The Strong Towns Podcast
When planner Patrick Kennedy started asking why prime land near downtown Dallas was filled with parking lots and boarded‑up buildings, the trail led straight to an elevated freeway: I‑345. He explains how making a hard economic case for removal—showing that taking the highway out could deliver the highest return on investment with minimal traffic impacts—grew into the Atlas of Inner City Highway Impacts, a data‑driven look at 142 U.S. cities. Kennedy details how inner‑city highways consume acres of valuable land, depress nearby property values, and either clog up all day in thriving metros or cut through struggling ones at full speed, while federal funding formulas and induced demand keep pushing us toward more lanes.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. I don't even know how to introduce you, dude. My guest today is Patrick Kennedy. This is one of the people who has long inspired me, and before we started chatting, you said, "Oh yeah, this is a passion project." I'm like, no, it's not — it's an obsession project, because you don't really have anything else but obsessions, really. Patrick, welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast.
Yeah, I've been on once before, mostly talking about Dallas issues, but I guess here's a much broader subject matter.
That's exactly right. I know that you do adjunct professor work — I can't remember what university. I know you're on the board of directors of Dallas Rapid Transit. I know you've got tons of side projects going on. Give your bio the way that you would give it.
Okay, so I'm a planner and urban designer with about 20 years of experience, all here in Dallas. Originally from Pennsylvania, but I moved to the most sprawling, warmest, most car-dependent place I could as soon as I got out of school, to try to make a difference. As you mentioned, I'm a professor of sustainable development at Southern Methodist University in the master's program of sustainable urban development. I chair the development committee for Dallas Area Rapid Transit, where we're trying to do more with our land. We own 200 acres of surface parking lots at our station areas, another 100 acres of maintenance facilities and various other properties, and we obviously want to do more with that land.
I'm transitioning to real estate development, so I've got a couple of deals in pre-development phase that I'm working on across the state. While those are going on, I'm doing some of these passion projects, like the Atlas of Inner City Highway Impacts.
Well, here's how I feel like I want to start this conversation. You were deeply involved in the I-345 discussions in Dallas. I don't want to pick at an old wound, but I feel like that might be the place to start. What is I-345? Why was it on the agenda, and where has that ended up?
Sure. About 15 years ago, there was this highway in downtown Dallas — it was the eastern segment of the inner loop — and I was doing some consulting for the local hospital, who said, "We need housing for all levels of income of our strata, from students and janitors to admins and docs nearby, within walking distance." What I realized was that the land had to be cheaper than free to make the economics work. This is the highway that divides that particular hospital from downtown Dallas, which I walked under every single day when I first moved to Dallas. I saw surface parking lots, boarded-up buildings, vacant properties — basically the entirety of my mile-long walk into my office.
That started the flicker of the flame, I guess you could say. In the ninth largest city in America and the fourth largest metro economy, within this booming growth period, why is this land fallow? Why is it essentially valueless to the real estate market? This was at the same time the Embarcadero was being redeveloped, the Central Artery in San Francisco, the Cheonggyecheon in South Korea. Eventually I decided to say: what if, hypothetically, we removed the highway in downtown Dallas? Opened up the land to try to make the economics work, so the real estate market could price the land as needed to figure out how to deliver housing near jobs and near transit.
Downtown Dallas is the most accessible to jobs and transit in the entire metropolitan area. To me, it made sense. The first question was always, "What happens to the traffic?" We tried to answer that. But most importantly, what was important was to convey the fact that not only was downtown Dallas struggling at the time — and still today — but also the southern half of the city was struggling. Forty-five percent of the population lives south of I-30, which is kind of the equator of the city of Dallas, and only 15% of the jobs. People would say, "Well, how do people get to the jobs that are going further and further north?" I said, "No, we shouldn't be trying to figure out how to get people in cars driving 30 miles, especially the lowest-income people. We should be trying to figure out how to bring growth back towards the center of the city." That was my solution, and I still believe it was the right thing.
Eventually, our efforts — which we particularly focused on the real estate value and the amount of investment and benefit that we could bring to try to win over the business community, which I believe we did for the most part — led to forming a political action committee with Wick Allison, who was publisher of D Magazine, which is kind of the local New York magazine.
Wick had escaped my mind until you brought him up. Yeah, the late Wick Allison.
Yeah, who passed from cancer that he had been battling for a long time. He became a mentor of mine, and oddly enough, somebody who had been editor of the National Review was to the left of me, and we would have endless debates in his office about various local and national political issues. I miss him very much. He and I formed a political action committee, started getting involved in local races, and won council seats. The focus was on this idea, but also we created the Coalition for New Dallas. It wasn't only about transportation infrastructure issues, but also about housing issues, Fair Park, the Trinity Toll Road, and various local hot-button issues in Dallas at the time. That was successful.
