The Strong Towns Podcast
Since finishing the Interstate Highway System in the 1990s, the U.S. has added 75% more urban highway lanes — and we're on track to double it again. Erick Guerra, author of "Overbuilt" and professor of regional planning, joins Chuck to discuss why we can't stop building highways we don't need and how our transportation funding system creates cities that are more dangerous and less prosperous.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. Erick Guerra is a professor of regional planning and associate dean for research at the University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is also the author of "Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction." I got to say, when I first saw the title of this book, I thought, "Absolutely genius, perfect, I want to read this book." So it's a thrill to be able to speak to you, Professor Guerra. Welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast.
Thanks so much for having me on, Chuck. It's a pleasure to be here.
"Erick" is gonna be okay for our conversation?
Please, yeah, that's my preferred name.
Wonderful. Well, I know you've got a PhD, and I know you're doing important work, so I'm glad you took the time to come and chat with us. Your book starts with looking at basically the intent of the interstate system and the federal involvement in highway construction. Can we start there? What were we trying to accomplish? What were we trying to do? And how did that go?
I think in many ways, particularly early Federal Highway planning and early investments in the highway system were primarily focused on rural parts of the country, specifically getting goods to market, getting farmers out of the mud. We really started to see a shift in the 1930s in particular. Some cities did some work predating that, but at the federal level, and in terms of the state departments of transportation level, we really start to see a focus on urban congestion starting in the 1930s. We have this shift from getting the farmers out of the mud to getting urban motorists out of traffic jams.
And then we have this period of time, the Depression, World War Two. I feel like we've nostalgized the building of the Interstate Highway System. The act that created it has all this nostalgia but also, I think in some circles, conspiracy around it. I've joked a few times that there's a bunch of people who think that "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is a documentary. But there is a lot of truth to the idea that there was a vision and then there was implementation, and maybe there's some divergence in that. How did the Interstate Highway System, culturally, politically, come about? What was it trying to do?
Oh, so much. I mean, I would say it takes from 1930 essentially 25 years to get the Interstate Highway System financed and to really shift laws in ways that encouraged and enabled really urban highway construction. I would say you have two parallel things going on. One is the way that people are promoting and advertising the Interstate Highway System. I think when we look back on it today, we often focus on that. We focus on things like defense, suburbanization, this intentional plan. But if you look at the early documents, it's really run by a number of highway engineers. Many of them came up building rural highways, and they developed all of these plans. They developed all these maps and they're really the ones who decided where highways were going to go, much more so than politicians or city planners or different city managers. So they were really largely responsible, and in many ways, it was behind the scenes.
There's a famous story of President Eisenhower getting stuck during interstate construction outside of DC, and he asked his driver, "What are we stuck in?" He's told, "Oh, we're stuck in interstate construction." Then he responds, "Wait, I thought we were building them around cities." This sparks a whole internal investigation into what is going on with the highway system. But at the end of the day, I would say the highway engineers went out. They say, "We provided these maps, we provided these plans to Congress. They knew what they were voting on." But the person most associated with the interstate highway system and enabling legislation really wasn't aware of where they were going.
So again, this idea, I think there were really two parallels: what was actually going on on the ground, and what we're saying we're doing, which is about connecting the country, defense. But a lot of what we were really doing, particularly in the early years, was really focused on building urban highways.
It's fascinating to me, because I was just thinking as you were talking—this is a tangent off of your notes—we're having this debate in this country over the role of institutions and the role of experts and the role of people with specialized knowledge to make decisions on our behalf. It's fascinating to me, because I think the default, often particularly among people who, I'll say this ungenerously, I think people who would fall into that highly educated, maybe technocratic class would say, "Well, of course, we should empower the experts." I feel the Interstate Highway System is the quintessential example of empowering the experts. Even today, we often see that we defer to the expertise of engineers. This was a system that did diverge pretty quickly from, I will guess, the founders' intent or the intent of the politicians who drove it forward. Does that analysis ring true to you? Is that fair?
I think there was a lot of people not really knowing exactly what they were voting on. This law that really provided $9 of match for every local $1 that was put into highway construction really cleared out any of the other obstacles or worries, just because that's such a large amount of money. If you're a locality, essentially, if you can find $1 and get $9, it makes sense just to dig holes in the backyard and fill them up because it's going to bring in a lot of revenue.
I think the intentions of the highway planners were good. I mean, they had this view. I think it was a pretty myopic view. I think that they often kept up this view against all evidence, many of them. There's a nice oral history project from the '80s where they go and interview a lot of the early highway engineers, and many of them reflect on their careers saying, "I really wish we had known more and done this differently." Some, of course, really doubled down. But the idea was, "We're doing this for modernization. This is in the best interest of the country." But they tore down hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and apartments. It was extremely disruptive.
