Booked on Planning

Overbuilt

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 21

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What if the United States didn’t just build too many highways—but built a funding machine that makes it hard to stop? We sit down with Erick Guerra, author of Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction, to unpack why capacity keeps growing, congestion doesn’t ease, and budgets bend under the weight of perpetual reconstruction.

We trace the policy DNA from ISTEA through IIJA, showing how well-meaning multimodal language coexists with incentives that still favor widening. Erick explains how “maintenance” often balloons into bigger lanes and interchanges, why induced demand is only part of the congestion story, and how common modeling practices overstate time savings while sidelining external costs like displacement, emissions, and stormwater. The result: urban highways that are wider, costlier, and less effective than promised.

If you care about traffic, climate, safety, or the fiscal health of your city, this conversation offers a clear map for change. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves a good policy debate, and leave a review to help more planners and curious listeners find the show.

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Stephanie Rouse:

You're listening to the Booked On Planning Podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation, and everything in between. Join us as we get booked on planning.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Basically, the overview of this book is that we have overbuilt our highway system. Erick gives a good background on the history of construction of highways in general and our interstate system. That basically we ended up finishing our interstate system in about 91, if I remember correctly, from the book.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah. So he does drop several acronyms, kind of an alphabet soup, which is pretty common with transportation industry, but one of them being the foundations of modern-day transportation bills, ICE T, Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. This was passed in 1991, basically when the interstate system was completed. It kind of shepherded a new policy for how we fund interstate highway, roadway construction in the United States.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, it certainly wasn't the only bill that's ever impacted our highway funding, though, has it?

Stephanie Rouse:

No, if you look at the history, following ICE T, we had T21, Safety Lou, Map 21, the FAST Act, and then what most of us are probably familiar with because was just passed in 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I do think it's so interesting that such a refreshing name, ICE T leads to ultimately some really crappy infrastructure building overall.

Stephanie Rouse:

Exactly. As we talk about in the episode, while a lot of these bills all have kind of this bend towards sustainability and trying to create multimodal transportation systems, they really just support more road building, leading us into the situation where we're at where we're highly overbuilt. And the more we overbuild, the more these bills have to maintain that infrastructure into the future, creating some concerning issues for the future of transportation funding.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, one of the points that you brought up actually that I'd never really thought about, and I know that's coming from your past as a transportation planner, but maintenance isn't always what you think of either. So when I think of like road maintenance, I think of just making sure that you go back in and repave and make sure that you get rid of all the potholes and stuff. But you brought up the fact that maintenance actually often is increasing lane widths as well as getting rid of all of so even if you just think, oh, my department of transportation is out just doing maintenance, actually, they probably are in fact widening your lanes as well.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, exactly. And just another sneaky way for increasing the amount of impervious service that we have here in the US.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Very not climate friendly.

Stephanie Rouse:

No.

Jennifer Hiatt:

All right. Well, let's get into our conversation with author Eric Guerrera on his book, Overbuilt, the High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction.

Stephanie Rouse:

Erick, thank you for joining us on Book Done Planning to talk about your book, Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction. There are books out there that focus solely on the construction of the interstate system, but your book is more focused on what has come after it was completed. You do start, though, by laying the foundations. So can you briefly explain a few key factors of the interstate building period that influenced how we build today?

Erick Guerra:

Thanks so much, Stephanie. It's really a pleasure to be here. I guess maybe one of the first points that I'll try and make is that the interstate system as it was constructed, we we often kind of talk about larger social issues like commerce connecting the country, military movements. I think even uh, you know, there were moments in time where we were talking about potentially evacuating cities from from nuclear strikes. But at the end of the day, the people who were planning and designing the interstate system uh had really been focused on urban traffic since about the 1930s. There was a movement to kind of thinking about accommodating car travel within cities, and a lot of the highway network was planned with that in mind. I would say in in terms of the actual interstate legislation, the main factors were, you know, one, kind of authorizing and empowering the predecessor to the federal highway administration to build the network. Two was really funding it. And the funding system, it wound up giving a strong federal incentive to local governments to build large highway systems. So the overall length of the system was capped, uh, but not the width or the number of lanes or even the cost. And the federal government at the beginning of interstate construction uh matched local dollars on a nine-to-one basis. So a really strong incentive for states, municipalities, localities to want to build highways, because for every $1 they would put into it, they got $9 in return. I also add to that that the people largely making the decisions were highway planners. So people who had been trained to build highways, who really focused on building highways. That was their kind of primary purpose, their education. If you kind of look through or listen to interviews that are part of an oral history project that was done after the more around the completion of the interstate or the originally planned interstate, you can hear a lot of them kind of talking about they have this conviction in what they were doing. This was part of a process of modernization.