Eventually, the Texas Transportation Commissioner named Victor Vandergrift — one of the five people appointed by the governor — called me up out of the blue and said, "What are you talking about, this idea of removing a highway?" He ended up meeting with me for two hours in the rain, out under the freeway.
We talked about it for hours, and he said, "You know what? You're right that we shouldn't only be thinking about how we move cars. We should be thinking about the impact on the surrounding area. So we'll study it."
That's when TxDOT led their City Map study, which eventually came out in 2016, was approved unanimously by those five commissioners, and its conclusions were the same as what we had predicted. The removal option would have the highest ROI — the best benefit-to-cost ratio — and would have a minimal impact on traffic. That's what it said, and that's what we said, which is astounding.
Yeah, basically a few more hours of delay over the 160,000 hours of delay. If you remove the highway, there'd be some more delay on the thoroughfares, but that's what we wanted, right? Because the highway was sucking up all the local traffic and the local city streets were dead — empty. There's tons of latent capacity in the city street network, and businesses look at traffic count numbers. We actually needed more traffic down on the street.
So that was adopted. But TxDOT had spent $20 to $30 million fixing this highway that was crumbling, and they did so to keep it standing until 2040. In the City Map report, they said, "Yes, the removal option is probably the best here, but we don't have to make a decision on this until 2040."
A couple of years later, the local property owners along the corridor said, "We can't wait that long. We've got decisions to make, investors to appease. We need to start making decisions now." So we sort of got the band back together. I hired Ian Lockwood, who is an old mentor of mine that I interned under in 2001 or so — he's currently with Toole Design Group. Ian's kind of a kindred spirit on these things.
We worked together to create a new plan, basically saying, let's update the removal option, let's update the trench option. Half the traffic is coming to the greater downtown area. The pass-through traffic doesn't need a wider highway. We can actually make it a smaller highway, get the local traffic off the highway further up and downstream, and really amplify the capacity of the surface street grid. I also added an updated economic development analysis with more contemporary numbers on land value, construction costs, and so on.
We did that, and eventually the city manager and the transportation director of the region asked me to come down to City Hall for a big public meeting. They said, "We'll give you five minutes to make your case." I ended up getting one minute. Then they had all the department heads at the city say why the big, wide trench was a better version — basically a 10-lane trench instead of the 8-lane elevated highway that's there now. I said, "Okay, this is bullshit." So I kind of didn't do anything for a year or two and was thinking about writing a book.
The book would be in three parts: the history of it — how did we get to this place? — then the present impact, and then the future. But then I realized the history has already been written. I'd been studying 30 different books on this. There was a new one coming out that you interviewed — Professor Eric — called Overbuild. I realized, okay, this book has been written. I wanted to focus on the data: what is the present-day impact of having gotten the interstate system wrong when we built it? And eventually the next project will be, where do we start tearing out freeways all over the city?
For now, the present project is this Atlas of Inner City Highway Impacts, where I have 142 cities with various data points showing all the various negative impacts of having built highways where they never should have been.
I'm going to ask you about I-345. I know we're going to get to this — is this an insane amount of information? When you are getting businesses on board, which seems crazy but you did, when you're getting DOT officials to say, "Yeah, this is worth studying," when you're getting reports that say the benefit-cost analysis here makes sense — what is that benefit? What should people envision in their mind about what's being done with this highway corridor?
I think there has to be, first, an analysis, and second, a public process to figure out what the needs are. In Dallas, the need was: the private sector is not delivering mixed-income housing, and certainly not delivering affordable housing where we need it — which is where the most jobs and most transit access are. That was one of the big points. Here's an opportunity to actually make the numbers work so real estate development can actually work and be profitable.
What I was also responding to is that Dallas is a leader in office-to-residential conversions, particularly Class B and Class C office. But every single one is taking $50 million of subsidy and incentives, and many have gone through bankruptcy multiple times since, because the rents still are not penciling. So instead of doing $50 million on every single one of these office buildings, let's spend $200 million, remove the highway, and now we've got 200 acres of repositioned land. That was a big selling point: here's some land, make profitable development out of it.
