanalysis?
Erick Guerra (23:01):
I mean, one thing I would say is often most road
projects are not doing anextensive cost-benefit analysis.
So where they are, if you lookat kind of a regional
transportation plan, often whatthey'll do is you'll kind of
forecast what's going to happento traffic over the next 25, 30
years.
If you have a prettysophisticated region, you're
(23:22):
going to model that.
You may also follow thepractice of just assuming that
traffic increases on allroadways by 3% every year.
That leads to a doubling ofkind of traffic every 20 years,
roughly.
Those are the basic practices.
And then you kind of look atthat future and then you model a
future in which you add a bunchof highways, you know, probably
(23:44):
also transit projects, probablyalso, you know, a series of
different projects in a region.
So you kind of model thatfuture with and without those
transportation investments.
And typically you're kind ofassuming really similar demands
for traffic, like people aretraveling the same amount,
whether or not you double, youknow, or add 20% or 10% or 5% or
(24:05):
remove highway lane miles.
You assume kind of this fixedamount of traffic.
And then you kind of look at,well, what's the difference in
travel time if we build thisversus if we don't build it?
And then you kind of justmultiply that by an estimate of
people's value of time and yousay though that's the benefits
of all these investments.
And it's a really inflatedestimate of benefits because
(24:28):
that's not really what happens.
And we see that over time, ifyou look at the history of these
large transportation plans,congestion's not going down
after them.
We kind of predict and provide,and we we provide for a certain
amount of traffic, and in someways it's a self-fulfilling
prophecy because we spreadthings out, there's more and
more travel.
And at the end of the day, wespend as much time, or
(24:51):
potentially, depending on whereyou are, more time in traffic
and in cars than we did prior tothese investments.
Jennifer Hiatt (24:57):
If the system is now overbuilt, what does
unbuilding look like?
And do you have any real worldexamples of it?
Erick Guerra (25:04):
One, I would say I think unbuilding is really
challenging and it's going to bea slow process.
So I just want to kind of startwith that.
One main takeaway from thisbook, I would hope that it would
be hey, maybe we should stophaving construction be the
default.
Like maybe we should slow down,and that should be a policy of
last resort.
So even before stopping, youknow, starting to unbuild, I
(25:28):
think we need to think about notmaking the problem worse.
Step one is stop contributingto the problem.
Then from there, I think we canmove on to thinking about
unbuilding with this kind of, Ithink an important caveat that
this is going to take decades.
I don't think there's a silverbullet.
It took us decades to get wherewe are.
We've had decades ofoverbuilding.
(25:49):
And I think the idea that wecan kind of correct in five
years or 10 years isproblematic.
And I think if we tried tocorrect things that quickly, we
would produce a lot of pain aswell.
That said, I think that we canstart to unbuild slowly over
time.
I think we do have someexamples of urban highways that
are narrowed or taken down.
My favorite examples always uhrelate to land use as well.
(26:13):
I talk about transportationsometimes as the kind of
negative space of a city.
And I don't mean negative as init's bad.
I mean negative as in like apainting.
You have negative and positivespace.
You can't have positive space,you can't have figure without
ground.
The figure is really the housesand the businesses and the
negative space, the ground iswhat connects them.
I think the the most successfulprojects are one where we are
(26:36):
opening up more parcels and Iideally kind of reintegrating
them into cities.
I think that there are someexamples that maybe are a lot
less successful than they couldbe.
For example, the you know, thebig dig in Boston, essentially,
you know, as soon as the centralartery was was built, people
were talking about how do we putthis underground?
(26:57):
The second phase essentiallywent underground because the
first phase was so destructiveand people saw how destructive
it was.
And then, you know, decadesafter that, we we put it
underground.
By the way, at the same time,we put it underground, we we
widened it.
And then, but that that's noteven that's not really my my
main complaint.
My main complaint would be thatwe didn't do anything of real
(27:19):
value on the surface.
There's a nice linear park, butthat used to be blocks of city.
And I would much rather seeprojects where we start to
encourage the kind of reuse ofland that's been used for
highways for other kind ofproductive uses like houses and
businesses and start to rebuildsome of the things that we
(27:39):
destroyed when we built thesehighways in the first place.
Stephanie Rouse (27:43):
So you said it'll take decades and a lot of
coordination at different levelsof government in order to
unbuild.
Who are the key organizationsor agencies that will help make
this happen?
Erick Guerra (27:54):
I think ultimately you need to have a partnership.
You need to have, you know, thefederal government enabling
some of this to happen.
Um, I think we probably need tohave some shifts in in how we
finance and evaluate projectsand highways at the federal
level.
That's also going to requirestate departments of
transportation to be on board.
But at the end of the day, assoon as you're getting into
issues of land use, it's reallyabout local localities, cities,
(28:18):
towns are the ones who manageland use and and who deal with
land parcels.
So I think you need to have apartnership between all three.
Stephanie Rouse (28:27):
Do you see this being able to happen sooner
rather than later just becauseof the the kind of core
financing mechanism is the gastax.
