
Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them? - colinbartlett
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-cities-history
======
m_mueller
As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just
saddens me that highways _replaced_ local public transport in many American
cities rather than added to it. That really doesn't make any sense to me. The
way I see it, any healthy city needs local transport like metro or streetcar
so sou can do your business there without wasting time (getting back to your
car, drive to the next place you need to go, find a parking lot, walk). It
seems like shopping malls have replaced that 'going to the city' activity -
the problem there is that you have no choice in the individual stores - they
tend to have one, max two of the bigger stores you need. Low competition
results in low quality - then the next big thing gets built further away,
people drive there instead and the whole cycle continues. The lesson here is
to stop lobbying from becoming too powerful - building highways is not the
problem, ripping apart public transport is.

~~~
forrestthewoods
No. Any city needs a good way to get around. Ideally any person could go from
any point to any point with ease. Theres nothing fundamentally special about
the mechanism used to do so. If cars can do it, great! If they can't but
trains and trolleys can, good!

I maintain that a pre-requisite to "good" public transportation is bad
infrastructure for cars. If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium
sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed.

Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US
New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the
country. No thank you.

Self-driving cars are obviously the future. Well, part of the future at least.
I'm very curious what the "ideal" city would look like with self-driving cars
at the center. What would a city look like if built from the ground up with
them in mind?

~~~
m_mueller
I'm sorry, but this is just a load of bollocks. There is a fundamental
difference between public transport and cars, other than the upfront
investment that was pointed out in another comment: A car is a ~12m2 sized
thing that you have to (a) somehow route into the system (road space
requirements) and (b) leave somewhere when you do your business.

(a) is an overhead of a factor of ~40 compared to people standing and a factor
or ~20 compared to people sitting for the transport alone (I'm assuming here
people driving alone, which from experience is how this mostly works out).

(b) is an additional constant overhead of 12m2 for every participant that's
not moving.

In computer science terms, your network protocol sucks, and leads to
inefficient cities.

Would you like an example? L.A. metro area has about the same size as Greater
Tokyo, produces about the same amount of carbon emissions total (!) [5], yet
provides space for 2.5x less people and produces ~2.4x less GDP at purchase
power parity [1],[2],[3],[4].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas_by_GDP)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area)

[4]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP)

[5]
[http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223399559_Twelve_met...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223399559_Twelve_metropolitan_carbon_footprints_A_preliminary_comparative_global_assessment)

~~~
forrestthewoods
Self-driving cars don't have to be left somewhere. They can go and transport
other people. Or they can drive themselves out of the way somewhere to hang
out for awhile. Or some combination there of.

I'm not sure how much I want to comment on your math equation. It's obviously
much more complicated. It can't be reduced to an equation.

~~~
m_mueller
_ideal_ self-driving cars basically remove (b) from my equation. The thing is,
even if self-driving cars are around the corner now, I reckon that the type
you can just leave on its own without any humans inside are still far out.
Even just a solution for driving in bad weather conditions hasn't been tackled
at all yet - you can't just shut down the city transport just because snow has
covered up most of the visual markers. So, self-driving cars isn't going to
solve any network problems for quite a while, and even when they do you still
have overhead (a), which intuitively I'd say is even more important. I don't
think it's that complicated btw. - if you do, please provide things I haven't
considered and significantly change the outcome of the calculation.

------
bane
I subscribe to reddit's /r/retrofuturism and I've formulated a hypothesis
about this. The future we used to want was full of what I like to call "garden
cities" [1][2][3][4]. Massive structures spaced far away from each other and
in between carefully curated green spaces. The obvious problem with this
vision is that getting around anywhere turns into a huge problem. This
appealed to transportation companies and car makers came out on top and we
ended up with the rest of the problems, _without_ ending up with the garden
cities. It turns out these visions of the future are bad for a whole host of
reasons, transport was only one.

1 -
[http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...](http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951403247/HORIZONS-
MURAL-Rober-McCall.jpg?token=PHSPVatsg2T5xuH1MoAbv97PN%2BI%3D)

2 -
[http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg](http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg)

3 - [https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379](https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379)

4 - [http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-
crazy...](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-crazy-
visions-of-the-future/)

~~~
DanBC
Have you read William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum"?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum)

A dodgy Russian site has the text
[http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt](http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt)

~~~
ak217
lib.ru is not exactly dodgy. It's the oldest Russian online library, founded
in 1994.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Perhaps he meant dodgy in the sense of "dishonest". I.e. ignoring the spirit
if not the letter of the Berne Convention?

