Since 2014, dozens of protests in the U.S. have deliberately blocked major highways in order to increase the visibility of these protests and to draw on long-standing political meanings of transportation infrastructure. In response, seventeen states in 2017 introduced twenty-one pieces of legislation aimed at stopping such protests. While only two of these bills passed into law, they are still of interest for what they demonstrate about state-level legislative responses to highway protests. Using quantitative and qualitative methods within a framework of mobility justice, this study considers the geographies of the legislators who sponsored these bills as well as the discourses they produced around mobility, space, and place.