Jennifer Hiatt:

As our listeners know, but you probably don't at this point, Stephanie and I live in Nebraska. We both work in Lincoln. And growing up, my grandfather owned a construction company that they built highways. Like my my dad and my grandpa were the people actually physically constructing the highways. And I remember one time my grandpa sitting there talking about the interstate. Like he was an adult when the interstate was constructed, and he very proudly pointed out in Nebraska, there are long stretches of the interstate that you could land a fighter plane on. It was a big deal for him.

Erick Guerra:

I think that's a great, that's a great story. I, you know, there there were a lot of people who were involved in constructing the interstate. I think, you know, a lot a lot of the intentions were really solid and positive. You know, there were some problems with how the interstate was built. I think there were problems in particular with how it intersected with with cities. I think there were some problems related to a lack of local control, a lack of planning, and a lack of alternative ways of thinking about how transportation should be invested in or kind of how cities should develop over time. But at the same time, there was, you know, a lot of a lot of work that happened. A lot of infrastructure was built in a relatively short period of time.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Well, and to that point, you titled your book, Overbuilt. So can you explain what you mean when you say that the highway system is overbuilt?

Erick Guerra:

I think from the kind of simplest point of view, the argument is that we have too many highways. We have too many, too high capacity roadway systems. And in some ways, I think that's maybe can be a little bit of a controversial statement. I think in some contexts that that's not going to be particularly controversial, but in others it might be. And I think for pretty clear reasons, uh, transportation is necessary for a functioning modern society, for a functioning modern economy. And without streets and highways, we would have extremely limited access to jobs, food, other necessities. Firms would have trouble attracting uh businesses, things like that. But too much highway is is also problematic, or too much roadway. And you can kind of think of two polar extremes. One extreme is a place that is entirely made up of highways, and the other extreme is a place that has no streets, no roadways at all. And they're both kind of dysfunctional in their own ways. In one place, there's uh no way to get where you're going, and in the other place, there there's nowhere to go. And there are very few places that are really kind of at that very extreme end, but you can think that somewhere between those two extremes is an ideal amount of transportation infrastructure. Just as a thought experiment, think about a city that kind of only has local roadways. And, you know, the first main arterial that you build, it's probably going to create a lot of value. Uh, you're gonna have shops and businesses that kind of line that first main street. You're gonna improve accessibility throughout your city or region. The second one probably also has quite a bit of value. Maybe there are even kind of important network effects, but eventually you hit a point where the next kind of roadway that you expand or build, it has benefits, but those benefits simply aren't worth the cost. The costs of land, you're just not creating the same types of benefits. A lot, you may just be shuffling land uses around instead of kind of generating new economic activities. You might be really just encouraging people to drive longer distances as opposed to unlocking, you know, more potential within your metropolitan area. And once you hit that point where the costs really exceed the benefits, every additional amount of roadway that you invest in is detrimental. And the central argument of the book is that we kind of passed that point quite a while ago and have continued to build, despite building more high capacity roadways. So when we completed the interstate system, kind of, you know, debates on exactly when it happened. But the originally planned interstate was largely completed in around 1990, 1991. And since that moment, we've added about 75% more to the lane miles of urban highway. We haven't really stopped building, we we've continued building a pace. But I would argue that most of that building has been net negative when you factor in how much it costs.

Stephanie Rouse:

I think an important point from your book, too, listeners might be thinking overbuilding is just building new and building extra lane miles. You discuss how roadway resurfacing projects will just get wider and wider and taking an existing roadway and making it fit the modern standards that we have that you need to have 14 feet of roadway width instead of 11 foot, which is a much better roadway to keep traffic down.

Erick Guerra:

Yeah, and I think you can kind of you can think of um road investments in three main buckets. One is maybe the initial investment, second is the just general maintenance, repaving. The third one that I think you're really talking about here and is an increasingly important part of what we finance is reconstructing. Everything we build has a shelf life. And at a certain point, every highway needs to be rebuilt. And as you're saying, when we rebuild, we often we add a lane here, we add a lane there, we add some you know bigger and wider interchanges, we add wider lanes, and the kind of impact of the roadway increases substantially.

