City Limits

Every major American city has a highway cutting through its center. Seventy years ago, planners presented these roads as the price and the proof of progress, a route to prosperity and to the freedom the automobile promised. Journalist Megan Kimble argues in City Limits that they delivered something else: neighborhoods split apart, families pushed out of their homes, a population tied to its cars, and a future locked into high emissions. Adding lanes did not even fix the traffic, which got worse the more highway was built.

Kimble finds the clearest view of the problem in Texas, where residents and activists in Houston, Dallas and Austin are resisting multi-billion-dollar highway expansions. The projects would take thousands of homes and businesses and deepen segregation and sprawl. She builds her account around the people in the path. In Austin, hundreds of families would lose their child care if a preschool is demolished to widen Interstate 35. In Houston, a young Black woman faces losing her brand-new home to an added lane on Interstate 10, only blocks from where a seventy-four-year-old nurse lost hers in the 1960s when the same road was first built.

The book also asks whether the answer is to stop widening old roads and take them out altogether. In Dallas, an urban planner has unexpectedly become a central voice in the national debate over highway removal. Kimble looks at cities where it has already happened, beginning with San Francisco and, more recently, Rochester, where tearing out a highway has brought new life to a divided city.

Combining the history of how urban highways came to be with close, on-the-ground reporting, City Limits counts the social and environmental price of a culture built around ever greater speed and distance. It also introduces the people working toward a more connected, sustainable future.