The other part is, if it wasn't for the market shift that I believe was led by millennials entering the workforce post-2000 and leading to the development of Uptown Dallas — and if you're familiar with Dallas, Uptown essentially cratered in the 1980s. Its population was about 2,000 people. It's a former redlined neighborhood, but it's now about 30,000 people. This area redeveloped completely, has added $6 billion to the tax base, all because a former Dallas Cowboy read Jane Jacobs and said, "Why don't people live closer to where they work?" That kickstarted Uptown and created walkable development in Dallas. They had to go to Japan to get financing for the first projects because nobody believed in it.
That started in the late '90s and early 2000s. From 2000 to 2010, Dallas only gained 8,000 people — the least Dallas had grown since 1870 to 1880. That was raising alarm bells for me. If it wasn't for walkable development coming in early 2000s, we need more of it, and we need more tax base. If we don't add tax base, we're going to be cutting services and in a downward spiral. Those few things registered with people.
The issue that got us into the most trouble was: okay, you're going to start bringing growth and gentrification to southern Dallas — which is the exact area we were trying to bring jobs closer to — but we just couldn't quite win everybody over on that topic. We were constantly warned, "You're going to lose on environmental justice issues." This made zero sense to me. This was a highway that wiped out redlined communities, wiped out Deep Ellum, which was the epicenter of jazz and blues culture in the 1920s and '30s in Dallas. Yet people said, "Okay, well, you're going to take away a transportation option to link low-income areas to job growth far, far away." This is insane to me. That's where we're at.
If people listening are envisioning in their mind what we're ultimately talking about, it's taking out a highway and putting back a city — stitching back neighborhoods. I feel like one of the things that makes you really effective — and maybe this is just the way you have to do it in Dallas — is I don't watch you relitigate the past and flog people with it over and over. I've watched you say, "Okay, how do we get to a vision that makes sense for people here?"
The gentrification issue is a real one. I think you and I could very quickly come to a consensus about how we can incrementally build out some of these poorer neighborhoods and really thicken them up in a way that enriches them — not just with jobs, but with tax base and value.
If we are trying to sell this as a vision to the country — and we can pivot to the Atlas next — we're really talking about a different version of economic development than the one we're all used to, which I would just say is: build a highway, open up land for cheap development, then build cheap stuff along it. I wouldn't say "cheap," but low quality — strip malls and big box stores are not cheap to build because of their size, but on a per-square-foot basis, they're pretty cheap construction. When we're talking about removing center-city highways on what should be high-value land, this is going to be high construction-cost development, where you tend to be writing down land costs or increasing entitlements to deliver mixed-income housing if need be.
Some places may not need the affordable housing because you've got plenty, because the highways have helped crater the local economy. To your point about selling a vision — I've never found that selling the problems of the past has been an effective means of winning people over. But what has been effective is walking people through the logic of how those mistakes were wrong, and then building to "here's what it could be."
The point I'm trying to make with the Atlas is distinguishing the difference between inner-city highways and the broader interstate system, which is why I get into the battle within the Eisenhower administration and the Bureau of Public Roads, and how we got that wrong — that decision point where the Eisenhower staff were actually right all along.
What has caught on, particularly with young professionals who moved to Dallas or grew up in Dallas, is: why isn't Dallas like the place where I traveled or the place where I went to college? Why can't I walk most of these areas? Why is downtown empty at night? I started to craft this vision: here's why it's wrong, here's what went wrong and the impacts of that, and here's how we can fix it. Not only should we fix it in Dallas, but we should fix it nationwide, because this is a drag on every single economy in America. Once you start painting it that way — you could have amenities, places to live, you could walk to work — people start to see that benefit. The municipal managers and elected officials see the tax base numbers and say, "That makes some sense. Let's think about this."
Let me give you a story from a small town, and then I feel like this will resonate. I remember working as a young engineer with a state DOT. I was working for a consulting firm, and we were doing a project rehabbing a highway. Most of the work was outside of the city, but then eight to ten blocks was in the city — not very much proportionately in terms of size. That little part in the city cost as much to rehab as everything we built outside the city, and we spent almost all of our time and energy trying to get the curbs right and the water drainage right. I remember saying to my colleagues, "Why don't we just buy this town and take this stuff out? None of this makes any sense. It's brutally expensive."
I feel like you have reached the same conclusion, and it has driven both a recognition of the insanity of what we did and also the amazing potential of doing this differently. So I'm using that to set up this Atlas. When I started reading it, I thought: "Atlas" is a pretty bold term. But it lives up to it. Talk about what you're trying to do here — why we should look at what's in cities differently than what's outside of cities when we're thinking about highways.
