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
When a school is placed miles away from the families it serves, the consequences show up immediately.
Three case studies reveal how top-down funding creates rigidity, waste, and systems that cities cannot afford to fix or abandon.
The Ocean State’s roads and bridges are failing. Rather than prioritizing repair, officials pursued an $85 million expansion that will cost decades of future maintenance.
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The Complete Streets concept has run its course, not necessarily because the vision was flawed, but because the system it embedded itself into was never built to support it.
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