A Place for Lovers & Friends

What Are We Optimizing For?

The elegant, tree-lined stretch of Octavia Boulevard in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley culminates in Patricia’s Green, a popular park fronted by restaurants, cafes, retail, and apartments. When my husband and I lived nearby, we’d often wander down for brunch, followed by coffees from Ritual Roasters and a stroll around the park. Impossible to imagine today, a ribbon of concrete once snaked through the neighborhood, blighting all in its path. When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the Central Freeway, San Franciscans decided not to rebuild it, instead reclaiming the neighborhood for people, not cars. 

Rarely in our cities do we get such an opportunity to rethink the future, but the question that faced San Franciscans in 1989 is the same that underlies all of urban planning: What are we optimizing for? For much of the Twentieth Century, the answer was cars—with all the highways, parking lots, and sprawl that came with them.

Octavia Boulevard, before and after Central Freeway removal (Source: CNU)

Urban highways are the subject of Megan Kimble’s excellent City Limits, an engaging, humanistic study of the destruction wrought on our cities by highway construction projects and of those who are rethinking the way we build in three Texas cities—Houston, Dallas, and Austin. As urban highways come down in some cities, we are still doubling down on the car-centric mistakes of the past in others.

Kimble describes a scene in Houston, observed from the patio of True Anomaly Brewing Company, that evoked memories of Octavia Boulevard:

Faint electronic dance music wafts from a rooftop club a block away. People on green scooters whiz through the intersection. Couples walk, arms looped loosely around waists, flashing summer skin. So many other cities are desperately trying to bring this scene back to their deserted city centers: the casual chemistry of a late Tuesday night in midsummer. 

Of course, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) intends to pave over it. The expansion of nearby Interstate 69 would engulf True Anomaly and much of the newly revitalized neighborhood that has emerged around the Houston Dynamo soccer stadium. TxDOT already condemned and demolished 165 apartments in a 375-unit complex, while the remaining apartments sit vacant. The brewery’s co-owner Michael Duckworth says, “One of the bigger things that we’re losing is the presence, the proximity, the location. We’ll find a place, but it won’t be this. That’s irreplaceable.” As Duckworth puts it, TxDOT is laying waste to a revitalized neighborhood. 

Place is irreplaceable—yet for decades we have continued to make space for cars at the expense of places for people. Why do we choose this?

Americans took to the automobile with gusto, and automakers and marketers were early to associate, in our collective conscience, the car with freedom and independence. Cars became a symbol of progress, widely embraced as the solution to the overcrowding and filth of early-1900s cities, and planners rolled out the concrete carpet for them. Cars allowed people to drive to where they could afford a single-family detached home of their own; but as much as cars enabled the expansion of the spacious suburbs, they were ill-suited for the urban environment: they take up a lot of space. Planners thus saw urban highways as a means of improving congestion within cities. Flush with federal highway funding, they built with abandon, even though transportation experts argued that mass transit made more sense. Instead, planners took the advice of Robert Moses that urban highways “must go right through cities and not around them,” and so armed with the absolute power of eminent domain, they bulldozed the interstate system right through urban neighborhoods.

But not everywhere. 

As Kimble notes, redlined black and Hispanic communities were three times more likely to have a highway routed through them than the better-rated neighborhoods. During the first wave of interstate construction, between 1956 and 1966, some thirty-seven thousand homes were demolished for highways, while the US Department of Transportation estimates that more than a million people were displaced for highways over the decades. Highways were incompatible with urban life, obliterating whole communities and the social fabric that held them together. City Limits tells tale after tale of such destruction.

Herbert Hoover once exulted that “locality has been annihilated” in the wake of the automobile. But urban historian Lewis Mumford understood that a city built for cars was an “anti-city which annihilates the city wherever it collides with it." What we ended up with was cities drained of their vitality and sprawling suburbs completely lacking in urbanity—anti-cities everywhere, designed for cars, for driving, for highways. We still do it.

What are we optimizing for?

Paul Millerd

of the Pathless Path laments, relatably, how his friends all optimized for the largest suburban homes they could afford rather than closeness to friends and loved ones; consequently, nobody sees each other anymore. Living further away from, well, everything, we spend more time in our cars, commuting to work or driving to errands, and so we engage less with neighbors and our broader community. The shape of our homes has evolved to conform to our auto-dependency: garages and backyards have displaced front porches and sidewalks, while walkable neighborhoods have given way to strip malls and drive-thrus and hellish school drop-off lines. Nationally, we’re living apart from one another, which has left us feeling lonelier and out of place, with weaker relationships, less vibrant communities, and more political discord.

We have optimized our homes and lives for a world of speed, only accessible via our cars—and it’s killing us.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 40,990 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2023, a decrease of 3.6% from 2022—but a 25% increase over 2013. According to the NHTSA, 7,522 pedestrians were killed and more than 67,000 pedestrians were injured in 2022. Meanwhile, the number of miles driven by America increased by 2.1% year-on-year.

In Texas, TxDOT reports that 4,283 people died in crashes last year, while 250,335 people were injured, 18,752 seriously. Based on the number of reported crashes, that equates to one person killed every 2 hours 3 minutes; one person injured every 2 minutes 6 seconds, and; one reportable crash every 56 seconds. How many people will be injured on Texas roads in the time it takes for you to read this? TxDOT notes that “There were no deathless days on Texas roadways in 2023.”

It’s hard to fight TxDOT, as San Antonio shows. Kimble describes how San Antonians had hoped to transform a state highway that ran through downtown into an urban boulevard akin to Octavia Boulevard in San Francisco. The state didn’t need the 2.2-mile stretch of road, and it was dangerous: from 2012 to 2021, three thousand people were involved in crashes and 27 seriously injured. When asked why TxDOT decided to kill San Antonio’s plan, an executive replied, “We definitely understand the need, for a lot of reasons, but safety being one of them, to increase pedestrian and bicycle facilities, make sure those facilities are safe. Just not at the expense of vehicular traffic.”

What are we optimizing for?

Meanwhile, in Austin, TxDOT is steamrolling ahead with an expensive highway expansion project that will destroy 54 acres of land and more than 100 homes and businesses, while an alternative plan would have created $3 billion in development opportunities and millions in recurring tax revenue. This expansion, like all others, is justified on the basis that it will decrease congestion, but the data suggests that building more lanes will only induce more demand, eventually making traffic just as bad or worse. 

Aptly, the banner TxDOT hung up at their I-35 groundbreaking ceremony read: “Clearing the way for Texas drivers.” We know what TxDOT is optimizing for. 

As mid-century highway builders razed downtowns across America, Lewis Mumford exhorted his countrymen to “forget the damned motor car and build cities for lovers and friends.” Urban highway construction drained cities of their residents and livelihood and damned them to become dead places. While the places they destroyed are irreplaceable, the damage does not have to be permanent. As San Francisco and other cities have found, removing urban freeways can revitalize neighborhoods with minimal impact on traffic—all while improving safety and air quality. In Texas, ambitious freeway fighters are working to change the direction that TxDOT seems intent on taking Texan cities: one in which life is not spent on or under urban highways, disconnected from our communities, our neighbors, and our loved ones. But TxDOT won’t change until voters change their minds about what kind of places they want to live in

Urban highways may be the path to larger houses, but they are barriers to connected communities, stronger relationships, and more vibrant places—to places meant for lovers and friends. To build a city for them, we need to forget the damned automobile and start optimizing for people.