I can tie those two things together. One is the cost issue, and that's one thing that attracted me to the battle between the Eisenhower staff — particularly a guy named General John Stewart Bragdon — and the Bureau of Public Roads. Bragdon said we should not be building any inner-city highways, and we should not be building inner-city loops. One of his reasons was that the purpose of the interstate system was interstate commerce, not to serve local traffic. But the Bureau of Public Roads — a lot of acolytes of Robert Moses and so on — said, "We can kill two birds with one stone. We've got all this money. Let's solve all the world's problems with local traffic, and the local officials can get rid of their slums as they please."
It turns out those inner-city highways had another problem that Bragdon emphasized: they were costing ten times, on average, what the rest of the interstate system was costing on a per-mile basis. I-345 itself was $12 million in 1960 for the land and $10 million for the construction — at the time, one of the most expensive highway segments on a per-mile basis in the entire system. That equals $184 million per mile in today's dollars. It's a hugely expensive segment of road.
When you start doing those numbers, you realize that one-tenth of the system cost half the entire interstate system — which was about $750 billion worth of a program in today's dollars. The opportunity cost, when I started digging deeper, was this: if we had not built those inner-city highways and instead taken Bragdon's advice — instead of building what should have been a 40-lane highway to accommodate the traffic being projected, we could have built one high-capacity transit line — if we had built transit in all of these cities at the cost that Montreal was building their initial subway system for, we could have built 36 entire Paris Metro systems across the country.
When I started doing those numbers, it's crazy. Yeah, and actually serve local traffic, and keep interstate traffic outside of the cities where it belongs — not getting stuck in traffic.
Fast forward to me finding a study by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve in 2021 — I think it's called "Freeway Revolts" or something like that. Their basic point was that within about a three-mile radius of the center of cities, highways have a negative impact — they create a disamenity on surrounding real estate values up to about a half mile away. Outside of that three-mile radius, they create an amenity and growth. So you're effectively displacing development and value from one part of the city into other parts of the city. And as you know from all the work that you and Joe at Urban Three do, all the value is in the center of the city.
So I started drawing radii of one mile and three miles around 142 different cities, wanting to figure out the average value of development within those radii. That gives me a starting point to say: this is where all the value potential is. The downtowns subsidize the rest of the cities if they're healthy, but if they're not healthy — and one of the root causes of that is the highways taking up all the land — that's a problem.
One book I read was called The Elephant in the Bedroom, I think, by two California engineers from the early '90s. There was a quote where they said one highway in Pasadena wiped out 10% of the city's revenue in one fell swoop. I thought: imagine a city trying to cope with that kind of budget loss. That's when I realized I want to understand what the budget loss is to every single city because of these same highways. That was sort of the genesis of this work.
I'm going through the Atlas and I'm blown away, because not only have you made this case in a brilliant way, but you've gone through Akron, Albany, New York, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Anchorage, Alaska. I'm on the A's. You go through every major city in the US. You started using the Yellow Book — and for people who don't know it, that was the 1955 book, basically just maps with these fat black markers through blobs called cities. It was used to sell Congress on the gas tax to fund the Highway Trust Fund. The maps are almost cartoonish. I wanted to contrast those maps with what we've actually built.
But then I realized there are no North Carolina cities in the Yellow Book, no San Diego in the Yellow Book. So I had to start adding more and more. Then I was like, "Okay, well, I'm missing these cities." I just kept adding to the point where I couldn't add anymore. I've been asked to add a couple additional cities, but at some point you have to stop.
This is an insane public service. Bloomberg wrote a great article about your work, and they put this little chart together showing the amount of land devoted to highway right-of-way in that core downtown area. What would Newark do with 1,100 acres of land? What would Houston do with 920 acres of land in the core? These are places that are screaming right now, "We don't have enough housing, we don't have enough economic development." What you're saying is: here's the land.
I feel like there's an immediate effect and then a tertiary effect. Can we talk about the immediate effect of giving Newark 1,100 acres of land, or Los Angeles 900 acres in their core, or downtown Dallas 850 acres?
I think there's a starting point to that conversation, which is the primary conclusion I came to after doing this work: these inner-city highways fail in one of two ways, depending on the city. They're either going to fail the city economically, or they're going to fail as transportation — which is their one and only purpose.
What I found is that where highways work best, these are in low GDP-per-capita cities. How I've quantified "working the best" is that their peak-hour speed is close to their off-peak-hour speed. That's actually a really useful notation. I include it in all the Atlas pages — how are the highways functioning? If they're failing at all times, those are the highest GDP-per-capita cities. So what are we trying to solve by addressing congestion? We're just harming them economically.