Jennifer Hiatt:

As you point out in the book, and we've already talked about a little bit here. I think it's probably safe to say that most planners and maybe even some engineers understand why building more lanes does not actually help traffic congestion, but the general public overall does not. And in fact, if you talk to most people in the general public, they would actually support the expansion of lanes on major roads. We've seen our interstate expand three lanes between Lincoln and Omaha. Now it's expanding three lanes between Lincoln and York. People generally support that. So can you explain to those who don't understand why is this approach so flawed?

Erick Guerra:

One thing I would say first in response to that is I'm not sure that people kind of support it to the extent that we think that they do. I think one of the large pieces of evidence for this is we have not raised the gas tax in over 30 years. And that's kind of a firm rejection, I would say, on the part of voters to expand the system. So as much as people might kind of say, oh, yeah, we we want to expand highways, we have good reason to, uh, they don't really want to pay for it. And there are instances, of course, where they do want to pay for it. But I think there's this kind of view that maybe they're costless, that it doesn't take money, that it doesn't take land, and and these costs really get hidden in the process of highway construction. And I think actually faced with a choice of what to spend funds on, how to use land, I think many fewer people would kind of choose to go for that highway widening. Kind of in response to the larger question, I think we we do have evidence that as you invest in highways, your average speeds tend to increase, you know, but much, much smaller than your investments in highways. But you do see if you have a region where you're investing in more highways, people are typically moving faster. That said, they also typically move further. And when you look at actually congestion, which you could you can think of congestion in a number of different ways, but I think a pretty simple way is the difference between how long it takes you to go where you're going when there's no traffic at all, and how long it actually takes you to get there. And that's what people really interact with. And that's what's not really changing. That's what in in uh many parts of the country have kind of steadily gotten worse despite massive investments in building new highways and widening highways. So we do tend to see higher average speeds from from highways, but the effects on congestion are pretty limited. Uh, and I think that's something that people kind of feel in many ways. People experience that that congestion.

Stephanie Rouse:

So, in your history of highway building, there's a clear feeling from the engineers of the time that were building the original interstate highway system that they knew best, and they seem to have some unchecked power for designing and building highways. And this seems to still pervade the field today. A previous author pointed this out, and it never occurred to me really until he said it, but engineers building roadways don't have any local boards or any commissions that have to approve the projects they designed, unlike planning parks and even health departments that all have advisory boards that are often reviewing and improving projects. Do you see this ever changing? Or what are your thoughts on this?

Erick Guerra:

I guess I I would maybe push back a little bit on that, in that I think that many highway engineers, if you kind of listen, listen to their stories, many of them fit the description that you're saying of people who are kind of, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and people are complaining too much, and we're doing this for the good of everyone a lot. However, when you kind of hear them talk about their trajectory of their careers, they'll say, I wish I knew then what I know now. So I think there are quite a few who are a little more retrospective about or think a little bit differently about urban highways and really felt like they hadn't received the training and that they were kind of given a task to do, but maybe not the right tools to do it, or it hadn't been fully thought through. So I think that there's a mix, but I do think in many ways there are still highways that are being built that people really don't want. And I think you can kind of see a little bit of that throughout the history of urban highway building. We had multiple instances where presidents asked highway builders to do something and they didn't really do it. FDR asked the predecessor to the Federal Highway Administration, the Bureau of Public Roads, to look into how could we finance the interstate system with tolls. And they kind of didn't really do it. You know, they said, oh, we could never build this with tolls. Let's do this other thing instead. They were also asked to kind of look at, well, you know, if highways are generating value, that value ought to translate into more valuable land. So they were asked to look into using a value capture mechanism to fund highways and say, well, you know, let's instead of buying the land for the corridor, let's buy the land for the corridor and a few things around the land for the corridor, and we'll use the increased value of that other land to pay for the highway. And the response was kind of, that's great. Let's buy up extra land and let's save that for widening the highway when people want to drive more on that highway in the future. I think also even even with Eisenhower, you know, I Eisenhower appointed a commission to look at ways in which the interstate program had derailed and were doing some things that were not kind of originally intended. So I think that there's always been this kind of maybe disconnect between what we thought we were doing, maybe, and or what politicians at least were kind of asking highway planners to do and what highway planners had had chosen to do. And I think at the point where they started receiving large amounts of money, it was it was kind of too late. Once you had that 90-10 match, there's just this real strong incentive to go through and and build uh ever more, ever wider highways.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Speaking of the financing of highways, obviously money plays a major role in how our highways and our inter system got built and continues to be expanded. But I'm not sure a lot of people understand how they're actually paying for their highways. So can you provide an overview of the current funding mechanisms?