Going into the contemporary narrative of the Interstate Highway System and the early years of construction, I think it's also easy to forget how immediate the backlash was. There were a lot of city planners, some engineers, real estate developers who really thought that it was a bad idea, that there was almost no planning. We had just drawn a few lines on the map, and we were making some pretty impactful decisions with really limited analysis. When there was a highway moratorium in Massachusetts, Governor Sargent just said, "We're going to stop building urban highways for a couple years, figure out what's going on." They went and studied the highway systems. They really could not find a clear articulation of what we were doing or why. So there really wasn't—there was this belief we need to build highways, we need to enable urban traffic. But beyond that, I think there was not much thought that went into it.
I would say, unfortunately, this is one of the critiques of the book: when we largely finished the interstate highway system, at least the originally planned system—there's a few different dates you can pick, I think early '90s is probably the best—but when we finished it, we really thought, "Oh, what are we going to do next?" Unfortunately, I think we really kept a lot of the financing in place, and we kept a lot of the evaluation in place, and that's really kept us on the same trajectory that we were on. We're not tearing down nearly so many homes. We're not destroying nearly so many businesses when we build and widen highways. But we've added since 1991 75% to the urban lane miles of interstate highway system. That's almost a doubling, and based on the last two decades, we will have doubled the urban highway network that we had when we finished the system in the next 20 years or so.
I find this part fascinating, because there is this transition between we set out to do what we plan to do, and you said early 1990s. I think early 1990s is the time when the last bits of the original interstate were finished, besides a few urban connections. I think that was the point in time where we're substantially finished, or substantially complete, or something. But most of it was actually built by even the late 1970s. You had the vast majority of it built a couple, a decade and a half earlier than that, even.
A lot. We really built the urban highways quickly. Yeah, in many ways, that's what funded the system. So if you look at the most disruptive, the most damaging highways, they were largely built in the '60s and '70s. But we still had large areas that needed to be connected, to connect through rural, pretty low population areas, and really create this interstate system, as opposed to a series of metropolitan highway systems.
Okay, I want to talk about that transition in the early 1990s because you dove into ISTEA. For me, ISTEA was the thing I was in civil engineering school '91 to '95, and so that was the thing that I was birthed into as an engineer, this world of ISTEA. I was not in the interstate world. That was the engineers that were teaching me were part of that world. I feel there's a bunch of things to explore here, but to me, the first one was the fascinating decision to not say, "Hey, mission accomplished. We're done. We completed this system. Let's wind down the Federal Highway Trust Fund. Let's go back to something." What was the vision in going on? What was the idea here?
There was a lot of discussion about what should happen. I think many highway builders, many politicians thought this was maybe a moment for the federal government to get a little more out of the business of highway development. There's an oral history project, and a lot of the engineers talk about it. A lot of the politicians talk about what comes next, and they talk about it in terms of the end of the Interstate Highway System, or the end of the system, but the end of the finance and construction.
The construction phase, yeah.
But I would say what we wound up with was giving a bit more control to localities around design of highways and the extent to which funding could be spent on transit. A lot of that came from earlier laws from the late '70s and the '80s. But I would say at the end of the day, most of what we had was a continuation and a continuation of two things. One, continuing to raise revenues for the highway system, primarily through the gas tax, and taking those revenues and dedicating them to transportation investments. So this idea that the more people are driving, the more revenue we're going to raise, and the more we're going to spend on building highways. Of course, as we've built more and more, we spend more and more on reconstruction and maintenance. Every highway eventually needs to be rebuilt, and it costs as much as it cost to build in the first place, potentially more. So we're spending less on new highways, but we continue to add to the system. Over time, it's really compounded. So that didn't change with ISTEA, the major shift in federal transportation law. So that didn't really change.
The other thing that didn't really change was the primary way that we evaluate highway systems, which is we forecast. We've been doing this since the early 1900s. We essentially look at origins and destinations, and if we're doing a careful analysis, we project population growth, jobs growth, make some assumptions about where traffic is going to go, and then say, "Hey, if we don't build enough highways to accommodate this forecast traffic, we're going to have gridlock traffic." Then we look at the difference between non-gridlock traffic and gridlock traffic, and assume we create all of these economic benefits by building the highway system. We've continued to measure highways that way. As you well know, we often don't even do that sophisticated analysis. We just say traffic is going to increase by 3% per year, and that doesn't sound like that much, but that means we double traffic every 20 years. The compounding is a lot. So we're stuck in this forever building more for more and more traffic. Of course, that creates traffic. It makes it easier to get around. It makes it harder to be able to walk to the corner store. It makes it harder to live in an environment that's not completely highway travel dominated. When I say highway travel dominated, I mean I'm including the arterials you need to use to get onto a highway to experience that system. It's not just the limited access highways.
You brought up the idea of local control in that early 1990s shift. A lot of our audience will be familiar with at least the stories of Jane Jacobs fighting Robert Moses over urban highway expansions, and this idea of local control, I feel, was to address or acknowledge the tension that was there when top down planners decide, "Here's where the highway is going to go," and then people have very little chance to resist that. You get the environmental requirements for review and all that coming in the '70s and '80s, and now in the '90s, we're going to tie the finance to that. That seems like a great thing. You've got local control, and now you have federal dollars backing local priorities. What actually happened?
