Overbuilt: Book Talk and Conversation with Erick Guerra

Join the Department of City & Regional Planning and the Penn Institute for Urban Research for this talk on Professor Erick Guerra's new book, Overbuilt. The book explores how outdated policies, flawed funding systems, and misguided metrics led to the overbuilding of the U.S. roadway network. Guerra examines the lasting consequences of this overbuilding and outlines how policymakers can "unbuild" to create a more sustainable and effective transportation future.

About the Book

Of the approximately inflation-adjusted $2.5 trillion spent on highways from the Highway Trust Fund since its inception in 1956, about 60 percent has been spent since completing the last bit of the originally planned Interstate System in 1992. About 75 percent has been spent since the system was supposed to have been completed in 1969. State and local governments have spent trillions more on capital road investments and repairs over the same period.

Though fewer homes and businesses are destroyed, highway planners have added 75% more lane miles of urban interstate and 55 percent more secondary highways and arterials today than there were in 1992. Few Americans have a sense of how much the government spends on roadways or how, why, or where roads get built. The better informed generally understand that the federal government and states raise dedicated transportation funds through a gas tax. And these funds are primarily spent to build, widen, upgrade, and maintain major highways and arterials.

Erick Guerra, Ph.D., is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Associate Dean for Research at the Weitzman School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in transportation planning and quantitative planning methods. His research focuses on relationships between land use, transportation systems, and travel behavior with an emphasis on rapidly motorizing cities, public health outcomes, and transportation technologies.

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