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Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful. If you parse responsibility down to the states, they're on

by bduerst 11y ago

Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful. If you parse responsibility down to the states, they're only going to build within their own self-interests, which is not very well aligned with inter-state travel. You'll get a hodgepodge of corridors, if the states even build at all. For example, Kansas won't build a track from KC to Colorado's border. Instead, they'll route the track south through Wichita and other cities within their border. Or it will turn out like California's project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2014/04/california-high-speed-rail http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2014/04/california-h...

lotharbot 11y ago
inter-state travel is aligned with the self-interest of states that want to have robust economic interactions. Kansas won't built a line to Colorado's border on their own, but the two states might jointly connect KC, Wichita, and Denver, and Colorado Springs if they thought those connections would be mutually beneficial. At the city/county level, Denver doesn't have its own mass transit system -- it cooperates with several surrounding counties to make up the "Regional Transportation District" which runs buses and light rail. This sort of regional organization doesn't somehow disappear when you make it multi-state instead of multi-city.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Right, but Kansas is a good example of how they will use their state-level control to route all inter-state travelers through each of their cities, increasing travel times and decreasing value. The question isn't whether or not interstate travel is beneficial, it's how the states will use their self interest to diminish quality, effectively turning the project into a tragedy of the commons.
  - tryitnow 11y ago
    In order for states to use their self-interest to diminish quality we have to ask "diminish relative to what"? If your comparing the actual to some ideal then, of course, your always going to see a diminished quality. But that's just a tautology. We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative. Unfortunately, realistic alternatives almost always require trade offs with special interest groups. Sorry dude, that's just reality. It's a simplistic analysis to compare something to an ideal optimum point and bemoan how far we've fallen from the ideal. But it's not terribly useful.
    - timr 11y ago
      "We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative." You're arguing about the highway system. Not only is it "a realistic alternative" to your state-run theory, it's actually real. In fact, we've had this debate, in the real world, and your side lost: every state has an extensive network of state-funded highways, nearly all of which are slower and less efficient than the interstate system.
      - esbranson 11y ago
        Limited access state highways are the same speed as interstate limited access highways ("freeways"). The feds dont give the states magic pixie dust when the states build and maintain the interstate freeways. In CA, my understanding that the most used parts of interstate freeways are actually state limited access routes (highways) extended to major national cities. This is in addition to the other state routes (expressways, etc.) and other county routes that permeate pretty much everywhere. Together, this state highway system (the county being an administrative instrument of state government) is by far more efficient than e.g. taking an interstate to a major national city (skipping even large regional cities) and then off-roading everywhere else. "Efficiency" is pretty loose term in this respect, no?
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Kansas isn't a great example for this. Why was I-70 routed eight miles south of Manhattan? (You'll really wonder why if you need fuel somewhere in the 60 miles between Topeka and Junction City.) Depending on my origin and destination on either side of this state (it has been less common for one of those to have been in Kansas), I have used several other highways to cross it, and I haven't found them to be slower than I-70.
    - bduerst 11y ago
      Because the interstate system (I-70) was designed using central planning. Routing north through Manhattan would have made the highway longer, and thus less effective for interstate travel.
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        Are you really claiming the current route is a good thing? There is literally nothing in the 60 miles between Topeka and Fort Riley. The geography is a gently rolling plain, that favors no particular route over any other. Manhattan is the site of one of the two universities in Kansas of which anyone outside the state has ever heard. Passing through Manhattan would have added about five miles to the road, would have been an added convenience for tens of thousands of drivers every year, and would have saved the later cost of improvements to the various high-traffic roads linking Manhattan to the rest of the highway system. If this is the great work of "central planners", they can keep it.
        lotharbot 11y ago
        I-80 does the same thing most of the way across Nebraska -- it goes through Omaha and Lincoln, and then it misses everything else by 3-5 miles. It creates this weird dichotomy in places like Lexington, where most of the town is far away, but there's a huge cluster of businesses being built next to the interstate. It's often not even a shorter route; compare I-80 to US-30 in that area. There are a lot of things to love about the Interstate highway system, but it's not always the superior choice.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  > inter-state travel is aligned with the self-interest of states that want to have robust economic interactions On the other hand, Chris Christie (https://www.propublica.org/article/chris-christies-tunnel-tango https://www.propublica.org/article/chris-christies-tunnel-ta...).
- pdeuchler 11y ago
  RTD is more or less controlled by Denver and Denver based beuracrats in practice, however
Shivetya 11y ago
yeah,it was wonderful as long as it wasn't your neighborhood that got bulldozered. There are not that many functions which require that level of government. The Federal Government should insure States cooperate with each other, not hold States hostage to cooperate with the Federal government. For as many benefits of the Federal Government it sure incurs a cost and penalty in many other areas. Federal rules and regulations drove health care costs up because it prevented sales across state lines. The Feds help cause if not were the main cause of water crisis in California by selling water so cheap that it exaggerated growth of water intensive businesses. It forces companies to see alternatives to sugar to protect a few business interest in limited states. The list can go on and on. Oh, it also lends aid to and gives court backing to search and seizure. I am quite sure we can afford to live with a much more limited government
- bduerst 11y ago
  Whether the state or federal level government controls planning won't change the problem of displacement. Opining your views on small government makes it seem like you personally just don't want the rail, for which switching the project to state-level control is non-sequitur.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  Robert Moses wasn't working for the feds.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    They gave him money, and he built highways with that money. Besides, NYC is far from the only place where this happened. Look at St. Louis: rather than creating peripheral connections through then-undeveloped (not anymore!) land to the existing I-55 (which for miles runs along the Mississippi, completely avoiding the problems I cite), they routed not one, not two, but three different interstates (often less than a mile apart) through central neighborhoods (most often those of minorities), destroying the existing networks of travel, commerce, and community. For what? To save a longhaul trucker five minutes? Pull the other one; those truckers drive north or south of the city on 270 to avoid the mess of the Poplar St Bridge and East St Louis's mind-melting spaghetti junction, and they have for decades. The destruction of minority communities, and the poorer lives that minorities live in St. Louis today, was a feature, not a bug.
baddox 11y ago
> Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful. Considered successful by some, perhaps, and probably not so much by others. Like people who don't like global warming or highway deaths, to give two examples.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  Interstates are the safest roads in the country, with dramatically lower fatality rates per mile. Sources: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2011/html/table_02_18.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.cfm#question16 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.cfm#question16
  - Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
    I wonder if the passenger and freight rail lines the interstates helped kill were safer still and building the highways might have increased fatalities by switching from rail to driving despite being safer than the older US highways.
    - baddox 11y ago
      It would be extremely difficult for me to imagine that not being the case.
  - baddox 11y ago
    All else being equal, adding new roads with a lower death rate per mile than existing roads is not exactly an improvement to road safety.
ktRolster 11y ago
If that were true, the avenue of the saints wouldn't exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_of_the_Saints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_of_the_Saints It's exactly that kind of cross-state cooperation you're talking about.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Not at all. This intermodal project and many of the other federally funded ISTEA projects [1] work well at the state level because they supplement the existing interstate highway network. On the other hand, the high speed rail corridors in the act (which was a new network altogether) failed horribly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_Surface_Transportation_Efficiency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_Surface_Transportat...
rdtsc 11y ago
> Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful. Well and it seems to be working as part of any sufficiently large company.
- eru 11y ago
  More or less. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
lstroud 11y ago
You do know that roads crossed state borders before the interstate, right? In truth, for the traffic volume, they were pretty good. That said the states would have evolved them to meet the needs, while the federal government took a more revolutionary approach. I tend to prefer the agility of incremental approaches. That said, when you are on the right side, revolutionary change is nice too. Despite how it seems today, I'm sure there are those that would argue the money could have been better spent. Ultimately, the question is where you put your faith; we the people or we the government?