Oh, I mean, one thing I would say is local control does not necessarily mean your local municipality, or the town that you live in. It's often a state department of transportation as an example, because Houston, the mayor's office recently sued the DOT over plans to widen the highway, and I can't remember if they lost or they're withdrawing that lawsuit. But local control does not mean that the city or town has the ultimate say. It often is just devolved to a state department of transportation or a regional governance body like a metropolitan planning organization, and they have varying degrees of control and power. Some of them are essentially rubber stamps, whatever the DOT is doing and focuses on compliance with federal laws. Others, particularly in larger metropolitan areas, are much more involved in trying to coordinate planning efforts across cities, potentially across states. So my metropolitan area is in Pennsylvania and also New Jersey. That's quite common for metro areas to be multi-jurisdiction.
One of the things I found fascinating in your book was this idea that with this shifting from more localized project selection, you actually wind up with less—what I'm going to call more sensitivity to tearing down homes, to other things—but you develop less sensitivity to project costs. I'm going to set that up, because I know a lot of what we talk about, particularly when it comes to transit in this country, but even when it comes to highway construction, is that, "Oh, Europe does it so much cheaper than we do. Oh, China does it so much cheaper than we do." I think in a lot of ways, we did it cheaper than what we do. We used to do it cheaper. Can you talk about that cost trade-off, or that engineering trade-off between the sensitivity that we developed because we were going into areas where you could not not run into existing stuff? I mean, not every highway was built across Kansas. How did this impact our approach? And how did this impact costs?
Well, we built much more cheaply in the past. I think some of the early highway construction efforts, essentially 90% was land acquisition. I will say also at the end of the day, particularly in urban settings, we probably vastly underpaid for the value of the land to put highways in, essentially kicking people out of their homes, sending them a check and saying, "Hey, we'll assess the fair value of your home and get back to you and give you money." I mean, that's horrible. Yeah, it's horrible. It's also, at the end of the day, I think those checks that people were receiving were really probably not what their homes were worth. I don't even mean on an emotional level, because obviously on an emotional level, that's an extremely painful thing to go through. But urban land is worth a lot, and the urban land that highways sit on today, it's tremendously valuable.
I've talked to a few friends and colleagues about this, about the escalating costs. This is probably one of the few areas where I could say it's good that highways cost as much as they cost to build, because if they cost less, we'd be building more. I did an analysis with an urban economist at the University of Pennsylvania, Gilles Duranton. We did a little simulation: if we added about 10% of the highways, which is a fairly reasonable amount that we've been adding every decade or so, maybe a little bit less, we found that the construction costs were probably about, maybe 85 to 95% of the benefits that we estimated. But as soon as you start factoring in the land value, which the construction costs don't factor in, and as soon as you start factoring in external costs, like pollution, traffic fatalities, you start to see a very different picture, where the costs of new highways substantially outweigh their benefits. If we have a fixed sum of money, a fixed pot of money, and we build as many highways as we can based on that fixed pot of money, having cheaper highways means we're building more. So long as we're not factoring in those other costs, we'd probably be a little bit worse off by paying less for highways. I can't think of another public good that I would say that about. I think that's how far overbuilt we are, is shown just in that idea that, "Well, would we be better off if highways were cheaper to build?" And the answer is probably no. That really means that we're building highways we should not be building.
Yeah, you just said something about land values that I find fascinating. I've always struggled with the idea that highways connect places, and that's tremendous. I live in Brainerd, Minnesota. I'm two hours north of Minneapolis-St. Paul, about two hours and 20 minutes north of the airport. It is a massive benefit for me to be able to get on a highway and drive to the airport. It's just huge. But I also live six blocks from the highway through the middle of the city, and that highway is a huge negative on my property values, on the property values between me and the people who live along that highway. We can show how having that highway there, yes, brings traffic. If you're the gas station, you're well, "I need that traffic." If you're the big box store, the strip mall, that whole street's been reconfigured over the past two generations to respond to that. But it's done that because the land, the actual land values have dropped tremendously because of the negativity of that highway, not to mention the added space that it takes up. Why are we so cavalier about land values? Why is land value not something we're seeking to maximize or look at? When we do the benefit-cost analysis, it's not even part of the calculation that anyone uses.
It's never been, it was never really factored in. It was really factored in in the 1930s, and it was really factored in because we had a lot of planners and engineers saying, "We really want to build more highways, but oh my gosh, it's so expensive to acquire urban land," and that's because urban land is quite valuable. In some ways, you saw this shift where many of the proponents of building more urban highways started to get into concepts of urban renewal, and this general idea that, "We should demolish buildings. We should tear things down for the sake of tearing them down. They're bad for the city to begin with." But you wonder at this really strange paradox where people were both saying, "This land is so worthless, we should just tear it down," but "By the way, it's so expensive that we can't hope to buy it." I think that really showed some of the contradiction there where tearing things down for the sake of tearing things down was pretty poor policy. But you can see highway builders gravitate towards that for reasons that make a lot of sense. They wanted to build urban highways, and this was an easy avenue for land acquisition.