Then there are the cities where the peak-hour speed is low but the off-peak speed is high — cities where the highways are moving at 55 to 60 miles per hour. These are your Flint, Michigans, your Youngstown, Ohios — cities that are struggling, and the highways work perfectly. So what are we actually trying to solve?
Once we figure that out, it's either failing economically for those cities or failing as transportation. I found a study called something like an annual bottleneck study for the trucking industry. I showed Charlotte the other day how the highways in downtown Dallas, downtown Houston, and downtown Austin are generally moving at 10 to 20 miles per hour for 14 hours a day. That's concentrating all the local traffic and all the interstate traffic on one defined corridor that we can never possibly make big enough. We can never get to the 40 lanes that Bragdon predicted we would need. The Katy Freeway in Houston is up to 26 lanes and it's slower than it ever was.
So we have to honestly understand that getting highways in the wrong place means they're failing. If they're failing, we don't need them. We can figure out the transportation as part of a broader, more holistic planning exercise, while also delivering what that city needs — probably tax base, probably housing, depending on the current dynamic. That process can lead to those solutions while also erasing the mistakes of the past.
When I wrote Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, I had a whole chapter about congestion. My argument was essentially that there's no way to solve congestion by focusing on transportation. The only way you use congestion is as a way to drive alternatives to auto trips. You use it to build — if a whole bunch of people want to be somewhere and they're willing to drive there and sit in congestion, build stuff so that they can actually be there and not have to drive. What you're saying is: you've got tons of land to do this as well, if we actually reapportion how we're using this land. You can meet not only all of those objectives, but I would argue — and I think you're arguing too — that the congestion kind of solves itself.
Yeah. Part of that is seeing every projected Carmageddon never materialize. When Seattle had three weeks with no Alaskan Way Viaduct and the tunnel wasn't open yet, or the Minnesota I-35 bridge falling down in 2005 or so — it never materializes. In many ways it's planned for. In Seattle, they knew three weeks was coming, so they encouraged people to work from home if they could, increased the ferry and transit capacity. That's exactly what Seoul, South Korea did when they removed a highway — provide the other services to help people get around in other ways.
From my standpoint, this is more about creating proximity to reduce trip length. Even if everybody was still making trips by car, I found — just using publicly available federal highway data, which has total highway lane miles for every metro — if I divide that by the population, I can figure out the highway capacity on a per-capita basis. They also have vehicle miles traveled for every metro. I can figure out the average vehicle miles traveled per capita. What I found when you put those numbers together is a direct line: where there's more highway capacity, there's more average driving in every single city. The Nashvilles are kind of at the highest, with about 40 average miles driven and some of the highest highway capacity. Direct line.
The other thing I found is that where cities have more lanes per highway — metros that average eight or nine or ten lanes — they've got the most traffic per lane. To me, these are the smoking guns of induced demand. Ultimately that means more costs — not only on the infrastructure side, because we've got to replace it every 30 years and maintain it every year, but more driving means more costs to the private sector in terms of owning cars, car dependence, all those things.
That's why I wanted to contrast the numbers I include for every city. I'm using INRIX data to show the cost of congestion per driver, which may range from $200 to $1,500. The $1,500 is in the high GDP-per-capita cities. But compare that to the annualized cost to maintain these highways and repair them every 30 years. And then the cost per mile driven per household using IRS annual mileage data. What I found is there's a wide range — from about $16,000 per household in the New York metro area up to $40,000 per household. Both of those numbers are dwarfing the cost of congestion. If we can just not have so much highway infrastructure, we're reducing the overall cost on a per-household basis far more than anything we could do fighting congestion. Frankly, if congestion goes up as economic activity goes up, maybe that's a good thing.
It's crazy, because I've spent years looking at the way we do economic studies as part of justifying highways. When you take your insights and combine them with that, what the government is often saying when we build highways is: we think you should value $1 of congestion pain more than you value two or three or four dollars in your pocket. That clearly is not responsive to how people live their lives.
Also, when I see those studies about congestion costing the country $180 billion a year, those are imaginary numbers — they're not real dollars. When you understand commuting patterns all over the world, average commuting time is going to be around 30 minutes. Even if you reduce congestion and have free-flow traffic everywhere, people just spread out further, because 30 minutes is the time cost people are willing to bear to get to their jobs.
On the other hand, the cost to build a highway, the cost to maintain a highway, the cost to replace a highway, the cost of the car, the gas, the insurance, healthcare costs from collisions and injuries — all of those are very real costs. We've been justifying everything we've been doing and keeping this churn going based on made-up numbers, compared to the very real costs of overbuilding the system.
