8 ms·

What problem were they meant to solve? (That's a serious question. I'm interesting in hearing how other people view the purpose of an urban highway.)

jff 11y ago
The problem of getting from one side of town to the other very quickly, without clogging up the "walkable neighborhoods" in the middle, with their narrow streets and wide sidewalks. The people going through get on the highway, out of the way of the people actually living in the town.
- stuaxo 11y ago
  In the UK we have built bypasses for most towns and most of the traffic goes around them instead of through.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    That's generally true with Glasgow being a notable counter example - fortunately the equivalent designs for Edinburgh were never implemented: http://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?tag=edinburgh-motorways http://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?tag=edinburgh-motorways
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    In Brazil, every city bypass we build becomes the new city center in about a decade. The city just moves there.
  - jff 11y ago
    And we all saw how well that worked out for Arthur Dent! I'm a fan of ring roads, Rochester for instance had a small inner loop and a much wider outer loop of freeways (with freeway segments and decent arterials connecting the inner to the outer, it looked kind of like a wagon wheel) that meant you could get almost anywhere pretty quickly.
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      Rochester has an extremely sad downtown area, because it’s tightly encircled by highways killing any connection to the surrounding areas, and it was turned into an office park filled with parking lots. Only a few blocks (where there are students) have any kind of vibrancy. For anyone who doesn’t have a car, it’s the perfect dystopian nightmare. A great illustration of what the article under discussion in this thread was talking about. It was much more of a real city up through about 1950. This comparison shot is striking: http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/ http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/ At least they’re trying now though, http://www.cityofrochester.gov/InnerLoopEast/ http://www.cityofrochester.gov/InnerLoopEast/
  - hydrogen18 11y ago
    Doesn't the UK have zoning laws that prevent the city from gravitating towards the bypass?
kevinnk 11y ago
I'm not an expert but I'd imagine the biggest advantages are: Faster travel within the city itself. Easier to move in and out of the city. Reducing rush hour traffic on local streets.
- astrodust 11y ago
  That's the theory, but due to induced demand the opposite tends to happen. Travel in the city gets slower because there's more traffic, it becomes harder to move into and out of the city due to increases in commuter activity, and rush-hour traffic on local streets gets worse as more people try and funnel into these highways.
pmiller2 11y ago
I would think it's primarily moving people from point A to point B (or, possibly from point C to point D via some stretch in between A and B). [Begin Rant] This brings up the biggest problem I have with Bay Area public trasnportation. I live 11 miles from work, but it's impossible to get there via any reasonable public transportation-based route in less than 1 hour. On flat land, I can bike at least 50% faster than that, in normal clothes, without breaking a sweat. The BART portion of my trip takes around 25 minutes. Once I get off BART, my choices are basically to take Muni or walk. Walking gets me there reliably in around 25-30 minutes. Muni theoretically gets me there in around 15 minutes, but that's in an ideal world where there are no delays on the line and I don't have to wait to transfer. I'd rather end the day $2.25 richer and get the little bit of exercise than save a whole 15 minutes. And, of course, the same goes for the trip home. People who live in, say, the Outer Sunset and commute to SOMA or the Financial District have even worse options. Your Muni trip involves taking 2 or 3 buses, and there's no other reasonable way to make the commute than drive (and we know how miserable and expensive driving in SF is). [End Rant]
- awjr 11y ago
  BART + fold-up bicycle?
  - kaybe 11y ago
    Or/And, if safe storage exists at both ends, bicycle with electric support, which should increase the no-sweat speed even further.
    - pmiller2 11y ago
      Electric and fold-up are both decent options. I rate them both above taking Muni and below just walking for myself. It still irks me that I can't just hop off a train at Embarcadero and onto a local BART train to somewhere closer to work. Once again, as in so many other situations, the last mile is the killer. :(
  - AngrySkillzz 11y ago
jesstaa 11y ago
Urban highways solve a political problem. When you have voters that spend a hour or so a day stuck in traffic it's really easy to sell them the idea that a highway will reduce traffic congestion without them having to change anything about their daily routine (ie. take public transport, bicycle, walk) Since the highway will only reduce traffic congestion for a short time it's something you can sell to the voters again at the next election.
- tremon 11y ago
  When you have voters that spend a hour or so a day stuck in traffic it's really easy to sell them the idea that a highway will reduce traffic congestion without them having to change anything about their daily routine That's disingenuous. I commute by car exactly because public transport takes longer to most of my clients, even when including structural and incidental traffic jams. It's happened exactly three times in the last five years that my car commute took longer than public transport would have taken. And on one of those occasions (excessive snowfall), most trains were canceled too.
  - lagadu 11y ago
    That only speaks to the inadequacy of the public transportation network where you live though, which is exacerbated by the construction of urban highways instead of a better mass transit network.
    - tremon 11y ago
      It's probably more that my situation doesn't match the topic under discussion. I live in an urban area, whereas many clients are in the rural areas surrounding it. Servicing those areas with mass transit would be prohibitively expensive: there is no mass traffic to service.
      - lmm 11y ago
        Good mass transit that got cars off congested roads would speed your kind of journey just as much as building urban motorways, and be more effective overall.
HillRat 11y ago
At least in major Southern cities, the problem was often "the blacks." Highway locations were often chosen to cut off less-desirable neighborhoods from city centers and more upscale residential neighborhoods. (I-30 in Dallas and the proposed I-485 in Atlanta, and arguably Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway all come to mind.) Today, the need for highways hasn't gone away, but more enlightened urban planning and urban gentrification means that cities are finding ways to either relocate or ameliorate the effects of those roads -- though the expense is significant.