Right. We have all heard the redlining stories. I mean, I do feel they targeted neighborhoods that were easier to acquire, but not necessarily ultimately having less value. I don't even mean the social value, but the underlying land values were tremendous, just tremendous.
Yeah. I did want to just respond to your earlier comment as well and draw that into the conversation. Highways and roadways are tremendously useful. We use them to get places. I like to talk about them as the negative space. So they're the negative space that help form a city, and the city, maybe, is the positive space. If you use a painting analogy, you can't really have a painting without negative space. You have form, and you have the things that bring the form together. But roads are also a land use. So every acre of roadway is an acre that is not homes, it's not businesses, it's not parks. So there is some trade-off. You don't want to have a place that has no roadway. You don't want to have a place that has no highways, but you also don't want a place that just consists entirely of highways. You want to have somewhere to go. I think that's a reason we really do need to factor in land values, because at the end of the day, yeah, it might be more convenient to move. It's easier to move, but there wind up being fewer places to go.
Most Americans are pretty happy to drive for most of their trips. I think that's a very reasonable response. It's very convenient. It's a great way to get where you need to go. At the same time, I think that people often would like to live closer to where they work, or be able to walk to a corner store or have more options that are nearby. I think the way that we evaluate transportation investments, we don't really factor that in, and land value is one way to factor it in.
My favorite part of this book—your professorial approach kind of came through. But I could picture you sitting and reasoning this through, which is my favorite. I'm not a "cite this study, cite this study" guy. I'm a "let me give you a thought exercise" guy. You do this great thought exercise where you're, "Okay, if there's no roads at all, what happens?" We're completely disconnected. "Okay, if everything is a road, what happens?" There's no value. There's no worth. Then you have this reason exercise where you're trying to find what is the range of where this makes sense. I mean, you just did talk through that a little bit, but that was my favorite part of the book, because I really like the way you think about this. It's a healthy thought exercise that engineers could do, but have never been asked to do, and have never pushed themselves to do.
I would say, I think that's one of the biggest challenges of the profession, is we don't have a stopping point. We just have a list of projects, and we just stop funding them because we don't have enough money. If we had infinite money, we would have infinite roadway and transit projects. Because professionally, that's just not part of how we've designed the evaluation system or the financing system.
So this podcast I want you to do most of the talking, but I feel I have a story that you will appreciate.
I would love to hear it. I love the stories in your book as well.
Oh, thank you. So here I am. It's probably 1997. I'm an engineer in training. I went out to the city. I did this study of all their roadways, and the condition that they're in. I drove every one, I measured every one. I did all this analysis. My boss, the engineer, one of my bosses—I had many bosses at that point, but one of the engineers was there at the meeting. This city, it was a small town, Crosby, Minnesota. Their whole budget was probably $800,000 a year, and they were probably spending $150,000 to $200,000 on roadways. By our analysis, in order to maintain the roads that they had, they needed to spend $1.2 million a year, some insane amount of money that they were never going to do. I remember putting this report together thinking, "Well, they're screwed. This is crazy."
My boss, we got to this meeting, and this is a really good guy. He goes to my church. I like him a lot. He's a sweet man. I think he genuinely cares about society. This is not a "Hey, I'm a consultant, just pay me." But his advice to the city was, I'll actually quote, almost paraphrase what he said. He goes, "We find ourselves in this situation a lot, where cities just feel overwhelmed by the amount of projects. So what we recommend you do is just cover your eyes, pick one of the projects off the sheet, and we'll just get started, and we'll just make as much progress as we can."
I remember walking away from that meeting going, "That's crazy. That's nuts." There's no other realm of society where we would just say, "Hey, in order to do what we all expect we're going to do, we have to spend six times more than what we're doing. We're never going to do that. So let's just do what we can." I'm, "What? How is that optimizing anything?" I feel your book makes that case. That policy of covering our eyes and picking the next five projects, that's national policy when it comes to transportation.
I agree. I mean, I think in many ways, we need to find some way to come up with a stopping point. We need some ways to really think about whether benefits outweigh costs, and how we approach things when they don't. Unfortunately, the way we evaluate transportation investments is just not, it's not set up to do that.
Can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, this is—you did quote me in this part, and I was, "Oh, I'm in this book." This has been a passion of mine, because I feel this is insane. But I'd love the audience to hear your take on the benefit-cost analysis.
I mean, I would say we don't really do benefit-cost analysis at all. Occasionally we do it. We have a system. We have a federal HERS system, which I critique a little in the book, just because it's not actually designed like a cost-benefit analysis at all. It's just designed to encourage greater packages of roadway investment rather than smaller packages of roadway investment. It uses some of the terminology of economics, but it's very uneconomical in its thinking, where the idea would be we really don't want to do any projects where the costs are outweighing the benefits unless, of course, there may be socially important reasons. We might, for example, it might be really important to connect rural parts of the country where you don't have much traffic, but people live there and it's important. So it's not all about economic costs and benefits.
