At the Sierra Club monthly meeting, Megan Kimble, author of City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, will present a talk and discussion regarding highways in our cities. Every major American city has a highway tearing through its center. Seventy years ago, planners sold these highways as progress, essential to our future prosperity. The automobile promised freedom, and highways were going to take us there.

Instead, they divided cities, displaced people from their homes, chained us to our cars, and locked us into a high-emissions future. And the more highways we built, the worse traffic got. Nowhere is this more visible than in Texas, where multi-billion-dollar highway expansions claim thousands of homes and businesses, entrenching segregation and sprawl.

Our allegiance to a life of increasing speed and dispersion has enormous social and environmental costs. What if, instead of building our aging roads wider and higher, we removed those highways altogether? It's been done before, first in San Francisco and, more recently, in Rochester, New York, where highway removal has brought new life to a divided city.