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Erick Guerra, "Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction" (Island Press, 2025)
00:36:37
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- [00:00]
A
We heard you. Nine years of Bring back the Snack Wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:21]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Eric Guerra about his book titled Oliver Overbuilt the High Costs and low rewards of US highway construction, published by Island Press in 2025. Helping us make sense of the massive, massive network of the interstate highway system that crisscrosses the United States, in fact is visible from space, which is really saying something and is obviously a masterpiece in terms of, like, engineering and logistics. But that doesn't mean that, like everything about it is great. You know, we're going to get into the politics of it, the economics of it, but also what this means for sort of everyday people because it might seem on the face of it like, yay, more roads is good, right? The answer is not nearly as simple as a straightforward yes, and therefore more interesting too. So, Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us all about the highways.
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A
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:22]
B
Miranda, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [01:29]
A
Sure, I'd be happy to. So I'm a professor of City and Regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where I've been teaching and conducting research on relationships between urban structure, transportation systems and outcomes like public related to public health, traffic safety, pollution, travel behavior for, for the past, you know, 12 or 12 or 13 years. And I initially kind of, I guess the core of this book really comes from teaching Introduction to Transportation Planning to, to first year graduate students studying, studying transportation planning. And it wasn't a book I had necessarily planned to write, but over time, just this kind of creeping dissatisfaction with some of the narratives, particularly narratives around shifts in public policy that occurred in the 90s, really shaped my interest in writing this book and I think kind of in many ways helped me to reconcile some of my conflicting ideas about transportation policy and history in the United States. Hmm.
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B
Always interesting to hear about the origins of a project. Thank you for starting us off with that. To get into then kind of understanding what the system is and its impacts and how we might want to think about it beyond sort of hagiography. Can we talk about when and why this whole federal highway planning thing even starts.
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A
Sure, of course, yeah. So, you know, there had been a long, for, for a long time. You know, since the early 20th century, there was a pretty strong desire to build a modern highway network in the United States. What we call the modern highway, highway network shifted over that time. But the federal government really started to get involved in the, you know, particularly in the 1930s, there was this shift from a focus of federal policy on rural areas, particularly on kind of making it easier for farmers to get their goods to market a fair amount of regional travel. But early federal highway laws, they really focused on rural areas. And in fact, the match was limited to low density rural areas. Then in the 30s, we started to see mass proliferation of the automobile and there was a lot of congestion from cars in and around cities. You know, the, the introduction of cars into old urban fabric was not an easy or costless interaction. And around that point in time, the predecessor to the Federal Highway Administration really shifted gears from having a rural focus to focus on traffic jams in cities and building what we kind of think of today as a modern highway through and around cities.
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B
Hmm. Okay, this is interesting to think about.
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A
And so that only got us to the 30s. So the beginning of the 30s. And, and it took a long time to figure out how to, how to pay for was extremely expensive, particularly the cost of acquiring urban land. I mean, urban land is valuable. It's, you know, where we build houses, it's where we build office towers. And in a lot of the early highway projects, the cost of land was, you know, 90% of the costs of a highway project. You'd have to buy up a bunch of land, tear down a bunch of buildings, and then move a highway through it. And no one really had the money for it. You know, there were a few projects that predated the, you know, federal, you know, heavy federal involvement that came about in, in 1956 with the, with the Interstate Highways Act. But so, you know, it's roughly 25 years of trying to figure out how to pay for, for urban highways.
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B
Yeah, that's, that's a tricky challenge. I mean, how did they figure that out?
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A
You know, there were a number of different proposals and ideas. So President fdr, he actually commissioned the predecessor of the Federal Highway Administration to look into funding it through tolls. The Federal Highway Administration basically came back and said, this is, this is not possible to fund it through tolls. So they, they wrote this big, long report. Maybe the first third is showing that what the President asked for was not feasible. And then the second Third just kind of showed a different approach to funding it, which ultimately wound up relying on the gas tax. But it's interesting that, you know, they were asked basically to look into funding a much more modest highway system using a means that was much more closely tied to the use of specific highways. And they came back with a much larger plan that was less tied to the use of highways. Another. Another request from the president was to look at funding the system through a land value capture. So essentially, you know, the idea was, well, if. If highways are creating as much value as you're saying, let's. Let's buy up land not just for the highways, but for the. The land around the highways, and we'll use that increase in value of that land to fund the highway system. That. That was the basic idea. And the predecessor to the Federal Highway Administration essentially responded, that's a terrific idea. Let's take that extra land and then let's save it to widen the highways when there's more traffic. So in many ways, I think there was this disconnect between what politicians wanted to build and there was a pretty strong movement, almost. Sometimes historians refer to it as almost a religious, you know, belief in the need to build highways and to build a lot of them and to serve traffic. And there were a lot of highway engineers who were really focused on that and highway planners who. Who just were really committed to the idea that we needed a lot of highways in a lot of different places. So that kind of got us into, you know, the 1950s. Then we found a mechanism to fund it. Essentially, the federal government would match new highway construction on the interstate highway system, which was. Was capped in essentially was captain length, but not in width or in cost. And the federal government covered 90% of the. Of the costs, so 90% of the highway costs. And then state and localities would cover just 10, 10%. And that was what really kicked off highway construction in the United States.