But that said, we're really not looking at costs or benefits. Instead, we have fixed sums of money, pots of money, and then we have lists of projects to prioritize that are often based on where we're projecting growth in traffic, where that 3% compounded over time is going to have the largest effects on capacity. Then we figure out which ones we can build, and we try and build them. Then we try and maintain and rebuild everything else that we've already built as well. So if I were to define our national policy, it would be to spend ever more money rebuilding and repaving an ever widening system. There's no real stopping point.
Let's talk about that rebuilding. I feel there's been this push to focus on maintenance, and I've watched this push, and even the politicians will say, "We should maintain what we have," and then I watch the projects come out the other end when they're called maintenance, and I look at them and I'm, "I'm an engineer. That's an expansion project. That's not a maintenance project. What is this?" I think you even called it stealth expansion at some point. What is the phenomena? What is going on, and what's the net result from that?
So, I mean, often every highway has a shelf life. You can repave it—depending on how it was built, we'll just say, let's just say 40 years. There's a lot of variance, but let's say, after about 40 years, an interstate highway you built through the city, it needs to be rebuilt. Over that period of time, one thing that's happened is standards have changed in many ways. So now maybe you used to have an 11-foot-wide lane, and now our minimum we want to build is 12 feet. Maybe we'll add in a buffer. We'll make it 13 feet. We're actually going to add a lane, but we're not going to call it a lane, because it's a breakdown lane. But we'll wind up using it during the AM peak. Maybe we'll add a few on-ramps and off-ramps, which consume tremendous amounts of land. These off-ramps, on-ramps, maybe you're taking up a whole block. So we say it's just a reconstruction project. We're not officially adding capacity.
I will say there's a lot of difference in different parts of the country, how increases in capacity are viewed. But if you go into a city, most people don't want added highway capacity. They know what it means. They know that it's going to mean more traffic at the on- and off-ramps. They know it's going to be more people speeding through their neighborhoods. So typically, in a city like Philadelphia, there's resistance. Most neighbors don't want to see more highway. So we have these projects, and we say, "All right, we're just rebuilding them, and we're rebuilding them as is." But at the same time, we might be adding 20 feet to the right-of-way because we've widened the lanes, because we've added an extra safety lane. Then we also might be consuming quite a bit more land because we're adding more on- and off-ramps at different locations. But that said, we do a lot of just capacity expansions as well. We say, "We're going to add two lanes to a highway." In many places, that is, no one is going to complain about that. It just goes through as part of the process. When we rebuild the highway, we'll add a couple lanes, or we'll add a lane.
Well, you had this stat that blew my mind, because I didn't know this. You said that urban interstate lane miles expanded 73% since 1991, since ISTEA, since the end of the interstate era. We've increased by three-fourths the number of lane miles we have. That's not a system that is maintaining itself.
No, it's this ever-expanding system, and each new lane mile, those are things that are on the books now to be rebuilt. Those are things that are on the books now to be repaved. But yeah, we've been, I wouldn't even say slowly, but just steadily, steadily adding to the urban highway system.
I've been tracking the American Society of Civil Engineers reports for the last—I don't know, since I think 2011 was the first one that I wrote about. It's been fascinating to me, because every time that a report comes out, the backlog of maintenance goes way up. In the last one, it was, I want to say, $3.9 trillion, and the prior one was $2.7 trillion. But the grade got better. We're doing better now. I think it had to get better because the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, and that was the propaganda around it: "Well, this will, this is a real serious down payment on infrastructure maintenance and this backlog and all that." You quoted Beth Osborne, who I adore, as saying the act was a "supercharged status quo." How should people be thinking about this succession of "We're going to have a big infrastructure bill, we're going to try to shore up the trust fund"? How should we be thinking about this as we think into the future? I mean, we're sitting here on September 29th. The Federal Highway Trust Fund expires in one year. How should people be thinking about that in terms of what we do with transportation as a country?
I think we should really be thinking of it as a key moment where we have the ability to redesign the system. I'm really worried that at the end of the day, we just decide to replace the gas tax with a VMT tax and have nearly the same system we've had for the last 80 years. I think it's a real opportunity. There are some, I would call them, strange ways that we think about highway spending in the US. So as an example, we raise about the same amount of revenue per trip or per mile of car travel from the gas tax, or if we replace it with a VMT tax, it will likely be similar. But we raise about the same amount of money from every trip. It could be a rural trip on a quiet road. It could be in your neighborhood, and it could also be in the densest part of a city at the peak hour, driving through downtown Boston or driving through downtown Houston, creating a lot of congestion, a lot of pollution.
What we do with the revenues is we tend to subsidize those most expensive trips. So we take money from throughout the entire system, and then we try and make it cheaper to drive at the time when we probably want fewer people driving. As a result, we subsidize those trips and we get more of them. I'm still looking for the best—I haven't come up with it. So if you can come up with it, I would love to hear it—I want an analogy that resonates well with people. I'll give you an example of the one that I have been trying to use. It's imagine everyone paid a tax on T-shirts, and then we just took all of that revenue and we used it to try and make the really expensive designer T-shirts as cheap as possible. Or we just spent it all to subsidize the Louis Vuitton or, I don't even know. As a result, you have more people buying those. That's essentially what we do. We have more people driving at these times when it's extremely expensive. So you don't really pay for that trip that's leading to tearing down a bunch of homes and a bunch of businesses in the city, because there's traffic that's being subsidized by every other trip, that highway expansion.