jacobolus 11y ago
They were meant to get people from far out of the city into the city, fast, in a way that would only be accessible to professional-class whites, so that they could keep downtown jobs while moving their families to the suburbs and stop spending their property tax money on poor brown people.
- superuser2 11y ago
  He's not exaggerating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Roads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Roads Urban highways in the US are a facet of the American Dream vision of the suburbs as "a safe place to raise your kids," which is basically a euphemism for "far away from the scary minorities who live in cities."
  - dinkumthinkum 11y ago
    Well, out of curiosity, do you think suburbs are actually safer than inner cities?
    - gr3yh47 11y ago
      crime data would seem to indicate so
      - splitrocket 11y ago
        However, mortality data would disagree. Generally speaking, in cities you are more likely to be the victim of homicide and crime. In suburban and rural environments you are substantially more likely to be killed/injured in general. http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it-turns-out-that-cities-are-the-safest-places-to-live/ http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
        rhino369 11y ago
        That only accounts for city vs rural. It never says where suburbs fall on that scale. If they are going based on US government definitions, suburbs are mostly considered urban (1000 people/sq mile or more).
SFjulie1 11y ago
Shortening the time it takes to go from north to south. All island are plagued with the "points of entries and congestions". Montréal is 30x40km island. With limited bridges. So by making a large artery that almost lead people from bridge to bridge (N/S) you may think you can create a traffic that will not interfere with the inter urban traffic... (laminarizing) thus getting rid of intra congestion. (Since it is in a trench and has bridges on top). But it also creates opportunities (like with real estates part) that have adverse consequences. And vortex around the entry points. It also create ruptures in the city that artificially recreates partitions. Thus recreating "islands" in the island. Maybe not for cars, I admit. It also generates more pressure on the outside bridge thus congestion at the edge of the city that are way more expensive to solve. Which make montréal famous for its traffic jam when commuters leave/come. Regarding the inside near décarie : not all inhabitants have cars some are not rich enough. And it is destroying local area business (thus jobs for the guy already plagued). Thus parts maybe gradually abandoned (unused infra decay faster) in the blocks near Decarie, and ... well, it does not attract neither business, nor wealthy inhabitants. So it is like a decaying scorch in the city, infra that still require maintaining with less income ... slowly draining money by fiscal pressure (no perequation between districts) ... making people leave ... (vicious circle) I am really puzzled by the way engineers model flux in the city. I would really like to understand the bug in their brain. Probably education + "a one best way and no need to measure"
- JackFr 11y ago
  With regard to the island problem, in Manhattan any bridge or tunnel which leads from a highway and primarily dumps you onto a local streets has a toll on the way in. This is expressly a throttling measure, as it's considered better to have a traffic jam on the highway going in rather than gridlock -- literal gridlock -- on the local streets.
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    Well, it makes sense. Why don't all city/stated paid engineers paid with public money don't work like and open knowledge community? A medieval based city (Europe) is often with bridges on a river. US squared big cities are often on rivers. And probably the same everywhere. Flux congestion due to bi partition of graphs is such a common pattern out there. The rivers are here because they were normal way of communications transport. But if it is not a river, it can be highways, mountains... I may be an idiot but google does not show papers, or stackoverflow, or public conference when I search for "how to solve traffic congestion in city with a bridge". Every single city fight the problem on their own. Why isn't this problem on the public place? My answer is engineers don't have the right culture. They believe in canonical ways of doing and do not accept to be scrutinized or share. Engineers nowadays are for me like a medieval corporation stuck to defend their own privileges at the expand of the community. Maybe it is time to question the education system that build experts. Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 11y ago
I don't know what they were created for, but today they solve the problem of making a city grow integrated, instead of like a lot of small (probably poorer) cities near each other. And they are the best tool for that job. The problem is that they alone are not enough, but any other option alone won't be nearly as good.
Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
There was a political problem. The interstates were spending truly ungodly sums of money in rural area; the whole system cost something like $400 billion - $500 billion in inflation adjusted dollars. If you were a city, your residents--who tended to be wealthier than rural areas--were footing the bill and getting nothing in return except maybe somewhat lower shipping costs. So what's a politician to do? Easy: extend the highways to cities. In the 1950s the thought was that cars were going to lead us to a glorious future, free from congestion on public transit, so urban leaders gladly paved over their downtowns. There were (and still are) huge subsidies for suburban areas, and other fears were that without these highways cities would be irrelevant as everyone moved to the suburbs and jobs eventually moved with them. In the wake of the planning failures of the 50s and 60s with regards to highways cities moved huge amounts of planning powers to hyperlocal areas and requiring environmental reviews, stopping all the highway nonsense. Unfortunately, it created a new villain in the form of the newly empowered NIMBY.
- ihsw 11y ago
  How do you reconcile urban sprawl with the sorry state of urban transit? Wealthier residents categorically avoid urban transit in many major municipalities because they are generally unsightly (dirty, littered with ads) at worst and generally unreliable (complete and total lack of consistency in travel times and distances from homes) at best.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Wealthier residents generally avoid urban transit simply because they do not live in urban areas. Post white-flight, cities are generally quite a bit poorer than their surrounding suburbs. Cities that were built before that phenomenon (e.g. NYC), have good transit that even wealthier residents use.