Erick Guerra:

I mean, it shifted quite a bit over time. So the way that we pay for highways is is now a bit different than it was in the in the 1970s, but kind of writ large, we still have a system where we generally are raising revenues through, you know, the primary source is the gas tax. There are there are other sources, but that's state and federal gas taxes, that these often go into a dedicated, in the case of federal governments, the federal highway trust fund. It varies by state, kind of how the funding works, but we wind up with these pots of money that are dedicated to the surface transportation system. And then there are different ways that they can be allocated. So, you know, currently a certain share can go to transit, a certain share can go to different types of projects. But at the end of the day, it's mostly raising dedicated funds through the gas tax and other taxes, and they're mostly set aside for building, rebuilding, and maintaining roadways. And over time, the share that we spend on new construction has diminished, but every additional kind of lane mile of highway puts us on the hook for more reconstruction and more maintenance in the future.

Stephanie Rouse:

On the funding piece and kind of the historic funding piece, as part of the National Interstate Defense Highway Act 1956, and you've mentioned this in the episode already, there was a nine-to-one funding match. So states had hardly anything to come up with in order to fund these highways through their communities. What do you think our cities would look like today if there hadn't been this substantial of a match?

Erick Guerra:

So, so different. You can even look at some of the early highway investments that were happening right before in the 40s and 50s, and you can see kind of how challenging it was to build urban highways. Uh, the land acquisition costs in particular were you know so high that it it would have been nearly impossible to build that large of a system. So I think we would have had a much more conservative highway system without that kind of match. You know, fewer highways, less wide, much better integrated with existing land uses. You know, it's expensive to tear down hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, and you really need some sort of strong financial mechanism to enable that.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I sit on the board of a land trust here in Lincoln, and some of our board members went to the Midwest CLT conference, and one of the land trusts there was talking about how their sole purpose is to try to mitigate the harm of a highway that came through. They lost 700 homes and 300 businesses just for a highway.

Erick Guerra:

Yeah, I think people and and I I would guess I count myself among them. When I teach about the history of highways, I often talk about the freeway revolt as something that happened in the past. So movements within cities to stop urban highways. I grew up in Boston and I tell a story in the beginning of the book kind of about some of my interactions with highways that were built or or were never built, and how you kind of grow up not really thinking about it. So I often think about this as a movement that happened in the past, and you look at cities like San Francisco and Boston, New York, it's maybe talked about a little bit less, but these highways were not built through Manhattan. You know, thinking about the French Quarter in uh New Orleans, all these places where highways were stopped, think of as this kind of larger uh freeway revolt. But there's still a lot of highways that are being built around the country that are resulting in the loss of homes, the loss of businesses. And at the end of the day, I don't think that there's really a strong, clear justification for doing it. We're largely justifying this based on some modeling practices that are, you know, over a hundred years old, like the general practice, and are highly criticized, are deeply flawed, and just the the logic is really poor. They have kind of faulty logic to assess the benefits of highway investments in the in the first place. But because we're still using the same general funding mechanisms, because we're still using the same general evaluation mechanisms that we used 50 years ago, I think that there are places where it it remains pretty easy to justify these takings of private property for highways.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I was surprised in reading your book that even the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was 2021, I think, recognizing the importance of multimodal transportation and climate change and the impacts of transportation on climate change, still allocated massive amounts of funding to building and widening highways. I feel like in the planning industry, we're getting the shift into smaller roads overall. I think even engineering is picking up on that. But how do we shift this perspective with our elected officials?

Erick Guerra:

I think that you know, many elected officials may, you know, they may agree, they may disagree on kind of finer points, but I think without addressing the funding mechanisms and without addressing the evaluation mechanisms, it's going to be really hard to shift us away from that practice. And and I would say in in many ways, I talk a lot about iced tea in the book, which is kind of you you can view as the first post-interstate highway law. And I would say all the laws that have have followed or all the acts that have followed really kind of follow that model of iced tea, where you talk a lot about sustainability, you talk a lot about a conservative network, you talk a lot about health, safety, accessibility, uh, physical access. But at the end of the day, the primary purpose, if you kind of track what we do, our primary purpose is to continue to build and rebuild an ever-expanding highway and arterial network.