I would love for us to move toward a system where we raise revenue from the trips that are really expensive. The reason is, when we do that, we can offset the need to build that highway in the first place, to widen it. Instead of saying, "Hey, we know it's really expensive to drive through the city at 8 AM. Let's not try and make it cheaper. Let's actually raise money from that part of the system and use that to fund the highway system." I think we wind up with a much more rational system where, at least when it comes to urban, congested hours, people are paying for what they get, rather than paying substantially less than what they're getting. Because the trade-off, unfortunately, as I said before, it's that it's less stuff, it's more highway, and it's less city, less suburb.
I came up—this was over a decade ago—I wrote a series of articles about the idea that we should have an access tax. I might have even put this in my book. The idea that if you're on a highway, but you're in the middle of nowhere, the access tax would be really cheap, because there's not that much traffic going by. But as you get to either a high volume area or a high land value area, that the access tax would go up. My thinking was, I watch local governments argue for the interchange or the access or the traffic signal or what have you, and it destroys what I've said is they mine the investment that we collectively make in moving people over distance. They mine that for local land use access so I can get the Walmart and the drive-through restaurant and the gas station and the strip mall by just saying, "You invest lots of money in building this highway and then give me the access to it." Now all of a sudden, I get this sugar high of growth that went nowhere. It went nowhere because it's almost too complicated of a system. How would you—I wouldn't know what my tax would be next year, because if we were really successful and had lots of vehicles, then my—
We had two presidential requests for looking into fund the Interstate Highway System in ways that would have been so much more constructive and so much less damaging. One was to fund it with land values. So essentially saying, "Well, if these highways are so beneficial, they're going to increase the land value. So let's go ahead and we'll buy up a little bit of extra land, and we will take the revenue from that, the added value to the land, and we'll use that to pay for the highway system." I think the response there from the then Federal Highway Administration—Chief McDonald was the bureau chief at the time—was, "Oh, that's great. Let's buy up that extra land and we can use it to widen the highways when there's more traffic in the future." It went away from a revenue-raising mechanism.
The other thing was toll roads. So the president initially asked the Federal Highway Administration, or its predecessor, to look at, "How can we fund this system through tolls?" The response was a two-part report. The first part was, "We can't fund this through tolls," and the second part was, "Let's do it this other way instead." That was largely the blueprint for the interstate highway system.
But had you done either of those two things, the nice thing about a toll is you can increase it. You can change the rates on a toll for trips that are really expensive. If people have been trying to build a highway through Midtown Manhattan for—I guess they've finally given up—but that's 80 years, actually more like 100 years, to build a highway, and that would be so expensive. So if you're using that highway, you ought to pay a lot of money for it. If you're not willing to pay that amount of money to use that highway, well maybe it's not worth as much as the buildings that were there before and the cost of construction. So I think it's a way to really rationalize the allocation of highways to ensure that at least the people who are using that highway are benefiting more or as much as the people who own the land before the highway was put in place.
So I think tolls would have done a much better job of doing that. I think a land value tax, similarly, would have at least provided these kinds of stopping points and rationalized the system in a way that, I would describe our current system as pretty irrational. It's not that well thought out. It's something we've done in the past. So again, going back to the Highway Trust Fund reauthorization, or the need to shift, and maybe a VMT tax, it would be such a missed opportunity if we do that, instead of exploring other options for how we fund transportation systems. We do need to fund them, not arguing that we shouldn't spend money on transportation. It's arguing that the way that we do it is problematic, and as a result, we've just built too many highways.
You would have feedback loops then. I think that's the thing that I mean. When you do the benefit-cost analysis, the way we do it today, you essentially justify every project. I have not seen a project that can't be justified. We have these examples of where you have a tolled bridge that saves time, and a non-tolled bridge that makes you sit in congestion, and people just value their time vastly different than what our equations value them. The actual demonstrated preference. The same thing would go for land values. If the highway is creating so much wealth, you actually should be able to finance the highway based on the wealth creation. When that is not even—I mean, when it's completely laughable, not even close to happening, you have to ask, what are we doing?
Yeah. Again, I don't think not every little thing needs to be a cost-benefit analysis. Not every project needs to perfectly cost however much, however many benefits it creates. But we need some way to rationalize the system a little bit better, to get a little—well, I would hope, a lot—closer to an ideal of how much space and resource we're dedicating to transportation relative to how much space and resources we're dedicating to the positive space, to the homes, to the businesses.