jff 11y ago

The problem of getting from one side of town to the other very quickly, without clogging up the "walkable neighborhoods" in the middle, with their narrow streets and wide sidewalks. The people going through get on the highway, out of the way of the people actually living in the town.

stuaxo 11y ago
In the UK we have built bypasses for most towns and most of the traffic goes around them instead of through.
- arethuza 11y ago
  That's generally true with Glasgow being a notable counter example - fortunately the equivalent designs for Edinburgh were never implemented: http://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?tag=edinburgh-motorways http://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?tag=edinburgh-motorways
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  In Brazil, every city bypass we build becomes the new city center in about a decade. The city just moves there.
- jff 11y ago
  And we all saw how well that worked out for Arthur Dent! I'm a fan of ring roads, Rochester for instance had a small inner loop and a much wider outer loop of freeways (with freeway segments and decent arterials connecting the inner to the outer, it looked kind of like a wagon wheel) that meant you could get almost anywhere pretty quickly.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    Rochester has an extremely sad downtown area, because it’s tightly encircled by highways killing any connection to the surrounding areas, and it was turned into an office park filled with parking lots. Only a few blocks (where there are students) have any kind of vibrancy. For anyone who doesn’t have a car, it’s the perfect dystopian nightmare. A great illustration of what the article under discussion in this thread was talking about. It was much more of a real city up through about 1950. This comparison shot is striking: http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/ http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/ At least they’re trying now though, http://www.cityofrochester.gov/InnerLoopEast/ http://www.cityofrochester.gov/InnerLoopEast/
- hydrogen18 11y ago
  Doesn't the UK have zoning laws that prevent the city from gravitating towards the bypass?

kevinnk 11y ago

I'm not an expert but I'd imagine the biggest advantages are: Faster travel within the city itself. Easier to move in and out of the city. Reducing rush hour traffic on local streets.

astrodust 11y ago
That's the theory, but due to induced demand the opposite tends to happen. Travel in the city gets slower because there's more traffic, it becomes harder to move into and out of the city due to increases in commuter activity, and rush-hour traffic on local streets gets worse as more people try and funnel into these highways.