- [08:10]
B
Got it. Okay. That's interesting to think about the evolution, but this disconnect as well, about kind of who wants what I think is worth spending a moment further on. Why was it sort of like we have to have these connecting all the things, like where did that idea come from if it's not coming from politicians? And is that also why the focus is so much on kind of urban areas like those? Both seem like not inevitable decisions, right?
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A
I think there's quite a mix. So anytime you have public policy, right, there are different constituencies who are looking to get different things out of it. And when we hear about the origins of the highway system. We often discuss military movement. The, you know, the, at the time, Department of War was, was involved in, in highway planning and published some of the first maps that would cover parts of the interstate highway system. But their agenda was extremely different from the highway engineers who are much more focused on urban traffic. And so for example, they, they generally wanted to avoid cities altogether just because cities have congestion and that would slow down the movement of, of military convoys. So that was against their interest in many ways. Many politicians didn't actually know what they were voting on. President Eisenhower famously got stuck in a, in a traffic jam in, in, in, in Washington D.C. and asked, oh well, like why are we stuck in this traffic jam? And it was because of interstate highway construction. He said why is the interstate being built through cities? That wasn't the plan. And that led to, you know, a commission looking at some, some problems with the early interstate programs, overspending, some, you know, little bits of corruption, and also just this, this idea that we're getting this construction that, that wasn't really what we thought we were getting, you know, from, from some, some politicians perspectives. And it wound up kind of almost leading to a pretty strong rebuke. There was a report written by, but at the end of the day it wound up just kind of not, not being a priority, not going anywhere. And essentially it came down to a conversation about maps and whether people in Congress, when they voted, whether they had access to these, these maps that had put together, been put together relatively hastily. You know, if you look at the old maps, it often, you know, it looks like someone took a, a black magic marker and drew, you know, lines around cities and, and that's often kind of the origin of specific highway plans in specific cities.
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B
That's kind of concerning when we think about sort of how these kinds of things get planned. So on the subject then of funding and planning, like how do these projects actually work? I mean, even for example, more recently than the 1950s, like what kinds of evaluations have to happen in order for a proposed project to get approval and fund it?
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A
Also, it's changed quite a bit over time. So I think you can kind of there, there are multiple periods of highway construction. In the early days, I think there was, there was very little that, that states. You know, both states were actually generally interested in building more highways, state departments of transportation. But localities often had very little control over what went into their cities or where. The cities that were able to stop federal highway construction, like San Francisco for example, the way that they stopped it was they, they didn't allow trucks to drive through local streets. So even though they couldn't control the federal government or the state government's ability to acquire land and build highways, they could stop actual construction just by denying access to local streets. So, so that, that happened similarly in Maryland. Local laws kind of allowed Baltimore to do similar things, although there, there was more of a mix in Baltimore in terms of what was allowed and disallowed. But you know, early highway construction, there was almost no relocation assistance given. You would essentially just get know if you, your house happened to be in the right of way, you get a letter in the mail and you get a letter in the mail saying, hey, here's a dollar. We've, we've taken your, your home. You have X number of days to be out of it. And then we will, you know, we'll assess fair value and we'll compensate you when, when we get around to it. And if you're a renter, no such such luck. There was zero relocation assistance in, in early highway construction. People often found out about highway plans by, you know, they go outside of their house and they'd see people measuring the right of way up to their house and you know, led, led to a fair amount of backlash and some of the early opposition to highways. And then today. So there's a lot of different facets that go into highway planning and it varies quite a bit by state and location. But I would say the most kind of common one way that you, you, you could think of kind of highway building right now. Well, first and foremost, most of what we do is reconstruct highway instead of build new highways. We've been building highways for, for decades and, and eventually they fall apart, need to be rebuilt, and we have this tendency to, to rebuild them wider with more lanes. We're also adding new new highways and, and increasing the amount of roadway footprint in other ways. But typically