I want to ask you a related transit question, and I don't think you got into this in your book, but when you're talking about these ways we could have funded highways differently, it feels to me that if you did that, you would be making a really strong case for transit, because transit actually builds tremendous land value, and transit actually has a natural system to collect, what I would just say, maintenance revenues from users. It's been my contention for a long time that funding transit as a byproduct of highway funding has really distorted not only the way we think about transit, but the way we talk about transit. Do you have any thoughts along those lines, or any insights? Or is that crazy talk?
I don't think that's crazy talk at all. I guess the first thing I will say, which is maybe on the more optimistic side, is, had 75 years ago, instead of investing what we did in just building as many urban highways as we could as quickly as we could, if we had instead done more comprehensive land use, transit and highway planning at a metropolitan level, I think we would have very different outcomes. Our cities would look very different. I think we'd have many more places where people tended to drive shorter distances when they did, but also they could walk and bike for a lot more of their daily travel, and a lot more people would rely on transit. We didn't. We obviously didn't do that.
I would say today, and I'm not sure—this is something I get a fair amount of pushback on, but I think it's pretty supported by the data—I don't think we can fix our problems by investing in transit, especially not at a federal level. Our settlement patterns are so auto-oriented. There are parts of the country where investments in transit, specifically high-capacity transit, major improvements to bus systems as well, where those can have a lot of benefits. But there's so many parts of the country where you could put in a billion-dollar train system, and very few people are going to ride it. It's just not integrated with the existing land uses. The built environment changes slowly over time, really slowly over time. So I don't think we can have a transit-led approach to federal surface transportation policy. I think we would waste a lot of money. We would alienate millions and millions of voters, and we would do very little of worth.
Let's end by talking about safety. I feel there's so many directions that go with this. It's really astounding to me, this idea that I first heard from Wes Marshall, which has probably been out there, but I'd not heard the idea of getting rid of the vehicle miles traveled, deaths per vehicle miles traveled, and actually looking at it per capita. When you do that, the results are just devastating. Can you talk a little bit about safety, and how we measure safety, and how we think about safety and how maybe we should shift some of these things?
Sure. Another quick reaction as well. If you look at the places, the states in the US with the worst traffic fatality per VMT, they also have the worst traffic fatalities per capita. It's almost a straight line. But yeah, we have a very poor traffic safety record in this country relative to other wealthy democracies.
That's stating it lightly. I mean, when you show the chart, it's horrific.
Everyone else has been improving, I think in a way that the US really has not been improving. Again, I think normalizing by how much people are traveling maybe helps a little bit, but we still look quite bad. But I think looking at the OECD countries that provided data, the next least safe country, New Zealand, had about half the traffic fatalities per capita.
Half. Now I know number two was half of us, yeah.
Half of us, yeah. There's a lot of variance in the US, so we've—
This is Secretariat level of distance.
Right. One of the wildest things is that we've been claiming safety first. Safety has been one of the top one or two stated priorities of the Federal Department of Transportation and most state departments of transportation for so long. It's amazing how many politicians and planners and engineers seem to think we're doing a pretty good job. I think the way that I think, and this is an area where maybe you can provide a little bit more insight, I think the way that they think we're doing a pretty good job, just from reading the statements, is you look at the highway fatalities per mile traveled, and you compare them to the arterial fatalities per mile traveled, and you say, "We're doing three times better on the highways than on the arterials. Therefore, replacing arterials with highways is a really safe thing to do." That's exactly what they say.
At the end of the day, arterials connect highways. You need arterials and highways. They're part of the same system. If you add highway, you inevitably add arterial. It's particularly dangerous at places where you get on and off the highway. Just to view these as separate systems, I think, doesn't make sense. But even viewing it that way, we don't have a particularly safe system when we can compare ourselves to peers, or even within our country, compare the really unsafe parts of, say, particularly the South, parts of the West as well, to much safer parts of the country.
I will say this, the places that are safer tend to be a bit denser, a bit easier to drive shorter distances to get to and from where you're going. People are generally traveling at slower speeds, not tremendously slower, but your average speed is a bit lower. But your average travel distance is a bit shorter as well. So it's not that people are traveling much more. They're just traveling at slower speeds and shorter distances, so less exposure, but also much less risk per unit of exposure.
I talk in the book about the self-driving fatality in the last chapter in Tempe. Tempe has three times the fatality rate of DC, where the NHTSA report came out of. It's hard to imagine—you can blame everything on human error, because essentially, what you're implying is people in Arizona are three times more reckless. They're just three times worse drivers. Everyone knows that's not true. Sure, there's some differences in driving culture, but it's not like people are particularly accident-prone. It's just the system is designed in such a way that you're moving too fast and you're moving too fast in the areas where you should be moving a bit slower, and you have to travel a lot to get anywhere. So it's a combo.
The chart you have in the book that was so fascinating to me actually has my home state, Minnesota, in the bottom left quadrant as being one of the more safe places. That would come as a huge shock to people here, because they're, "We have got ice on the roads for six months of the year. People are running into everybody all the time." I'm, "No, for six months out of the year, everybody drives really slow and really carefully, and that actually makes things a lot safer." We have most of our fatalities in the summer when you don't have the ice on the roads.