Stephanie Rouse:

So you discussed the cost-benefit analysis, which is often done with new road projects and how flawed they really are. One way to improve them is to measure external costs and opportunity costs of the project. Can you discuss what these are and whether they're actually making them into project analysis?

Erick Guerra:

I mean, one thing I would say is often most road projects are not doing an extensive cost-benefit analysis. So where they are, if you look at kind of a regional transportation plan, often what they'll do is you'll kind of forecast what's going to happen to traffic over the next 25, 30 years. If you have a pretty sophisticated region, you're going to model that. You may also follow the practice of just assuming that traffic increases on all roadways by 3% every year. That leads to a doubling of kind of traffic every 20 years, roughly. Those are the basic practices. And then you kind of look at that future and then you model a future in which you add a bunch of highways, you know, probably also transit projects, probably also, you know, a series of different projects in a region. So you kind of model that future with and without those transportation investments. And typically you're kind of assuming really similar demands for traffic, like people are traveling the same amount, whether or not you double, you know, or add 20% or 10% or 5% or remove highway lane miles. You assume kind of this fixed amount of traffic. And then you kind of look at, well, what's the difference in travel time if we build this versus if we don't build it? And then you kind of just multiply that by an estimate of people's value of time and you say though that's the benefits of all these investments. And it's a really inflated estimate of benefits because that's not really what happens. And we see that over time, if you look at the history of these large transportation plans, congestion's not going down after them. We kind of predict and provide, and we we provide for a certain amount of traffic, and in some ways it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because we spread things out, there's more and more travel. And at the end of the day, we spend as much time, or potentially, depending on where you are, more time in traffic and in cars than we did prior to these investments.

Jennifer Hiatt:

If the system is now overbuilt, what does unbuilding look like? And do you have any real world examples of it?

Erick Guerra:

One, I would say I think unbuilding is really challenging and it's going to be a slow process. So I just want to kind of start with that. One main takeaway from this book, I would hope that it would be hey, maybe we should stop having construction be the default. Like maybe we should slow down, and that should be a policy of last resort. So even before stopping, you know, starting to unbuild, I think we need to think about not making the problem worse. Step one is stop contributing to the problem. Then from there, I think we can move on to thinking about unbuilding with this kind of, I think an important caveat that this is going to take decades. I don't think there's a silver bullet. It took us decades to get where we are. We've had decades of overbuilding. And I think the idea that we can kind of correct in five years or 10 years is problematic. And I think if we tried to correct things that quickly, we would produce a lot of pain as well. That said, I think that we can start to unbuild slowly over time. I think we do have some examples of urban highways that are narrowed or taken down. My favorite examples always uh relate to land use as well. I talk about transportation sometimes as the kind of negative space of a city. And I don't mean negative as in it's bad. I mean negative as in like a painting. You have negative and positive space. You can't have positive space, you can't have figure without ground. The figure is really the houses and the businesses and the negative space, the ground is what connects them. I think the the most successful projects are one where we are opening up more parcels and I ideally kind of reintegrating them into cities. I think that there are some examples that maybe are a lot less successful than they could be. For example, the you know, the big dig in Boston, essentially, you know, as soon as the central artery was was built, people were talking about how do we put this underground? The second phase essentially went underground because the first phase was so destructive and people saw how destructive it was. And then, you know, decades after that, we we put it underground. By the way, at the same time, we put it underground, we we widened it. And then, but that that's not even that's not really my my main complaint. My main complaint would be that we didn't do anything of real value on the surface. There's a nice linear park, but that used to be blocks of city. And I would much rather see projects where we start to encourage the kind of reuse of land that's been used for highways for other kind of productive uses like houses and businesses and start to rebuild some of the things that we destroyed when we built these highways in the first place.

Stephanie Rouse:

So you said it'll take decades and a lot of coordination at different levels of government in order to unbuild. Who are the key organizations or agencies that will help make this happen?