You talk about this plot you did where there's a correlation between the amount of driving and the amount of highway miles. I think the engineer would look at that and say the opposite — look at the demand, the demand is there. I always use my hometown as an example. We have the same population today that we had at the end of World War Two — literally no growth in overall population — but we've expanded the area of the city by 10 times and expanded our roadway capacity at least that much, maybe more. Basically you have the same people driving around more.
That's the point of proximity — if you have somebody driving two miles versus everybody driving 10 miles, you're going to be counting the same car in various different spots. Whereas the Champs-Élysées is moving 60 to 80,000 cars, but it's probably not the same 60 to 80,000 cars throughout its entire length. You're driving for a little bit and getting off. The capacity is actually a lot higher based on the length, because the trip lengths are shorter. If you focus on reducing trip length by, say, 20%, you're going to have this huge multiplier effect on reducing congestion.
Ultimately, these highways have a net negative impact that exceeds whatever their benefit might be. Cities are always going to find a way to get around. We want to help people get around. But when things spread out and everybody has to get into a car, there's no good solution.
I want to ask you about the policy outcome here. I'm interested in what you hope people will do with this Atlas. Strong Towns is all about bottom-up action, local government, people working in a community. If I were going to hold up a counterexample to say the Strong Towns approach has got it wrong — it would be you getting one minute in front of the Dallas City Council when they had lined up a whole bunch of people to basically sandbag all the work you'd done. What should happen here? If I'm a city, I'm looking at this going, "Oh my gosh, this is what I need to do in the future. I really need to demand that my DOT remove the highway. I need a development strategy around it. I don't want gentrification. I want incremental thickening up of these neighborhoods, but I've got to reconnect them." Where do you think the policy levers are to actually respond to this in an effective way?
I think there are two parts to that. One is, I spent all this time, effort, and gained experience and expertise on the battle here in Dallas, and I wanted to arm everybody across the country with this kind of data. If they want to talk to me, they can reach out. So one part is helping with that David-versus-Goliath battle.
The other part is we have to change our funding mechanisms for transportation. That gets back to — you've talked to Professor Guerra, and he focused on ISTEA and how that was essentially just keeping the ball rolling. I take it all the way back to how they decided to fund it with the gas tax in the first place, back in the '50s. The irony is that it was the fiscal conservatives in Congress who said, "No, we don't want to take on debt to bond this thing. We want it to be user-funded through user fees — gas taxes, rubber taxes, oil taxes." But rather than just taking out a lump sum of debt to build what was budgeted, it just kept going and going and going. They've never stopped it. We've grown the system to a point so much bigger than what the trust fund can actually handle. We assume it's running out, and in a way it is, but we've had to add general fund money into it to keep it going. That's helped overbuild the system, because we basically turbocharged the funding for it.
Now we're at this point where we've overbuilt it, we can't maintain it, and the gas tax and the trust fund are not capable of keeping up with it.
That's humbling, Patrick. I've heard people say, "Well, raise the gas tax," and I'm like, there's no level of gas tax that solves this. Nobody wants to raise taxes, but nobody also wants to do something different. So we're stuck in this stasis of inertia. There seems to be a growing sentiment from Strong Towns and Transportation for America that we need a new transportation bill that rethinks everything.
I think a lot of the problem here was it was the Bureau of Public Roads — now USDOT — that got it wrong, and it was federal money that juiced the system, and then it was local officials who applied it, in many ways, to wipe out Black and Brown communities. To me, it's the federal dollars that need to rectify it. So if I'm looking into the future, whatever the next transportation bill would be, hopefully it's a fix-it-first model. But then also, let's say there are 400 miles that need to come out of center cities. To me, this is not necessarily purely transportation — it uses transportation dollars, but more than that it's a "revitalize every city in America" project. It's a domestic Marshall Plan type of project to say, "We got it wrong. Let's fund 400 miles of tear-outs over the next 10 to 20 years. Here's $40 billion over 20 years — $2 billion a year." That's not a big number, but it has a huge multiplier effect on housing and tax base in local cities. I've estimated we've lost $5.2 billion in municipal property tax revenue annually in all these cities.
To me, it helps — in your words — thicken up every single city so they're not so dependent on federal money, so they can be healthier, provide housing, particularly housing to own, so people can build equity, which in many ways doesn't pencil right now.
The current infrastructure bill we're operating under has the Reconnecting Communities Program, and I'll express my cynicism — then I want you to push back on it. I feel like the price of getting $1 of Reconnecting Communities money — which is, let's tear down highways, let's reconnect the neighborhoods, let's do the kind of work you're talking about — the price of getting $1 of that is getting $100 of highway expansion money. For whatever reason, the advocates for biking and walking and neighborhood development, when they get to Washington, DC, just want to increase the size of the pie, because that's how they increase their share of it.
