Over the Fourth of July weekend, a lane of Interstate 97 south of Baltimore simply warped out of existence, twisted into uselessness by the heat before anyone could do anything about it. A Chicago street buckled too. Multiple state transportation departments sent out warnings telling drivers to watch for additional failures. This is the part where we tell you it's only going to get worse.
What Actually Happened Out There
The mechanics are straightforward enough to make a civil engineer wince. According to NPR, heat-related road failure happens when moisture gets underneath pavement, softens it, and then extreme heat causes it to expand past its breaking point. Throw in several consecutive days of brutal temperatures and heavy holiday traffic, and you get what happened on I-97.
Charlie Gischlar, a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Transportation, told NPR that it was exactly that combination, prolonged intense heat plus traffic load, that caused the Baltimore blowout. The road wasn't defective. It wasn't poorly built. It was built for a climate that, increasingly, no longer shows up.
Concrete and asphalt fail in different ways, which is its own special nightmare for transportation planners. Charles Marohn, founder of the nonprofit Strong Towns, explained to NPR that asphalt gets soft and rutted, basically turning into slow-moving liquid on a hot afternoon, while concrete holds its shape longer but then fails catastrophically when it goes. As Marohn put it, when concrete fails, "it goes really bad, really quick."
The Roads Were Built for a Different Planet
Here is the core problem, stated as plainly as possible. Amit Bhasin, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the university's Center for Transportation Research, told NPR that every road is designed for a specific temperature range. When actual temperatures fall outside that range, the road fails. Not because someone did something wrong. Because the assumptions baked into the design no longer match reality.
Mikhail Chester, an engineering professor at Arizona State University, said it even more directly in an interview with NPR's All Things Considered. "In many ways, we've designed our infrastructures over decades, if not centuries, for temperatures that have been relatively milder," he said. "Now, as temperatures are hotter, you're starting to see the dynamics of those extremes take hold, exceeding the design thresholds of those infrastructures."
Scientists have been saying for years that heat waves are getting more frequent and more intense. Climate change is also driving heavier rainfall, which is the moisture part of the moisture-plus-heat equation that destroys roads. The two trends are converging directly on the asphalt beneath your tires.
So What Do We Do About It
Engineers actually have answers here, which is either reassuring or infuriating depending on your relationship with the phrase "politically unfeasible." Bhasin told NPR that better materials exist: more durable asphalt blends, higher percentages of steel reinforcement in concrete, adjusted joint spacing that handles more thermal expansion without that annoying clack-clack sound that already grates on every driver in the country.
The data problem is significant. Bhasin said that if climate projections point toward more extreme events, engineers can absolutely design for them. "Engineers have figured this out, and they can design it," he told NPR. "They just need to know what to go off of." The issue is that infrastructure planning still frequently runs on historical climate data rather than projections, meaning roads get built to handle yesterday's weather.
And then there's the cost conversation, which is where things get politically ugly fast. Bhasin was blunt with NPR: anyone can build roads robust enough to handle extreme events. It would just cost significantly more. "So you have to make the call," he said, that you're willing to accept occasional disruptions to keep costs down. That calculation made sense in 1990. In 2026, with roads literally warping on a holiday weekend, it deserves another look.
The Bill Is Going to Come Due Anyway
The cheapness argument for existing road design is starting to eat itself. NPR points out that concrete roads cost more upfront but last longer and need less maintenance, while asphalt is cheaper to build but requires more frequent repairs and resurfacing. In a stable climate, that's a reasonable tradeoff. In a climate where extreme heat events keep disabling roads that weren't built for them, you're paying for constant emergency repairs on top of regular maintenance anyway.
Chester told NPR that the country's old approach to infrastructure "doesn't seem to be sufficient" and that what's needed is innovation and knowledge-sharing. That's a polite way of saying the entire framework needs to be rebuilt from scratch, which is a sentence that should make every transportation budget in America very nervous.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about the political context here. The Trump administration has spent the better part of its time in office dismissing climate science, gutting federal agencies that produce the exact climate data engineers say they desperately need to design better roads, and rolling back environmental regulations on the theory that the economy can't afford the burden. Meanwhile, the actual economy is watching a lane of Interstate 97 twist into a heat-warped sculpture on the Fourth of July. How's that burden feeling now?
The infrastructure law passed under Biden put real money into roads and bridges. Whether any of that money goes toward climate-adaptive design, rather than just rebuilding the same roads to the same old specs, is a question nobody in a position of power seems eager to answer in public. Chester's word, "innovate," sounds hopeful. The political will to fund that innovation, to make the upfront investment that prevents the much larger downstream repair bills, has been notably absent from Washington for a generation.
Bhasin's framing is the one that should keep transportation planners up at night. You can design a road to handle 99% of conditions and accept that 1% of the time traffic gets disrupted. That math worked when the extreme 1% was genuinely rare. Climate change is moving the goalposts. The 1% keeps showing up more often, in more places, on more major holidays, on more interstates. At some point, the country has to decide whether it wants roads that work or roads that were cheap to approve in a budget meeting fifteen years ago.