Erick Guerra:

I think ultimately you need to have a partnership. You need to have, you know, the federal government enabling some of this to happen. Um, I think we probably need to have some shifts in in how we finance and evaluate projects and highways at the federal level. That's also going to require state departments of transportation to be on board. But at the end of the day, as soon as you're getting into issues of land use, it's really about local localities, cities, towns are the ones who manage land use and and who deal with land parcels. So I think you need to have a partnership between all three.

Stephanie Rouse:

Do you see this being able to happen sooner rather than later just because of the the kind of core financing mechanism is the gas tax. And with the shift over to EVs and the pace that the gas tax is just not keeping up, we aren't going to have as many funds. So it's going to really have to be limited on the amount that the federal government is supplying.

Erick Guerra:

In that respect, I think it's a really interesting moment. I think we we have an opportunity to reframe how we fund transportation systems. I think there's a real opportunity to move towards charging more for the most expensive types of trips. And what I mean by that is if you're you know driving on a rural highway at at 1 a.m., you're not very expensive. Your vehicle is kind of creating some wear and tear, you're emitting some greenhouse gas emissions, you're emitting some local emissions. But when you think of that relative to a trip that's going into a downtown at a really congested, really busy time of day, that's an extremely expensive trip. And that's the type of trip that kind of encourages the widening of a highway to try and meet that demand. And those should be more expensive. It should be more expensive to drive. You know, I think that that sometimes can be framed in kind of a negative way. It's all about charging people. But at the end of the day, it's about preventing a highway widening and about thinking about well, you know, instead of having this be a 10 lane highway, maybe it doesn't need to be five lanes in each direction. Maybe it could be three in each direction, and we're paying a little bit more for it. But now that's freeing up an awful lot of land. And it's a lot easier. There's more things to kind of go to. So ideally, we can kind of shift a little bit more towards funding from, you know, raising funds from these more expensive trips. I think at the end of the day, a lot of people are talking about moving towards a kind of vehicle miles travel tax and simply replacing the gas tax with that. And I think that would be a real missed opportunity to rethink overall funding because anything that's kind of raising about the same amount of revenues from the cheapest trips to the most expensive trips, and then dedicating all of those resources or most of those resources to the really expensive trip is going to really distort travel behavior and travel patterns. And it is part of what got us into this overbuilt system that we have.

Jennifer Hiatt:

As this is booked on planning, always our last question is what books would you recommend readers check out?

Erick Guerra:

Of course. I love Wes Marshall's book, Killed by a Traffic Engineer. If you haven't read that yet, it's it's absolutely terrific. I think it does such a good job of framing the history of how certain practices got institutionalized over the last uh hundred years, and really does a good job of explaining kind of why and how the U.S. has done such a poor job on traffic safety. Other books I would recommend, I kind of recent. I like uh The Drive for Dollars. That's uh Brian Taylor, Eric Morris, and Jeff Brown. That's really focused on highway finance. I think that came out in maybe a cut, maybe two years ago, maybe three years ago. Like that book a lot. Pay Paradise, if you've read that, that's uh Henry Graber. It's really cool book. A lot of it, you know, if you're familiar with parking practice in general, you'll be pretty familiar with it. But then kind of intersect with that. There's some great stories on practices of kind of how parking regulation has made it so hard to develop housing in certain situations. Uh, stories about mafia involvement in parking garages, and just you know, it's really great, fabulous look at parking that I think kind of really adds to the body of knowledge on that that topic. City limits. That's um sorry, I is it Megan Kimball? Yeah, Megan Kimball. I don't know her personally, so I I lost her name there for a moment. But yeah, it's a great book. Really liked it. It's about kind of contemporary freeway, like fights against freeway expansions in in Texas cities. She was reporting, you know, in that in that area for a while. I think it's a really, a really great book. What else have I read recently that I really liked? That's four, right? That's a that's a good number. Yeah.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We had uh Wes on last year talk about Killed by a Traffic Engineer, and our last episode, right before this one, was actually Pave Paradise. We had Henry Gabor actually here in Nebraska at our fall workshop and did a live podcast recording with him.

Erick Guerra:

So terrific.

Stephanie Rouse:

A lot of great book recommendations. We'll add the the two new ones to our list that we don't have yet. Eric, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your book, Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction.

Erick Guerra:

Thanks, Stephanie. Thanks, Jennifer.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Eric Herrera on his book, Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of U.S. Highway Construction. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Island Press by supporting your local bookstore or online at bookshop.org. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review, and share the show. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on Bookdown Planning.

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Jennifer Hiatt

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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

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