If the idea was to reallocate expansion money to fixing cities, I feel like I could get behind it more. But I'm cynical of the approach of just layering on more things we're going to do, and building that political coalition by funding highways all over the place. React to that, Patrick.
I'm not here to push back on it, because I've got similar cynicism. My biggest pushback to Reconnecting Communities and how it's been applied is that it's like a Plinko chip finding the easiest politically palatable way to apply those dollars, and that tends to be caps and deck parks. What we've seen is that those are incredibly expensive — sometimes $100 million for each project. In some cases, like Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, there was a huge success: it was a $110 million project that leveraged $200 to $300 million of incremental value. That's roughly a two-to-one return. Removals are going to have a 20- to 30-to-one return on cost — a much bigger value.
The cap, in my mind, only solves the local area problem. It's trying to address the negative impact those highways have on surrounding real estate, to get back to that Philadelphia Federal Reserve study. But it's not solving the bigger problem, which is the overall induced demand and the spreading out. Until you solve that, is that really the best use of dollars?
Look at Woodall Rogers — that's another highway that's failed. It's literally a parking lot 18 hours a day. Yes, the park is nice, but imagine if there wasn't a highway underneath. Wouldn't that be even better? We're trying to do the politically expedient thing: "We don't want to have that fight. Let's just put a deck over it." Imagine every city competing for a very limited pie of that particular grant program, everybody trying to build these everywhere.
If the money were simply for removal — not for trenching your highway, just for removal, first in line — I would want people to justify that it's inappropriate for the overall transportation system, that it's either not carrying the traffic or it's inducing the congestion it has created, which many of those highways have done. You'd have to have a plan for a certain amount of economic development. I'd put those kinds of contingencies on it to ensure it's going to the right places and having the most impact.
Then, personally, I would like to see a much bigger number for transit projects around the country to augment that. If we're removing one piece of infrastructure — where in every single way it's advantageous to get in a car because it's perceived as a free drive, whereas a transit trip has a fare and requires getting out on foot at some point — all of those things incentivize people to get in the car anyway. We have to have something to offset that. There has to be an increase in transit funding for the entire country. Gets back to what we should have done: those 36 Paris Metro systems. Imagine Cincinnati with a Paris Metro system.
The Federal Highway Trust Fund expires in September. The IIJA expires this year too. We have argued here that it would be better to just give that money back to the states and not have a federal highway program. But whenever I say that, there's pushback — I get this from northeastern liberals a lot: "Oh, you can't trust Texas. They'll screw it up." Well, you're in Texas — do you feel like TxDOT would screw it up?
I kind of feel like TxDOT would screw it up. If you gave them more money, they're going to go build more highways, maybe. But when I think through the process of going through that City Map effort, I think there are a lot of engineers at state DOTs who want to do the right thing. They just want to do their job. Ultimately, they're not the decision makers, though in some cases they may be putting their thumbs on the scales to do the expedient thing.
What I found in this effort and in the Atlas is that there are states far worse than Texas that I would trust a lot less than Texas. But there does have to be an educational component at the elected and appointed level — at the highest level of state, local, and regional governments. Hopefully this work and what you do and what Transportation for America does starts to change those mindsets: we can't just build our way out of this problem, and every ribbon cutting is not a good thing. Every dollar spent on highways is probably a dollar lost, or at least a dollar with zero return. It's a holistic shift — the conventional wisdom has to change. Hopefully this plays a tiny little part of that.
You earlier used the phrase "David versus Goliath." I want to ask you: in your frame of this, who's David and who's Goliath?
David is every group of advocates around the country that are trying to oppose either widenings or new highways. Goliath is the sheer amount of dollars and inertia pouring in to keep doing the same thing, and the amount of staff resources behind it. It's remarkable.
I was wondering if you would say that. There was this idea in the '90s in the Clinton administration — it's long faded because it's not a mindset anyone really holds anymore — but the Republican counter was "starve the beast." If we just gut it of all its money, it will fix itself. I always thought that was kind of dumb, because if you do that in the private sector, they lay off people, change systems, and reform. When you cut government budgets by 40%, you just stop delivering services — it just stops working.
If Goliath is the sheer volume of money, how do you not get to a mental framework where you just get rid of the money? What you're talking about — tearing down the highways and building good transit — costs money. There's a money component I'm not discounting, but I'm also wondering: would we be ahead if we just stopped funding this thing and let cities and states kind of figure it out in a different way? I don't know the answer to that, Patrick, but I'm following the Goliath logic.