pmiller2 11y ago

I would think it's primarily moving people from point A to point B (or, possibly from point C to point D via some stretch in between A and B). [Begin Rant] This brings up the biggest problem I have with Bay Area public trasnportation. I live 11 miles from work, but it's impossible to get there via any reasonable public transportation-based route in less than 1 hour. On flat land, I can bike at least 50% faster than that, in normal clothes, without breaking a sweat. The BART portion of my trip takes around 25 minutes. Once I get off BART, my choices are basically to take Muni or walk. Walking gets me there reliably in around 25-30 minutes. Muni theoretically gets me there in around 15 minutes, but that's in an ideal world where there are no delays on the line and I don't have to wait to transfer. I'd rather end the day $2.25 richer and get the little bit of exercise than save a whole 15 minutes. And, of course, the same goes for the trip home. People who live in, say, the Outer Sunset and commute to SOMA or the Financial District have even worse options. Your Muni trip involves taking 2 or 3 buses, and there's no other reasonable way to make the commute than drive (and we know how miserable and expensive driving in SF is). [End Rant]

awjr 11y ago
BART + fold-up bicycle?
- kaybe 11y ago
  Or/And, if safe storage exists at both ends, bicycle with electric support, which should increase the no-sweat speed even further.
  - pmiller2 11y ago
    Electric and fold-up are both decent options. I rate them both above taking Muni and below just walking for myself. It still irks me that I can't just hop off a train at Embarcadero and onto a local BART train to somewhere closer to work. Once again, as in so many other situations, the last mile is the killer. :(
- AngrySkillzz 11y ago

jesstaa 11y ago

Urban highways solve a political problem. When you have voters that spend a hour or so a day stuck in traffic it's really easy to sell them the idea that a highway will reduce traffic congestion without them having to change anything about their daily routine (ie. take public transport, bicycle, walk) Since the highway will only reduce traffic congestion for a short time it's something you can sell to the voters again at the next election.

tremon 11y ago
When you have voters that spend a hour or so a day stuck in traffic it's really easy to sell them the idea that a highway will reduce traffic congestion without them having to change anything about their daily routine That's disingenuous. I commute by car exactly because public transport takes longer to most of my clients, even when including structural and incidental traffic jams. It's happened exactly three times in the last five years that my car commute took longer than public transport would have taken. And on one of those occasions (excessive snowfall), most trains were canceled too.
- lagadu 11y ago
  That only speaks to the inadequacy of the public transportation network where you live though, which is exacerbated by the construction of urban highways instead of a better mass transit network.
  - tremon 11y ago
    It's probably more that my situation doesn't match the topic under discussion. I live in an urban area, whereas many clients are in the rural areas surrounding it. Servicing those areas with mass transit would be prohibitively expensive: there is no mass traffic to service.
    - lmm 11y ago
      Good mass transit that got cars off congested roads would speed your kind of journey just as much as building urban motorways, and be more effective overall.

HillRat 11y ago

At least in major Southern cities, the problem was often "the blacks." Highway locations were often chosen to cut off less-desirable neighborhoods from city centers and more upscale residential neighborhoods. (I-30 in Dallas and the proposed I-485 in Atlanta, and arguably Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway all come to mind.) Today, the need for highways hasn't gone away, but more enlightened urban planning and urban gentrification means that cities are finding ways to either relocate or ameliorate the effects of those roads -- though the expense is significant.

jacobolus 11y ago

They were meant to get people from far out of the city into the city, fast, in a way that would only be accessible to professional-class whites, so that they could keep downtown jobs while moving their families to the suburbs and stop spending their property tax money on poor brown people.

superuser2 11y ago
He's not exaggerating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Roads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Roads Urban highways in the US are a facet of the American Dream vision of the suburbs as "a safe place to raise your kids," which is basically a euphemism for "far away from the scary minorities who live in cities."
- dinkumthinkum 11y ago
  Well, out of curiosity, do you think suburbs are actually safer than inner cities?
  - gr3yh47 11y ago
    crime data would seem to indicate so
    - splitrocket 11y ago
      However, mortality data would disagree. Generally speaking, in cities you are more likely to be the victim of homicide and crime. In suburban and rural environments you are substantially more likely to be killed/injured in general. http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it-turns-out-that-cities-are-the-safest-places-to-live/ http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
      - rhino369 11y ago
        That only accounts for city vs rural. It never says where suburbs fall on that scale. If they are going based on US government definitions, suburbs are mostly considered urban (1000 people/sq mile or more).