we do this through a process of kind of essentially looking at projections of population and economic growth, origins and destinations, and then making assumptions about the increases in traffic volume and building a highway network to meet that traffic volume, often as a shortcut. There's just this assumption that traffic will grow by 3% a year and 3% a year. That doesn't sound like very much. Right. That seems like a modest amount, but that means doubling your highway network to keep up with traffic every, every 20 years. So essentially do these maps look at where congestion is going to increase and then attempt to widen highways to, to meet that demand? And I'd say that's, that's largely how highways have been constructed since, since the originally planned Interstate was completed in the 90s. Some places are much more conservative a building, much fewer lane miles of urban highway. Often these are older places that have quite a bit already. And, and really most of the money is spent on reconstruction, maintenance. And there are other cities, you know, some cities in the south, cities in Texas, where construction really has, you know, continued quite rapidly, still quite a. Quite a lot of takings of private land to build. Build urban highways. And kind of going back to my original point, I think talking about some dissatisfaction with how we taught about the history of highway planning, we often kind of viewed this federal law, ICE T in the early 90s as being this transition point where we gave more power to local authorities through metropolitan planning laws. And that, that really shifted things. But, but looking at the data, we've added about 75% to the total lane miles of urban highways since then. So we've almost doubled the highway system. And we've also spent more money since then than. Than prior to then. So we've spent more since building the Interstate system than we. We spent to build it. And that's after adjusting for inflation.
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B
Yeah, that's, that's quite a lot. So I think there's two things in particular I'd love to pick up from that. This iced te thing in the 90s is was that a kind of break from the massive building before? I mean, you said we kind of. You mentioned, like, we often see it as a change, but was it a change?
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A
I think in some ways, yes, but probably in terms of the most fundamental important ways, no. I think it's also important to view it as a, you know, a series of responses to highway construction in the US and shifts in. In kind of how we approached highway building. So as I said before, the early highway building, there was essentially no compensation, no local autonomy, very little planning, just, you know, engineers drawing lines on maps and then. And then trying to get them built, you know, relatively cheaply. You know, over time, as there was more money, the focus was less on building cheaply and more on building wide and big. But, you know, there was a lot of backlash. And I think we sometimes talk about that backlash starting in the, in the 70s and 80s, but it was immediate. There were people who were dissatisfied with the, the highway program as soon as it started, and it just took a long time to kind of shift over overarching public policy. So there's a series of, of laws prior to, I see many of which required relocation assistance laws that you Know, forced, forced planners to, you know, think a little bit more kind of about how, how destructive it was to the environment and to surrounding neighborhoods and laws that allowed localities and states to spend money on transit instead of spending it on, on highways.
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B
Okay, that's an interesting aspect.
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A
So we had this, yeah, we had this kind of gradual shift over time. And then ice tea, at least, as you know, I think is often thought of and taught as this pivotal moment. But at the end of the day, I don't think it changed that much into fundamentally how we do transportation planning in the United States. And that's. We raise dedicated revenues through, you know, primarily through the gas tax, but through other means as well. And we use that money to build, widen, rebuild and maintain roadways. And we've built, widened and maintained an awful lot of it since ICE T. So if I kind of wanted to try and define U.S. highway policy Writ large, it would be to reconstruct and maintain an ever expanding roadway system. And there's really no stopping point. There's no end site. There's just, you know, we go through and we, we create these lists of, of projects. So we get these lists onto, you know, these are kind of desired regional highway projects. And we, we go and we put them on this list called the. The tip, which is a transportation improvement program. And what actually makes it onto the TIP is defined by how much money we have. And what gets built is defined by how much money we have. So there's never like this idea that a project is not a good project. It's just that there is not enough money. And if we had more money, we would spend it on more, more transportation investments.
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B
Okay, that's a really odd logic in a lot of ways, right? Like, I'm not hearing things around road safety. I'm not hearing things around sort of impact on the environment. Like, what is not part of these decision making that maybe should be?
