People cannot be economically mobile if they are not able to be mobile. People cannot access employment, healthcare, or education if they cannot get there. Transportation policy and decision-making has been dominated by white, male, able-bodied, cisgender engineers (Frisch, 2002; Lowe, 2021). As a result, many of the decisions made by transportation policymakers lack the grounding in racial justice or the life experiences of the most vulnerable users (Barajas, 2021; Frisch, 2002; Lowe, 2021; Lowe et al., 2023; Vigar, 2017). In City Limits, Megan Kimble aims to pull back the curtain on transportation decision-making and the effects of those decisions as she takes the reader through the journey of how a highway gets built and who it violently destroys in the process. Divided into three sections, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, uses three Texas cities and freeways as case studies to detail the fight for and against Houston’s I-45, Austin’s I-35, and Dallas’ I-345 through the eyes of several community members, elected officials, government staff, small businesses, and community organizations.
T. J. Butler (2025) studied this question.