I'm by no means a legal scholar, but this story was apparently published in
1981. Russia agreed[1] to Berne protection for 1973 and later work. So why is
the full text of the story available at that link?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Russian_F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Russian_Federation#Amendments_of_the_1993_Copyright_law)

------
Spooky23
Chalking everything up as racism is a real one dimensional way to look at this
issue. You really got to think through process in context... The world had
just been through two devastating world wars. The past was 30 years of
depravity... People were focused on building a better future.

I think in those days, nobody saw vibrant neighborhoods. They saw cold water
flats, often desperate poverty and the legacy of the past. A rare visionary
would look at a 1950 industrial waterfront or tenement neighborhood and see a
valuable public resource that the public needed to be connected with.

~~~
jqm
Exactly. What I got out of the article was that GM and some racists conspired
to destroy America's cities and pollute the environment so the rich could get
richer.

(FWITW, I'm highly in favor of green cities and efficient public
transportation. And highly against politically charged exaggerated one sided
articles.).

------
ojbyrne
My understanding is that a significant part of the motivation for the
interstate system was military, which doesn't seem to get any consideration in
this article. Wikipedia says:

"The Interstate Highway System gained a champion in President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, who was influenced by his experiences as a young Army officer
crossing the country in the 1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway, the first
road across America. Eisenhower gained an appreciation of the Reichsautobahn
system, the first "national" implementation of modern Germany's Autobahn
network, as a necessary component of a national defense system while he was
serving as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War
II. He recognized that the proposed system would also provide key ground
transport routes for military supplies and troop deployments in case of an
emergency or foreign invasion."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System)

~~~
hippich
I don't know much about autobahns. Do these go through cities, or go near
cities?

~~~
mschuster91
Yup, just look at Berlin and Munich. Munich is surrounded by a (partially)
8-lane ring, and numerous Autobahns end within 10min driving distance of the
city center.

------
csomar
The article criticises the cost of the entire interstate-highway and yet he
focused on the couple highways that are inside the city.

I think that the cost of the interstate highway was mainly due to, you guessed
it, building the highway interstate (I might be wrong).

The interstate highway also serves a different purpose than driving to work.
It links states. Any industrialised country should have highways to link major
cities. Heck, my underdeveloped country has highways that links all of the
main cities (around 80% of the population)

------
theVirginian
This would have been an interesting article if it didn't try to expose the
highway system as some giant racist conspiracy.

~~~
alexqgb
It wasn't a conspiracy. In a country where laws against interracial marriage
weren't struck down until 1967 (SCOTUS: Loving v. Virginia), there was no need
to be furtive about racism. Quite the contrary, segregation was a selling
point.

~~~
sologoub
That may be true, in all honesty, I don't know enough, but am trying to learn
as much of this history as time permits. Not originally from US...

That said, US on average seems to be doing a hell of a lot better in owning up
to such injustices than many other place. For example, I was bored last night
and reading about the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia circa
1700s, and somehow managed to find out about TWO distinct ethnic groups and
languages that barely exist today, but were more or less thriving as late as
early 1900s in the area I would have considered nothing but Russian. If you
are interested, read up on the history of Vyborg and Ingria:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria).
Good luck getting the current residents to even knowledge this...

At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully,
more progress is made to that end.

~~~
smil
>At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully,
more progress is made to that end.

You are clearly in denial to the point where you need to look at other nations
500 years ago and conjure things that never happened, to make yourself feel
better about the U.S., a country that has never been democratic nor free.

As for Ingria in Sweden, still exist, have their own language and the
state/county is still named after them, Ångermanland.

~~~
sologoub
How can I be in denial if I said I'm just learning about the US history and
details? I absolutely acknowledge that I have not read enough on the subject
to have a proper informed perspective.

As for Ingria, I think we are referring to different places. I'm referring to
the area mostly in present day Leningradskaya Oblast in Russia. From the same
wikipedia article:

"According to the Soviet census of 1989, there were 829 Izhorians, 449 of them
in Russia (including other parts of the country) and 228 in Estonia."

Compared to:

"By 1897 (year of the Russian Empire Census) the number of Ingrian Finns had
grown to 130,413, and by 1917 it had exceeded 140,000 (45,000 in Northern
Ingria, 52,000 in Central (Eastern) Ingria and 30,000 in Western Ingria, the
rest in Petrograd)."

So from 140k to maybe ~800? At least to me, that's pretty heinous...

Edit: Note that events I'm talking about are less than 100 years old and, as a
resident of the country doing it, I had no idea it even happened...

