Overbuilt

America’s roads tell a story of ambition, incentives, and unintended outcomes. The interstate era promised speed, safety, and national reach; the funding machine that built it never really wound down. As Erick Guerra explains, we finished the planned network around 1991 and then kept going, adding roughly 75 percent more urban highway lane miles. The result is a system that delivers higher average speeds but worse mobility where it matters. We also inherited a financial burden that grows with every lane added, since reconstruction and maintenance costs scale with size. The core message is blunt and evidence-based: we are overbuilt, and we keep funding the problem we say we want to solve.

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The policy lineage matters. ISTEA was hailed as a pivot to multimodal planning, yet its descendants—TEA-21, SAFETEA-LU, MAP-21, FAST Act, IIJA—largely preserved federal incentives that reward building and rebuilding big roads. The match structures, dedicated fuel taxes, and modeling norms all tilt toward more capacity. Even routine “maintenance” often means wider lanes, bigger interchanges, and more impervious surface, locking in future costs and emissions. Meanwhile, voters resist raising gas taxes, signaling ambivalence about endless expansion when the bill is clear. The contradiction is stark: a rhetoric of sustainability paired with a capital program that privileges asphalt.

Why don’t wider roads clear traffic? Induced demand is only part of the story. Regions expand trip lengths, spread land uses, and lock households into longer drives, so time-in-traffic barely improves. Standard planning models often fix trip totals and then credit projects with large time savings, inflating benefits. External costs—displacement, emissions, stormwater, crashes, and the opportunity cost of land—are typically sidelined. When we multiply small modeled time gains by high values of time, we wash away real harms and overstate returns. The bill then arrives twice: once at the construction site and again in fragmented neighborhoods and a brittle fiscal base.

If we are overbuilt, what does unbuilding look like? It starts with a cultural shift: construction becomes the last resort, not the default. Pause capacity projects that don’t pencil out after full costs. When corridors come due for reconstruction, evaluate narrower footprints, lane conversions, and surface boulevards that restore the street grid. The strongest successes pair transportation change with land use repair—more blocks, more parcels, more homes and businesses where viaducts once stood. Linear parks are welcome, but economic life depends on addresses, not greenspace. Unbuilding is slow work, measured in program cycles and parcel maps, but every avoided lane mile reduces tomorrow’s liabilities.

Pricing can help us steer. Not every mile costs the system equally: a 1 a.m. rural trip is cheap; a peak-hour downtown approach is costly. Transitioning from blunt fuel taxes to smarter user fees means charging more for the most expensive trips—think congestion pricing with equity guardrails—while keeping off-peak and low-cost travel affordable. Replacing the gas tax with a flat per-mile fee risks repeating the same distortions, funding the most expensive capacity while spreading costs uniformly. Calibrated pricing can prevent widenings, accelerate transit and safer streets, and align budgets with outcomes. The opportunity is timely as EVs erode fuel tax revenue.

Changing course requires a three-level partnership. The federal government must realign funding formulas and evaluation methods. States need to pivot DOT missions toward stewardship and safety, not throughput alone. Cities, which control land use, must plan for infill, missing-middle housing, and multimodal streets that make shorter trips viable. Rigorous benefits analysis that counts displacement, climate, and crash risk can reset priorities. With patience and better incentives, we can trade oversized highways for connected neighborhoods, fiscal resilience, and everyday mobility that actually works.