A convincing case for removing highways and shaping cities meant for people, not cars.
An extended argument against car culture and the continuing proliferation of highways.
Austin-based journalist Kimble has been witnessing firsthand the consequences of living in the country’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, with its lack of affordable housing, sprawling urban footprint, and increasing traffic gridlock. Traveling through the eight miles of downtown via the north-south interstate used to take eight minutes, but by 2019, that had stretched to 32 minutes; in 2045, it is expected to take 223 minutes. The more sensible alternative would be improved public transit, but “transit functions best when it connects people across densely occupied places,” which doesn’t describe so much of urban Texas, with metro Dallas–Fort Worth “covering more area than the states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined.” Kimble’s case studies center mostly on Texas cities, with forays into the experiences of highway architects and anti-highway activists elsewhere. While the book is full of solid information and sometimes appalling data, to say nothing of sound arguments for such things as reenvisioning the federal government’s role in funding, it’s overlong and could have benefited from a little less purely anecdotal, human-interest journalism. Still, Kimble capably proposes a sustained rethinking of urban infrastructure, untangling highways from cities that serve as chokepoints and recognizing more widely the long-established fact that traffic expands to fill such motorway space as is made available to it, so that no road, however new and shiny, ever does a thing to ease the jam. We’ve been going at it in exactly the opposite direction, notes the author. “Between 1993 and 2017,” she writes, “the hundred largest urbanized areas in the United States spent more than $500 billion adding new freeways or expanding existing ones”—and the resulting congestion far outstripped the rate of population growth.
A convincing case for removing highways and shaping cities meant for people, not cars.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593443781
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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