First, we have to address the overall cost of construction, whether it's any kind of transportation infrastructure — those things are all out of control, particularly in transit. That's part of it. The other part is those dollars are fungible — they're taxpayer dollars and should be used to benefit taxpayers. Maybe it's too much, but it's too much for doing the wrong thing. If it's doing the right thing and has a return on investment, then maybe it's not too much. That gets back to my point that the system is so bloated that the revenue coming in is overwhelmed by it, but it's still a ton of revenue — we're just putting it toward worsening the problem, to the point where we still can't maintain it.
We have to completely unwind and reverse that inertia. Take out the highways where they never should have been. Leave the ones outside the cities. Have your third beltway around Houston or Dallas — fine. To me, the development around those is adapted specifically to that infrastructure. But everything within a one- to three-mile radius — those highways were imposed upon places that already existed, and have transformed the area around the new bones of that infrastructure.
By bringing them down, the best use of our dollars now would be: let's fix our mistakes. Let's reduce the overall size of the system, get it right-sized. Take whatever dollars we save from that, put them towards the transit projects we need to help shift modes, help people get around on local trips, reroute interstate commerce around cities so it's not getting stuck in traffic. If it's budget-neutral, let's call it that. If we want to make it politically palatable, reduce it a little bit. But as long as there's revenue coming in, we should invest it wisely. Currently, we're basically just throwing it in the garbage.
If people want to get a hold of you, if they want to get a copy of the Atlas themselves, what's the best way for that to happen?
Email is always the best, and that's [email protected] or [email protected]. I currently only have a couple of sheets up on my website, which is thehumanecosystem.city. I need to post the full thing because it's on Dropbox, and that's where we'll have the download, which is free to view or download.
The link is available on that Bloomberg article too — I think it's on Scribd there rather than Dropbox. I'll put the link to the Dropbox. You can always find me on Bluesky, which is the.dot.city — and "dot" is spelled out, so T-H-E-D-O-T-C-I-T-Y is my Bluesky handle. I'm not on Twitter anymore.
Those were the days. My gosh. I feel like if you are a city council member, if you are an advocate, if you've got a conference where you need a speaker, Patrick Kennedy is the guy you want in the room. I know you've devoted a lot of your life to the Dallas–Fort Worth area, but you're willing to go do some of this stuff in other places too, right? If I've got a conference with 2,000 people in the room and I want a dynamic speaker who can come and talk about highways and the future, you'll do that, right?
I absolutely would do that. That's kind of the point of this — to expand the reach beyond DFW and carry this message. I've felt there was always a void in the understanding between the architectural and urban design world, the real estate and economic development world, and the infrastructure world. There was something missing at the nexus of all those things. I've just tried to throw myself into the middle of that.
I really want people to connect with you, and we're going to do whatever we can to make that happen. A personal question: how many dogs do you have right now?
Dogs? Currently zero. I lost both that I had. At one point I had four — one was a foster and one was an old dog I'd had for a long time. Then I lost both of mine to cancer in the same summer.
Oh man.
We've got two little kids now, and so until we either get a bigger house or — well, the "less kids" option is not happening — the kids want dogs, but they're young. They're four and two. We want them to get a little bigger so they can help take care of whatever dogs they want.
We always had Samoyeds. When they aged out, Coach Guy — the one who lived the longest — was actually 16 when she passed away.
The kids insisted you get one, I'm sure.
I was heartbroken. I said, "I don't know, we're fine." And we ended up at the shelter and got this dog they said was a Shar-Pei lab mix. He was six months old when we got him — 25 pounds. I looked at him and said, "He's going to be like 45 pounds."
No dude — 111.
He's the biggest dog I've ever seen. His head is twice the size of mine. He's a massive, cuddly dog.
Big cuddly dogs, man — they're the best.
He is big. My daughter wishes he was more cuddly, if we had to rank my dog's favorite people. I'm number one, then there's a huge gap, and my wife and my oldest daughter are two and three, then another huge gap, and the youngest one is four. But the youngest one is always crawling in his crate with him, trying to hug him — and he's just getting annoyed by it. With me, he's trying to climb in my lap.
All right, Patrick, so nice to chat with you. Thanks for being here. Everybody listening — you've got to check out the Atlas. You've got to check out Patrick's work. This is really, really worth your time. Thanks for everything you do, friend.
It's so gracious of you. I appreciate it. I love the opportunity to chat with you.
Keep listening and keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care, everybody.
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