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A
Well, I think that there's a lot kind of in laws about the environment, about road safety. So if you, even if you go back to early, early highway laws that predate the, the Interstate highway act, there, there are conversations about, you know, we've. Americans have lost more people to traffic collisions than we've lost in all of the wars that we fought. So, you know, that that's not a new statistic. That's, that's an old, that's an old statistic. And it comes up in early work to try and pass federal highway laws to fund highways. And I think part of the problem is that we viewed highways and expanding highway capacity as being synonymous with safety. So I had this really problematic idea that if we just built superhighways, there would be no crashes, and just ignored the fact that that wasn't true, that the more people were driving, the faster they were driving, the more collisions there were and the more deadly those collisions were. We still have about as many traffic fatalities in the United States as we did in the past. You know, population has obviously grown. The amount that people drive has grown even more substantially. But, I mean, if you imagine our system that we have today, with the cars that we had 50 years ago, the number of fatalities would be astronomical. So we've had some improvements in safety, but a lot of them really relate to vehicle technology. And if you compare the US to the, you know, the rest of, you know, the world of wealthy Western democracies or wealthy democracies, you know, looking at data from the oecd, the US has twice the traffic fatality rate of the average peer country, so doing substantially worse in terms of traffic safety than our peers.
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B
And could that be improved?
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A
Yeah, I think there are a number of ways to improve it. At the end of the day, if we think about traffic safety from the most simplistic mechanism, exposure and risk. We have exposure and risk, and Americans drive more, and they drive in less safe conditions. So we've got more exposure and we've got more risk per unit of exposure than other places. So we drive a lot and we drive in unsafe ways. And, you know, highways correlate pretty strongly, relate pretty strongly to. To both of those phenomena.
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B
Got it. Well, that makes unfortunate amounts of sense. There's some other aspects, of course, in terms of impact of highways that we haven't discussed yet, but I want to make sure we do, which is around the kind of social. I supp. Demographics or the people around highways, the people that do and don't have access to them. So can we talk about how this system that has been built up in this way has embedded inequalities that already exist but kind of continued them or made them worse? If we're thinking about things like class or race.
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A
Oh, for. For certain. You know, I think probably the easiest way to frame it is in most of the country, it's pretty terrible to live without a car. I mean, you need a car for getting to work, you need a car for going to school. You need a car for accomplishing nearly every basic, you know, activity outside of a handful of older cities or town centers. But really, most of the United States, most residents need a car for Almost all activities, owning and operating a car is also quite expensive. You know, there's quite a few people who can't afford it or struggle to afford it or are really at the margin where an increase in fuel prices has extreme effects on their, on their household budgets. And so you wind up in a situation where there just aren't really many other options. And so people who aren't well enough off really struggle with the land use and transportation systems that we've built and you know, are kind of living paycheck to paycheck and filling their gas tank and dealing with a minor or, or even worse, a major car repair or a collision. Those are really bank breaking challenges. So the system does not work well. If you, if you look at data on, on poverty. So across the United States from, you know, the 70s and 80s to, to the present, poverty has generally gone down. Like we, we see households doing better. However, if you look at households without access to a car, with the exception of places where you have really good transit, really good alternative opportunities, poverty has gotten worse. So the outcomes for, for kind of the households who can't pay into this system is, you know, among the worst outcomes in the, in the country.
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B
Yeah, that really is quite noticeable for anyone visiting or moving to the US I will say.
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A
I mean, I, I also think in many ways that the system does not work great for a typical American either if kind of 40% of households reporting that owning and operating a car is a, is a, is an important financial burden. And you know, we've, we've also kind of come up with these terms like, like hockey, mom and dad, chauffeur. These are, these are people whose lives are almost characterized by driving their kids around for, for like a certain period of their, of their lives. You know, the idea of just letting your kids walk to school or bike to the corner store, that's just not a real realistic option in so many parts of the country.
- [25:26]
B
Yeah, it definitely impacts kind of not just the people driving the cars, but everyone else in them and around them as well. Is it possible to change evaluation practices or funding practices or kind of any of this that we've discussed to improve things going forward? Obviously the highway system is there. One can't wave a magic wand and disappear it. So given where we're at now, what could be done going forward?