by bduerst 11y ago

lotharbot 11y ago

inter-state travel is aligned with the self-interest of states that want to have robust economic interactions. Kansas won't built a line to Colorado's border on their own, but the two states might jointly connect KC, Wichita, and Denver, and Colorado Springs if they thought those connections would be mutually beneficial. At the city/county level, Denver doesn't have its own mass transit system -- it cooperates with several surrounding counties to make up the "Regional Transportation District" which runs buses and light rail. This sort of regional organization doesn't somehow disappear when you make it multi-state instead of multi-city.

bduerst 11y ago
Right, but Kansas is a good example of how they will use their state-level control to route all inter-state travelers through each of their cities, increasing travel times and decreasing value. The question isn't whether or not interstate travel is beneficial, it's how the states will use their self interest to diminish quality, effectively turning the project into a tragedy of the commons.
- tryitnow 11y ago
  In order for states to use their self-interest to diminish quality we have to ask "diminish relative to what"? If your comparing the actual to some ideal then, of course, your always going to see a diminished quality. But that's just a tautology. We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative. Unfortunately, realistic alternatives almost always require trade offs with special interest groups. Sorry dude, that's just reality. It's a simplistic analysis to compare something to an ideal optimum point and bemoan how far we've fallen from the ideal. But it's not terribly useful.
  - timr 11y ago
    "We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative." You're arguing about the highway system. Not only is it "a realistic alternative" to your state-run theory, it's actually real. In fact, we've had this debate, in the real world, and your side lost: every state has an extensive network of state-funded highways, nearly all of which are slower and less efficient than the interstate system.
    - esbranson 11y ago
      Limited access state highways are the same speed as interstate limited access highways ("freeways"). The feds dont give the states magic pixie dust when the states build and maintain the interstate freeways. In CA, my understanding that the most used parts of interstate freeways are actually state limited access routes (highways) extended to major national cities. This is in addition to the other state routes (expressways, etc.) and other county routes that permeate pretty much everywhere. Together, this state highway system (the county being an administrative instrument of state government) is by far more efficient than e.g. taking an interstate to a major national city (skipping even large regional cities) and then off-roading everywhere else. "Efficiency" is pretty loose term in this respect, no?
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Kansas isn't a great example for this. Why was I-70 routed eight miles south of Manhattan? (You'll really wonder why if you need fuel somewhere in the 60 miles between Topeka and Junction City.) Depending on my origin and destination on either side of this state (it has been less common for one of those to have been in Kansas), I have used several other highways to cross it, and I haven't found them to be slower than I-70.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    Because the interstate system (I-70) was designed using central planning. Routing north through Manhattan would have made the highway longer, and thus less effective for interstate travel.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Are you really claiming the current route is a good thing? There is literally nothing in the 60 miles between Topeka and Fort Riley. The geography is a gently rolling plain, that favors no particular route over any other. Manhattan is the site of one of the two universities in Kansas of which anyone outside the state has ever heard. Passing through Manhattan would have added about five miles to the road, would have been an added convenience for tens of thousands of drivers every year, and would have saved the later cost of improvements to the various high-traffic roads linking Manhattan to the rest of the highway system. If this is the great work of "central planners", they can keep it.
      - lotharbot 11y ago
        I-80 does the same thing most of the way across Nebraska -- it goes through Omaha and Lincoln, and then it misses everything else by 3-5 miles. It creates this weird dichotomy in places like Lexington, where most of the town is far away, but there's a huge cluster of businesses being built next to the interstate. It's often not even a shorter route; compare I-80 to US-30 in that area. There are a lot of things to love about the Interstate highway system, but it's not always the superior choice.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
> inter-state travel is aligned with the self-interest of states that want to have robust economic interactions On the other hand, Chris Christie (https://www.propublica.org/article/chris-christies-tunnel-tango https://www.propublica.org/article/chris-christies-tunnel-ta...).
pdeuchler 11y ago
RTD is more or less controlled by Denver and Denver based beuracrats in practice, however