SFjulie1 11y ago

Shortening the time it takes to go from north to south. All island are plagued with the "points of entries and congestions". Montréal is 30x40km island. With limited bridges. So by making a large artery that almost lead people from bridge to bridge (N/S) you may think you can create a traffic that will not interfere with the inter urban traffic... (laminarizing) thus getting rid of intra congestion. (Since it is in a trench and has bridges on top). But it also creates opportunities (like with real estates part) that have adverse consequences. And vortex around the entry points. It also create ruptures in the city that artificially recreates partitions. Thus recreating "islands" in the island. Maybe not for cars, I admit. It also generates more pressure on the outside bridge thus congestion at the edge of the city that are way more expensive to solve. Which make montréal famous for its traffic jam when commuters leave/come. Regarding the inside near décarie : not all inhabitants have cars some are not rich enough. And it is destroying local area business (thus jobs for the guy already plagued). Thus parts maybe gradually abandoned (unused infra decay faster) in the blocks near Decarie, and ... well, it does not attract neither business, nor wealthy inhabitants. So it is like a decaying scorch in the city, infra that still require maintaining with less income ... slowly draining money by fiscal pressure (no perequation between districts) ... making people leave ... (vicious circle) I am really puzzled by the way engineers model flux in the city. I would really like to understand the bug in their brain. Probably education + "a one best way and no need to measure"

JackFr 11y ago
With regard to the island problem, in Manhattan any bridge or tunnel which leads from a highway and primarily dumps you onto a local streets has a toll on the way in. This is expressly a throttling measure, as it's considered better to have a traffic jam on the highway going in rather than gridlock -- literal gridlock -- on the local streets.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  Well, it makes sense. Why don't all city/stated paid engineers paid with public money don't work like and open knowledge community? A medieval based city (Europe) is often with bridges on a river. US squared big cities are often on rivers. And probably the same everywhere. Flux congestion due to bi partition of graphs is such a common pattern out there. The rivers are here because they were normal way of communications transport. But if it is not a river, it can be highways, mountains... I may be an idiot but google does not show papers, or stackoverflow, or public conference when I search for "how to solve traffic congestion in city with a bridge". Every single city fight the problem on their own. Why isn't this problem on the public place? My answer is engineers don't have the right culture. They believe in canonical ways of doing and do not accept to be scrutinized or share. Engineers nowadays are for me like a medieval corporation stuck to defend their own privileges at the expand of the community. Maybe it is time to question the education system that build experts. Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

marcosdumay 11y ago

I don't know what they were created for, but today they solve the problem of making a city grow integrated, instead of like a lot of small (probably poorer) cities near each other. And they are the best tool for that job. The problem is that they alone are not enough, but any other option alone won't be nearly as good.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago

There was a political problem. The interstates were spending truly ungodly sums of money in rural area; the whole system cost something like $400 billion - $500 billion in inflation adjusted dollars. If you were a city, your residents--who tended to be wealthier than rural areas--were footing the bill and getting nothing in return except maybe somewhat lower shipping costs. So what's a politician to do? Easy: extend the highways to cities. In the 1950s the thought was that cars were going to lead us to a glorious future, free from congestion on public transit, so urban leaders gladly paved over their downtowns. There were (and still are) huge subsidies for suburban areas, and other fears were that without these highways cities would be irrelevant as everyone moved to the suburbs and jobs eventually moved with them. In the wake of the planning failures of the 50s and 60s with regards to highways cities moved huge amounts of planning powers to hyperlocal areas and requiring environmental reviews, stopping all the highway nonsense. Unfortunately, it created a new villain in the form of the newly empowered NIMBY.

ihsw 11y ago
How do you reconcile urban sprawl with the sorry state of urban transit? Wealthier residents categorically avoid urban transit in many major municipalities because they are generally unsightly (dirty, littered with ads) at worst and generally unreliable (complete and total lack of consistency in travel times and distances from homes) at best.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Wealthier residents generally avoid urban transit simply because they do not live in urban areas. Post white-flight, cities are generally quite a bit poorer than their surrounding suburbs. Cities that were built before that phenomenon (e.g. NYC), have good transit that even wealthier residents use.