- [25:52]
A
I do think it's possible to change systems and I think it's very difficult to change outcomes without changing those two systems. So the first is finance and I think we really need to do a better job of disconnecting how we raise money from how much people drive to kind of ideally, from my perspective, we would shift to more of a system where if you're going to drive on a really congested urban highway during peak hours, you're paying more because that's a really expensive highway to drive on. And right now the system, we collect money from everywhere. So we collect it through the gas tax. Whether you're driving at night on a residential street or on an uncongested highway, we raise roughly the same amount of revenue and then we have a tendency to spend more to reduce the cost of travel in these places that are most expensive and most congested. So instead of kind of charging a lower, you know, a higher price where things are most expensive to build, we wind up subsidizing it. So I'd love to see us move away from that system. So instead of considering widening a busy highway, you would consider raising the price. And often raising the price. You know, that that will kind of help traffic diffuse throughout the day, shift to other parts of the network that aren't as busy. And it's, it keeps us from this idea that the only way to deal with traffic is to build more and more. Because we found that when we do build more and more people drive more and more. And the system is kind of a bit of a, I mentioned the 3% growth. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you double your highway network, you wind up doubling traffic over time. Not congestion, but traffic the amount that people are driving. And in terms of. So that, that's one approach, I think that's, you know, a more complicated approach. I think it could work well in a number of different cities. I think so long as you remove the gas tax, you know, got rid of some mechanisms of funding to, to replace them with others. I think that you could build some political constituency for that. There would of course be winners and losers, but overall it would tend to lead to a more modest highway system where our default wasn't this ever expanding network of ever widening highways. So I think that's one approach and another approach, and I think that this is much more common in the rest of the world, is just to take transportation revenues through the gas tax or whatever it is, and instead of dedicating them to transportation projects, just put them in the general fund. That's what most other countries do. And then highway projects need to compete with other important public policy. You know, whether it's, it's school education policy, safety policy, whatever it happens to be and I think that that's a relatively simple way to address the problem. We're also at a point where things likely need to change sometime soon. The reason being we haven't seen an increase in the gas tax since the 90s, and it's also not kept up with inflation. So we're essentially collecting a lot less transportation revenue per gallon of fuel consumed. And cars have also become a lot more efficient. So the average fuel economy of cars, the number of electric vehicles, they've all gone up. And as a result, there's a lot fewer dollars raised per mile driven. And so we're reaching the point where the system has to change in some way. So I think it is an opportune moment to consider moving away from a finance system that is. Is really focused on building more highways and encouraging more driving to a system that thinks about what's an optimal highway network. How do we try and get there? How do we make sure that we're not building highways that are. That are more expensive than. Than they're worth? How. How do we get a system where we're not kind of building beyond our means, which is what. What we're doing now in terms of evaluation, I'd love to see us shift focus to evaluating what matters more, which is not, you know, how fast you go, it's not how far you go. What matters is whether you can get to work, how long it takes you get to work, whether your kids can get to school, whether you're able to accomplish your daily activities. And if you're in a place where Your trip is 30 minutes at, you know, 50 miles an hour, is that that different from a place where your trip is 30, you know, 30 minutes at 25 miles per hour. So the trip 30, 30 minutes at 25 miles per half, you're going to have a lot fewer traffic fatalities. You're going to be producing a lot less pollution. There's going to be a lot more opportunities to get places by walking. There's going to be, you know, a very different feel to that type of place. And at the end of the day, I think. I think we want to move towards a more conservative system, one where the benefits of the transportation network are more in line with the costs.
- [31:06]
B
Yeah, I think that sounds like there would be a lot of improvements from that kind of change. Is this the sort of thing that you're continuing to work on, or have you moved on to another project? Is there anything you have on your desk at the moment you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [31:20]
A
I always have Too many projects going on. I often work on smaller, narrower, more technical projects. So I'm working on some studies looking at the safety effects of curb extensions or bump outs where you take the area at the corner of a sidewalk and you kind of extend it, prevent people from parking there so you get better sight lines and better crossing distances. I'm not working on a similarly large project to a book on U.S. transportation policy. I have started a project looking at minibuses. I do a lot of work in Latin America and places that are pretty reliant on minibuses for moving people around. I also think that with vehicle automation, so thinking about self driving waymo cars, there's really an opportunity to improve public transportation in the types of places where public transportation has not been an option, essentially because the density is too low, destinations are too far spread out. You know, bus drivers are, are expensive. And you know, we, we tend to have, you know, a bus moving through space, but if we don't have enough passengers for the bus, the bus only comes every hour, every two hours. It's not a very useful way to get around. But through automation, it becomes more feasible to run smaller vehicles at more frequent intervals. And I think that can really change the dynamic for where public transportation or mass transportation by, by public, I don't necessarily mean that it's, you know, owned and operated by, by the public. It could be owned and operated privately like most transit in the United States until the, until the 1950s and 1960s. So I think there's some opportunities there. So I'm kind of working on a potential book project there. But mostly it's smaller, concrete, often funded research projects.
- [33:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. No one can work on a massive book at all times.
- [33:26]
A
But it sure is fun though. And it's really fun to have the opportunity to speak with you and to speak with others and talk about larger issues like, you know, public policy writ large.
- [33:39]
B
Well, if any listeners want even more, they can of course, go read the book we've been talking about titled Overbuilt the High Costs and low rewards of US highway construction, published by Island Press in 2025. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [33:54]
A
Thanks so much, Miranda. Have a great.