~~~
smil
You specifically named Sweden, and that's the remark I replied to.

~~~
sologoub
Because that land was controlled by Sweden before 1700s. But in any case, the
article I linked to is written better than I can explain and also links to
other relevant info if you are interested.

------
tedunangst
> Curiously, urban planners were absent — the profession barely existed at the
> time.

Huh? Wouldn't it have been even more curious to include people who didn't
exist?

~~~
vidarh
It's exaggeration.

Hippodamus (5th century BC) was described by Aristotle as "the first city
planner". Europe is full of examples of detailed urban planning dating back a
millennium or more.

Roman cities were carefully planned out to ensure transport, water supply,
defence capabilities etc.

After the Roman expansion, we have tons of plan-drawings for new city
developments across Europe spanning hundreds of years.

The US too had any number of prominent examples of detailed city planning
dating back to e.g. Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington D.C. in 1791.

It might be more reasonable to say that in the US, city planners were still
not considered relevant to planning major transport infrastructure. City
planners were employed to handle the layout of the interior of cities, and
more often landmarks and politically important parts of the downtown areas.
Why would you consult them when you wanted to figure out how to move people
_between_ cities? It was not seen as their domain.

Europe was different in this respect mostly because Europe already had the
road networks, and population density along them, that means building freeways
have been largely about upgrading/replacing existing "working" road
connections that were already integrated into the urban fabric, sometimes
through centuries, or even dating back to Roman times, and much less about
creating entirely new road connections.

Add on to this difference that freeways were seen as a sign of the future even
in Europe to the point where e.g. the London suburb where I live was _proud_
to get a flyover cutting straight through the historic city centre in the 50's
- it passes right by a market dating back to the 1300's, and a church dating
back to some time before 960... Today it stands as a monument to the lack of
respect for the integrity of the town the planners at the time had; then it
was a monument to progress.

~~~
jpatokal
Meh, the Romans and Greeks are upstart striplings when it comes to city
planning. Mohenjo-daro in present-day Pakistan was built as a planned city in
c. 2600 BCE, and Chinese capitals like Luoyang's first incarnations aren't far
behind.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-
daro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luoyang#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luoyang#History)

------
ak217
I'd say heavy-handed urban freeway construction is all the more unfortunate,
even tragic in how it caused the pendulum to swing too far the other way,
resulting in the current culture of nimbyism and reign of misguided anti-
development community activists.

------
mieses
Rail guts cities. We have a cotton candy view of it since we don't see it
much.

------
mirimir
> But this new arrangement had the backing of President Eisenhower, who was
> especially interested in seeing the system built, partly so it could be used
> for troop movements and mass evacuations in the event of a nuclear attack.

I've read that US interstates were designed to accomodate mobile ICBM
launchers. That was the pre-silo plan, as I recall. Does anyone else recall
that?

------
EGreg
Aha so the great American success of Federal governent that progressives tout
also displaced a lot of disenfranchised residents of cities. I guess there's
no such thing as a slam dunk when it comes to giant projects like this.

~~~
pekk
The Interstate system is typically attributed to Eisenhower, a Republican. The
attitude that infrastructure is worth having isn't really a "progressive"
attitude.

~~~
brandon73
Don't make the mistake of conflating liberal with progressive, republican with
conservative, nor the idea that someone who values small govt is necessarily a
conservative. Those are all substantially different things, even though
current majorities make them SEEM equivalent.

As a thought experiment, consider that most of our nation's founders were
liberal but they favored small govt. Also, there is a number of people today
who believe in classical liberalism but don't identify as progressive nor
conservative; they are usually called libertarian.

Libertarians would generally eschew both Eisenhower, big govt programs, AND
progressivism.

~~~
lukeschlather
That's really an oversimplification. In the early history of the USA, there
were two camps, the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists
explicitly wanted a strong central government. The anti-federalists, which you
might describe as the "small government" side, wanted a freedom from
monopolies written into the constitution, with the understanding that the
government would revoke corporate charters if any company got too powerful.

Even so, the federalists didn't really want an environment where strong
corporations check the power of government, they wanted an explicit oligarchy
where the most wealthy men around were Senators.

Neither of these camps really sound like modern libertarians to me.