I'm originally from Boston. Famously bad drivers, bad, aggressive drivers. Our fatality rates are really quite low.
So what happened during COVID? Because I've written a lot about this, I would love your take. Because the official kind of out of the USDOT, and then a lot of studies out of universities said we just got broken as humans and started driving like maniacs.
One thing that happened was engineers stopped normalizing by vehicle mile traveled because it looked so much worse. They started normalizing per capita a little bit more because we had fewer people driving. The road system, I think the best way I could characterize it, if you look at the data, more of the roadway system looked the way it does from 7 PM to 2 AM. Not as much traffic. You can go a lot faster. So we had overall way less traffic, but a lot more fatalities. In particular, more fatalities per collision. Also, big increases in drunk driving. So that is part of the reality.
It's another funny thing about normalizing fatality rates per VMT. Most, if you look at a highway, no one's dying when there's congestion. No one's dying or almost no one is dying when speeds are 30 to 40 miles per hour.
My argument is, you might not have more drunk driving. You just are not mixing the drunks in with stop-and-go traffic. It's just a very different situation. You've given the drunks a full, nasty highway to drive down.
That's reasonable and fair. I do think, I mean, we did see increases in alcohol consumption. We did see—there was a lot of things going on with COVID. But it did expose many of the fallacies of the system. I think particularly that if you talk to any public health official, congestion is good for traffic safety. It's only really when you talk to people who really don't want congestion that they start conflating safety and congestion. I think Wes, in his book, he mentions the safety being 12th, maybe as being the Wi-Fi password at a DOT where he worked.
At the end of the day, the way I frame it in the book is, we're either being incompetent or disingenuous, and maybe there's a mix of both. But it's hard to say something is your top priority and be doing such a bad job at it. We really have been. I know that you talk in your book quite a bit about your own personal struggle, and your personal emotional relationship to this topic. But it's a big one. It's something we have not come to grips with nationally, is how just how bad we're doing.
Let me ask you a final question, because the book is called "Overbuilt," and you make the case. It's a case that is rarely made, that we have actually built too much highway infrastructure, too much auto-based infrastructure. If you were going to try to summarize that just concisely, what's the downside of having too much of a good thing? If highways are great, we benefit from it. What's the problem with too much?
I think it's anything. Too much water, you can die from too much water. You'll die without water. But if you drink too much water, you can kill yourself. Probably eating is a better analogy. You want to eat the right amount of food. You want to eat a healthy amount. Yeah, sometimes you want to eat things that are unhealthy for you. You don't really want to be overeating. There's always some sort of balance. I think we have ways of measuring what an optimal balance might be. I think that there's some pretty strong evidence that we're pretty far over in terms of how much we've built. So the natural reaction is to unbuild. If you've been eating too much, you want to eat less eventually, and start to undo some of the harm, in terms of—I love the analogy to communication specifically.
We call transportation, we sometimes refer to it as a derived demand. In an economics term, we don't really travel for the sake of traveling. You might go for a joy ride, you might go for a recreational walk, things like that. But for the most part, we're traveling to do something else, go to church, go shopping, visit friends, go to work. So at the end of the day, it's probably even worse than the example of food, because we're doing it for something else.
And it's ancillary to another purpose.
There are trade-offs. There are trade-offs between that something else. At the most basic, many neighborhood churches were torn down to build freeways. Many houses were torn down. So things are further apart. Things are harder to get to. I guess, if I were to summarize my own relationship to it, I think we should have more stuff, more of the stuff, less of the in-between that gets us between the stuff. I think that's not a very sophisticated way to put it, but I think we'd be a lot happier and healthier if we did.
You say in the book, the first thing we need to do is just acknowledge that we have too much, and the second step is to stop building more. There's a dumb logic in that. It's dumb, not in it's a dumb observation, but it's, "Okay, you've eaten too much. Maybe admit that you're eating too much, and you should stop eating so much." It's Captain Obvious, okay? But yet, we're so far from that in so many ways.
As we all know, it's hard. It's hard to stop eating as much as you've been eating. There are reasons. There are reasons why we do the things that we do. So it may be small, it may be obvious, but I think it's quite difficult. I'd be very happy if this book got half of the people who were exposed to it to think, "Hey, maybe we have, maybe we are overbuilt. Maybe we should think about stopping." I think I quote the first law of holes in that chapter, which is, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. So we got to acknowledge the problem, and we need to stop digging. Until we can do those two things, I don't think that we can repair, we can start to repair the system.
That's fantastic. The book is "Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction." It's well written. It's very thoughtful. It's an easy read. You will enjoy it. Please go get a copy. Not only get a copy, get a copy for your friend, give it to your city council member. We actually need to have this conversation leak out into the broader cultural awareness as well. Professor Erick Guerra, Erick, thanks for taking the time to chat. This has been wonderful. I feel we could talk all day about this topic. You've done a great job with this book. Thank you.
Thank you, Chuck. It was really nice to chat with you, and I appreciate your time and all the work that you do. Thanks.
We'll talk again soon. Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.
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