
The Unfinished History of U.S. Freeway Revolts - jseliger
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/07/freeway-revolts-interstate-highway-system-data-urban-history/594082
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heymijo
> _Most famously, in New York City the writer and urban visionary Jane Jacobs
> took on Robert Moses, rallying community opposition to his grand plan for
> the 10-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have destroyed parts of
> Little Italy and SoHo._

The biographer Robert Caro paints a maddening picture of how Robert Moses
decimated communities in NYC with his highways with effects that live on
today. Moses did so with a disregard and even callousness for freeway
placement, even when it would have made more sense _not_ to have it run
through a vibrant community.

The Power Broker is the best book I read last year. It is enlightening,
frustrating, and at times enraging. It is 1344 pages. I recommend the
audioboook.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker)

~~~
nja
I've been wishing for years that this would become available on Kindle. My
commute wouldn't allow me to easily lug around such a tome, so I have yet to
read it despite its obvious quality. I don't understand why a book publisher
would hold out on an ebook version yet have an audiobook available...

~~~
heymijo
Interesting. I see that Amazon does not have an ebook of it yet there appears
to be an epub on library Genesis so depending on your scruples...

~~~
nerdponx
Download it and mail a check to the author.

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seibelj
I have family in Saint Louis and we visited the City Museum which has various
artifacts and historical anecdotes about the city.

Over and over they would show something really cool, like the old baseball
stadium, townhouses, trolleys, neighborhoods and it would end with, “they were
all demolished to build highways”.

Saint Louis itself is now the definition of a suburb-city, lacking character
with a very small walkable downtown, and everyone has to drive to get from
strip mall A to strip mall B. Very sad what the car did to that city. Even my
family who lives there recommends not moving there.

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dsfyu404ed
>The revolts did help usher in federal policy changes that prioritized local
input, historical preservation, and the environment

Which seems to be leading to infrastructural stagnation as no city or state
seems to be able to please the local stakeholders enough to build anything
(not just highways).

~~~
notfromhere
no, that's mostly because infrastructure is grossly underfunded and we built
so much unsustainable urban sprawl we can't afford to rebuild it

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jseliger
It seems crazy today that anyone thought neutering cities with freeways was a
good idea in the first place.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/was-the-
automo...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/was-the-automotive-
era-a-terrible-mistake)

~~~
xeromal
Freeways were designed in part to help the US army traverse the county in
times of war. Before freeways, the US did a transcontinental trip with all
kinds of vehicles including a young Eisenhower who saw the importance of fast
transit.

They were essential in the event on an invasion. I guess they could've been
made federal and not usable by civilians.

~~~
_delirium
That was the motivation for the interstate system at a national level, but not
the reason access freeways were put directly through the center of a number of
cities. There's not much military usefulness in something like the I-345 spur
that cuts through downtown Dallas, or the now-demolished Cypress Street
Viaduct through Oakland. If you just wanted a national road network, it
would've been cheaper to bypass dense urban areas. Those kinds of urban
freeways had more to do with postwar planners' ideas about the future of
housing/working/commuting.

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afarrell
We're discussing the decision-making of people in the US in the 1950s,
correct? If communists take control of a dense urban area and throw up
barricades to block the more narrow streets, there is military usefulness in
having a freeway passing through that urban area.

It is also theoretically useful in case of a railway strike.

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pjc50
This was the 1950s. If it was even slightly conceivable that Communists would
take a city somehow, after an amphibious landing across a distance the world
had never seen, and the city had not already been reduced to rubble by
incoming ICBMs or strategic bombing, it would have been destroyed by a stay-
behind nuclear mine.

~~~
emiliobumachar
The Communists were big on revolution. As in, from the inside, done by the
workers of the target country themselves, usually with a lot of foreign help
but no full-blown foreign invasion. It may seem implausible now, but many
countries had already fallen to revolutions, and it was not unreasonable at
the time to think it might happen in the U.S.

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8bitsrule
Good stuff. Led me to a couple of surprisingly detailed Wiki articles. In many
cities the interstate project was greeted like an invasion. Often because of
elimination of ethnic neighborhoods in the guise of 'urban renewal'.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_States)
(US scope)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt)
(worldwide scope)

