Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction

by Erick Guerra

The world’s largest public works investment visible from space, the Interstate Highway System and the hundreds of thousands of miles of supporting roadways, are frequently hailed as a marvel and triumph of engineering. President Eisenhower’s 1956 Interstate Highway Act is often praised as a model of successful bipartisanship.
 
Today, the extensive damage wreaked by the creation of the highway system and the ills of car dependency are more widely acknowledged. Congestion and traffic deaths remain endemic despite nearly three-quarters a century of public policies and trillions of dollars spent with a primary stated goal of reducing congestion and improving traffic safety. The financing, governance, and construction models established by the 1956 act continue to influence what gets built today.
 
In The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction, transportation planning expert Erick Guerra describes how the US roadway system became overbuilt, how public policy continues to encourage overbuilding, what the scale and consequences of overbuilding are, and how we can rethink our approach to highway building in the US.
 
Guerra explains that the national propensity to build roadways is no longer official or intentional policy. Instead, overbuilding stems from the institutions, finance mechanisms, and evaluation metrics developed in the first half of the twentieth century. While more funds are set aside for transit, walking, biking, and beautification, the investment paradigm has not changed. Planners and engineers have not adjusted the tools they use to determine which roads should be built, rebuilt, or widened and why. The country has added more lanes of urban Interstate since declaring the Interstate system complete than prior to it. 
 
Despite having too much roadway, the country is still operating in construction mode, using the same basic approach used to finance and build the interstate system quickly, Guerra states. The interstate was completed more than three decades ago. Overbuilt argues convincingly that it is time to move on.
 
 

256 pages, Paperback

Published July 8, 2025

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

The early chapters documenting the history of overbuilding were very well done and laid the foundation for solutions. The later chapters offered little in the way of solutions beyond 'stop doing it'. The author cited two contemporaries - Wes Marshall and Charles Marohn - and says all traffic engineers are either 'incompetent or disingenuous'. I don't think it fair/useful to say something like that about an entire profession without either 1) offering alternative methodologies or 2) tying the offered solutions to specific standards that are inhibiting safe mobility. The conclusion suggests a few ways forward: measure accessibility, not capacity; conduct rigorous cost-benefit analyses; change the finance mechanisms and performance measures to stop overbuilding. But the author says transit is not a realistic solution because of our car-dependent land use, and says technology won't fix this. The author suggests his 'clever students' propose something like a guaranteed basic income to overcome the mobility needs resulting from overbuilding, and the 'weak' responses are to invest in transit. To stop overbuilding is certainly a first step, but I will have to read other books to see how to reverse the trend - i.e. to determine what solutions have benefits that do outweigh the costs, if transit isn't a realistic alternative.

[Nechama Lowy · Rating 5 out of 5]

a great read on the history of highway expansion, traffic safety, and impacts of freeway building on low-income and minority communities. i did find it interesting that his solutions didn’t argue for expanding public transit, which is usually the go-to saying. he recognized the nuance of different U.S. regions that just wouldn’t benefit from transit as much as other parts of the country. I’m not sure i fully agree but it was thought-provoking to read other proposed solutions, like using accessibility as a feature of transportation and traffic planning.

[Kelsey Huse · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the nerds (like me), it’s packed full of history and arguments toward the need to simply stop funding road expansions. Lot of referenced research that I will certainly be using in my own thesis!