Shivetya 11y ago

yeah,it was wonderful as long as it wasn't your neighborhood that got bulldozered. There are not that many functions which require that level of government. The Federal Government should insure States cooperate with each other, not hold States hostage to cooperate with the Federal government. For as many benefits of the Federal Government it sure incurs a cost and penalty in many other areas. Federal rules and regulations drove health care costs up because it prevented sales across state lines. The Feds help cause if not were the main cause of water crisis in California by selling water so cheap that it exaggerated growth of water intensive businesses. It forces companies to see alternatives to sugar to protect a few business interest in limited states. The list can go on and on. Oh, it also lends aid to and gives court backing to search and seizure. I am quite sure we can afford to live with a much more limited government

bduerst 11y ago
Whether the state or federal level government controls planning won't change the problem of displacement. Opining your views on small government makes it seem like you personally just don't want the rail, for which switching the project to state-level control is non-sequitur.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
Robert Moses wasn't working for the feds.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  They gave him money, and he built highways with that money. Besides, NYC is far from the only place where this happened. Look at St. Louis: rather than creating peripheral connections through then-undeveloped (not anymore!) land to the existing I-55 (which for miles runs along the Mississippi, completely avoiding the problems I cite), they routed not one, not two, but three different interstates (often less than a mile apart) through central neighborhoods (most often those of minorities), destroying the existing networks of travel, commerce, and community. For what? To save a longhaul trucker five minutes? Pull the other one; those truckers drive north or south of the city on 270 to avoid the mess of the Poplar St Bridge and East St Louis's mind-melting spaghetti junction, and they have for decades. The destruction of minority communities, and the poorer lives that minorities live in St. Louis today, was a feature, not a bug.

baddox 11y ago

> Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful. Considered successful by some, perhaps, and probably not so much by others. Like people who don't like global warming or highway deaths, to give two examples.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
Interstates are the safest roads in the country, with dramatically lower fatality rates per mile. Sources: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2011/html/table_02_18.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.cfm#question16 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.cfm#question16
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  I wonder if the passenger and freight rail lines the interstates helped kill were safer still and building the highways might have increased fatalities by switching from rail to driving despite being safer than the older US highways.
  - baddox 11y ago
    It would be extremely difficult for me to imagine that not being the case.
- baddox 11y ago
  All else being equal, adding new roads with a lower death rate per mile than existing roads is not exactly an improvement to road safety.

ktRolster 11y ago

If that were true, the avenue of the saints wouldn't exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_of_the_Saints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_of_the_Saints It's exactly that kind of cross-state cooperation you're talking about.

bduerst 11y ago
Not at all. This intermodal project and many of the other federally funded ISTEA projects [1] work well at the state level because they supplement the existing interstate highway network. On the other hand, the high speed rail corridors in the act (which was a new network altogether) failed horribly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_Surface_Transportation_Efficiency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_Surface_Transportat...

rdtsc 11y ago

> Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful. Well and it seems to be working as part of any sufficiently large company.

eru 11y ago
More or less. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

lstroud 11y ago

You do know that roads crossed state borders before the interstate, right? In truth, for the traffic volume, they were pretty good. That said the states would have evolved them to meet the needs, while the federal government took a more revolutionary approach. I tend to prefer the agility of incremental approaches. That said, when you are on the right side, revolutionary change is nice too. Despite how it seems today, I'm sure there are those that would argue the money could have been better spent. Ultimately, the question is where you put your faith; we the people or we the government?