The world's largest public works investment visible from space, the Interstate Highway System and the hundreds of thousands of miles of supporting roadways, are frequently hailed as a marvel and triumph of engineering. President Eisenhower's 1956 Interstate Highway Act is often praised as a model of successful bipartisanship.
Today, the extensive damage wreaked by the creation of the highway system and the ills of car dependency are more widely acknowledged. Congestion and traffic deaths remain endemic despite nearly three-quarters a century of public policies and trillions of dollars spent with a primary stated goal of reducing congestion and improving traffic safety. The financing, governance, and construction models established by the 1956 act continue to influence what gets built today.
In Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction, transportation planning expert Erick Guerra describes how the US roadway system became overbuilt, how public policy continues to encourage overbuilding, what the scale and consequences of overbuilding are, and how we can rethink our approach to highway building in the US.
Guerra explains that the national propensity to build roadways is no longer official or intentional policy. Instead, overbuilding stems from the institutions, finance mechanisms, and evaluation metrics developed in the first half of the twentieth century. While more funds are set aside for transit, walking, biking, and beautification, the investment paradigm has not changed. Planners and engineers have not adjusted the tools they use to determine which roads should be built, rebuilt, or widened and why. The country has added more lanes of urban Interstate since declaring the Interstate system complete than prior to it.
Despite having too much roadway, the country is still operating in construction mode, using the same basic approach used to finance and build the interstate system quickly, Guerra states. The interstate was completed more than three decades ago. Overbuilt argues convincingly that it is time to move on.
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"The lessons that emerge from Overbuilt are valuable for any country or city struggling with car dependency…. Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding."
" "No matter how much you think you know about the unfortunate legacy of America's interstate system, and the many ways that highways have mutilated, divided, and compromised our cities, you'll find new insights in Erick Guerra's Overbuilt. This concise book demolishes the false arguments that policymakers and politicians have used for decades to prioritize highway construction over everything else we value."---Inga Saffron, Pulitzer Prize-winning Architecture Critic, 'Philadelphia Inquirer' "The fact that we overbuilt our highway system in many parts of the country might not be all that surprising. But how and why we ended up in this situation? Those stories are worth telling, especially if we want to stop making the same mistakes time and time again. I'm thrilled that Erick Guerra did so-and did so so well. I honestly had to find another highlighter while reading this book because my first one ran out."---Wes Marshall, Author of 'Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System' "An eye-opening exploration of how outdated funding policies and evaluation measures have created an interstate system in the United States that was designed to expand, not evolve. Guerra challenges us to rethink the criteria that determine what gets built, advocating for a slow-yet-necessary process of "unbuilding" to make safer, smarter, more responsible choices for the future."---Leslie S. Richards, Professor of Practice, Department of City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
