End Highway Expansion
We built highways to connect our towns.
But then we never stopped building them.
Core Insights
This is because we fundamentally misunderstand these things about highways:
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- Highways don’t address local transportation needs.
Highways are designed for long-distance, high-speed travel. They’re great for moving freight across states or connecting cities hundreds of miles apart. But when we try to use highways to provide access to local homes and businesses, we end up driving up congestion and making travel unsafe—even deadly.
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- Highways are a liability.
Highways come with massive short term costs in planning and construction, and long-term financial commitments for cities that are left with the maintenance and replacement bill.
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- Highways destroy financial productivity.
Highways don’t generate wealth for cities. In fact, they often destroy it. When a highway cuts through a city, it lowers the value of adjacent land, displaces residents and businesses, and fragments neighborhoods. That’s not just a social cost, it’s a financial one. You lose productive land and replace it with something that doesn’t pay for itself.
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- Highway development is driven by top-down priorities.
Cities often get help from state or federal sources to build highways, but once they’re built, the maintenance, policing, and infrastructure around them become local responsibilities. That’s a huge burden.
Latest Stories on Highways
We could save lives for far less than $58 million, but only if safety were the true priority.
On Ash Wednesday, 1966, a highway carved up New Orleans, taking families, flowers, and futures with it. Today, the attempts to rectify those wrongs stop short of actually treating the wound.
Removing an urban highway is a big win—but the work doesn’t stop there. Providence shows how cities can take the next steps to repair their communities.
North Carolina’s I-26 Connector illustrates everything wrong with the way state DOTs operate—especially in an area still recovering from Hurricane Helene. But it also shows how these systems can change.
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