And with the shift over to EVsand the pace that the gas tax is
just not keeping up, we aren'tgoing to have as many funds.
So it's going to really have tobe limited on the amount that
the federal government issupplying.
Erick Guerra (28:46):
In that respect, I think it's a really interesting
moment.
I think we we have anopportunity to reframe how we
fund transportation systems.
I think there's a realopportunity to move towards
charging more for the mostexpensive types of trips.
And what I mean by that is ifyou're you know driving on a
rural highway at at 1 a.m.,you're not very expensive.
(29:10):
Your vehicle is kind ofcreating some wear and tear,
you're emitting some greenhousegas emissions, you're emitting
some local emissions.
But when you think of thatrelative to a trip that's going
into a downtown at a reallycongested, really busy time of
day, that's an extremelyexpensive trip.
And that's the type of tripthat kind of encourages the
widening of a highway to try andmeet that demand.
(29:32):
And those should be moreexpensive.
It should be more expensive todrive.
You know, I think that thatsometimes can be framed in kind
of a negative way.
It's all about charging people.
But at the end of the day, it'sabout preventing a highway
widening and about thinkingabout well, you know, instead of
having this be a 10 lanehighway, maybe it doesn't need
to be five lanes in eachdirection.
(29:54):
Maybe it could be three in eachdirection, and we're paying a
little bit more for it.
But now that's freeing up anawful lot of land.
And it's a lot easier.
There's more things to kind ofgo to.
So ideally, we can kind ofshift a little bit more towards
funding from, you know, raisingfunds from these more expensive
trips.
I think at the end of the day,a lot of people are talking
about moving towards a kind ofvehicle miles travel tax and
(30:17):
simply replacing the gas taxwith that.
And I think that would be areal missed opportunity to
rethink overall funding becauseanything that's kind of raising
about the same amount ofrevenues from the cheapest trips
to the most expensive trips,and then dedicating all of those
resources or most of thoseresources to the really
expensive trip is going toreally distort travel behavior
(30:38):
and travel patterns.
And it is part of what got usinto this overbuilt system that
we have.
Jennifer Hiatt (30:45):
As this is booked on planning, always our
last question is what bookswould you recommend readers
check out?
Erick Guerra (30:51):
Of course.
I love Wes Marshall's book,Killed by a Traffic Engineer.
If you haven't read that yet,it's it's absolutely terrific.
I think it does such a good jobof framing the history of how
certain practices gotinstitutionalized over the last
uh hundred years, and reallydoes a good job of explaining
kind of why and how the U.S.
(31:13):
has done such a poor job ontraffic safety.
Other books I would recommend,I kind of recent.
I like uh The Drive forDollars.
That's uh Brian Taylor, EricMorris, and Jeff Brown.
That's really focused onhighway finance.
I think that came out in maybea cut, maybe two years ago,
maybe three years ago.
Like that book a lot.
Pay Paradise, if you've readthat, that's uh Henry Graber.
(31:36):
It's really cool book.
A lot of it, you know, ifyou're familiar with parking
practice in general, you'll bepretty familiar with it.
But then kind of intersect withthat.
There's some great stories onpractices of kind of how parking
regulation has made it so hardto develop housing in certain
situations.
Uh, stories about mafiainvolvement in parking garages,
(31:57):
and just you know, it's reallygreat, fabulous look at parking
that I think kind of really addsto the body of knowledge on
that that topic.
City limits.
That's um sorry, I is it MeganKimball?
Yeah, Megan Kimball.
I don't know her personally, soI I lost her name there for a
moment.
But yeah, it's a great book.
Really liked it.
It's about kind of contemporaryfreeway, like fights against
(32:18):
freeway expansions in in Texascities.
She was reporting, you know, inthat in that area for a while.
I think it's a really, a reallygreat book.
What else have I read recentlythat I really liked?
That's four, right?
That's a that's a good number.
Yeah.
Stephanie Rouse (32:30):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We had uh Wes on last year talkabout Killed by a Traffic
Engineer, and our last episode,right before this one, was
actually Pave Paradise.
We had Henry Gabor actuallyhere in Nebraska at our fall
workshop and did a live podcastrecording with him.
Erick Guerra (32:44):
So terrific.
Stephanie Rouse (32:46):
A lot of great book recommendations.
We'll add the the two new onesto our list that we don't have
yet.
Eric, thank you so much forjoining us to talk about your
book, Overbuilt (32:55):
The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S.
Highway Construction.
Erick Guerra (33:00):
Thanks, Stephanie.
Thanks, Jennifer.
Jennifer Hiatt (33:03):
We hope you enjoyed this conversation with
author Eric Herrera on his book,Overbuilt: The High Costs and
Low Rewards of U.S.
Highway Construction.
You can get your own copythrough the publisher at Island
Press by supporting your localbookstore or online at
bookshop.org.
Remember to subscribe to theshow wherever you listen to
podcasts and please rate,review, and share the show.
Thank you for listening, andwe'll talk to you next time on
(33:23):
Bookdown Planning.
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