15 ms·

Costs of Sprawl: The Speed Burden (2014)

109 points by Doctor_Fegg 10y ago

wmeredith 10y ago
The opening statement of this piece about "how much we've given up" to accommodate cars in the US leaves me pretty cold. This isn't Italy and we aren't bound by how far we can travel by foot. The US still has huge swaths of undeveloped land. Drive from Kansas City to Denver sometime, it's a mind-numbing exercise in endurance. Energy usage concerns (which are very real) not withstanding the actual physical footprint of all this infrastructure is a drop in the ocean. The US is huge.
- lmm 10y ago
  There are empty parts of Italy too - it's not like the whole country's the same density as Florence. The point (and it's an inherently subjective one) is how much nicer it is to live in Florence than in Atlanta.
- Lazare 10y ago
  Yeah. It's a fascinating comparison, but it's being presented as a clearly problematic tradeoff, but it's not clear why. The unspoken conceit of the argument is that all land is equally valuable. Which...maybe so! But if you believe that, I'd love to chat with you about doing a land deal... Edit: Plus if you look at the comments at the link, there's some pretty serious criticism of the basic accuracy too...
- pif 10y ago
  I'm Italian, I LOVE Florence and I upvoted you. Indeed, nothing was given up to build that interchange. If you want to build a new Florence in the US, you won't be room-bound. OTOH, one of the factor of Florence's charm is its history, and one cannot build several centuries of history out of a blueprint.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- return0 10y ago
  Visitors in the US can't help to notice just how much emphasis was put on cars when designing cities (e.g. LA). I wonder if that design has paid off, given that today's technology can be used to significantly lower city traffic.
  - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
    A lot of that emphasis only dates from the mud 20th century, with the unholy trinity of urban renewal, the interstate highway system, and tearing out commuter rail/interurban/streetcar lines.
- bitslayer 10y ago
  The US is huge, and we could build anything we want. The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together. The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another. The "square" that I pass through every morning is a massive intersection of two suburban highways. Behind our tinted windows, we wait in long lines for out turn signal. We drive to the gym and fight for that close up parking space so we won't have to walk. Why? Because the exterior environment we have built is horrific. This is not the life I want to live. I reject the idea that we can't live in nicer places. Americans learn the wrong lesson from visiting Europe. They think that a place has to be hundreds of years old to be livable. But we can build anything we want. Politics need to get out in front and not drag us back. Moneyed interests need to take a chance. Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world.
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago
    > the exterior environment we have built is horrific So true. Growing up in one of the most sprawled cities in America I had no sense for how ugly and disgusting our city was to pedestrians and why that might matter. Then I lived in Washington DC where walking almost anywhere was a pleasant experience. Now I hate the sprawl and what we've given up.
  - VLM 10y ago
    > Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world. Try an inductive proof. Assume that is true, see if characteristics under those circumstances match real world observations. So, wards of the state on welfare were ordered by the state to move to the unwanted burbs which they hated and wished they could live packed together in giant ultra dense urban projects. There are no slums or poor/bad neighborhoods in cities because cities being more desirable than burbs means slums and slum dwellers are all pushed into the burbs. Starving college students and recent grads live in the burbs because they're poor and McMansions are less desirable, then if or as they get higher incomes and have kids, they move into downtown because thats nicer. All economic development in the city is via private investment because everybody wants to live there, whereas all burb development is taxpayer funded. The suburbs are full of burned out abandoned buildings and empty lots whereas continuous construction and redevelopment fills the cities. Crime rates are extremely low in cities because the less well adjusted members of society are all pushed economically into the burbs, which are overflowing with violent crime, resulting in more poverty in an anti-virtuous cycle. The cities, being more desirable, have the best public schools and the burbs, being less desirable, have 50% dropout rates and massive discipline problems. It would make an interesting alternative history, but seems to have no relationship with reality. Therefore I think that's probably proven false.
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  It's not that you've give up the (unscarce) land, it's that you've given up the ability to walk through town on foot.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  still very many countries have incredible amounts of land going unused, usually owned by the state. with technology we no longer need to live on top of each other and should be free to choose to or to not too. cities are not inexpensive places to live and in some areas they aren't the safest either. still it should always be choice. we as a world are far from running out of space or arable lands
- matwood 10y ago
  > Drive from Kansas City to Denver sometime, it's a mind-numbing exercise in endurance. I just had terrible flashbacks from doing that drive multiple times when I moved from the east coast to Denver (and then back!).
- wobbleblob 10y ago
  Driving is nice there, but I think you've taken it too far. Why are there no sidewalks in the suburbs? People actively campaign their local government to stop them from building sidewalks along their street. Sometimes we visit relatives in Atlanta. The mall is literally across the street from where they live. The only legal way to get there is by car. You couldn't even walk to the next crosswalk. It's a mile or two down, and then back up to the mall, but as there is no sidewalk, the police will stop you and ask you why you are walking. Crazy.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    I agree that America has in the past de-emphasized safe pedestrian paths way too much in favor of car culture (the South in particular is pretty bad... Atlanta's not great, but I don't think their walking-unfriendliness compares to Houston or Dallas). I think the culture is changing somewhat though. I think there's a much greater desire for pedestrian friendliness than there used to be. Of course, any demand for improvements will always be the usual mix of NIMBY, people who think almost any government spending is useless, people who don't like change of any sort, people who fear sidewalks will bring in "undesirables", or people who don't seem to understand what an easement is. It really depends on the neighborhood culture, though. Personally around here (Tampa Florida) I think I've seen more concerns along the lines of "why can't my child safely walk to school". The statistics probably help shed light on the problem too... Florida cities in general has very high pedestrian fatality rates (due to the issue of being a traditional retirement area + poor pedestrian considerations in road design).
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Exactly this, there is no reason you can't have something that's good for both cars and people with some effort, but so much of the US is just a giant middle finger to pedestrians. I live in a fairly walkable area of the suburbs. I routinely walk to the grocery store, hardware store, restaurants, etc. And yet, the infrastructure kind of sucks. The most direct paths are missing sidewalks in a couple of places. The main road only has a sidewalk on one side for most of it. Many of the intersections have crosswalks on only one, two, or three sides. There are a couple of businesses I almost never visit simply because getting there requires crossing three crosswalks of the same intersection, then doing it again on the way back. And it's a dangerous intersection to cross which requires great care, because people routinely blow through red lights to turn right on red. Naturally, there is zero police enforcement of this. It even goes beyond a lack of infrastructure and sometimes involves intentional barriers. I used to take a shortcut through the neighborhood next door, which gave me some variety and bypassed one of the bits of missing sidewalk. Then they put up a fence and I can't go that way anymore. So many places in this country are within a reasonable walking distance of things, but make it unnecessarily difficult to take advantage of that fact. Get rid of pointless fences, put sidewalks and crosswalks everywhere, and you'd improve things significantly.
mseebach 10y ago
It could also fit inside a decent-sized airport. Several large factories are bigger than this. Heck, so are single farms. The idea that there's a trade-off between centres of high culture and highway interchanges is entirely absurd.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  Can you have "high culture" and cars? Empirically, all the towns and cities I like to visit are the non-high-rise pedestrian ones. They don't have to be old, but it helps. My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. Small towns with small roads can be nice in the evenings, and that's about it.
  - pif 10y ago
    > all the towns and cities I like to visit ... Warning: "like to visit" != "like to live in"
    - smcl 10y ago
      We can clarify with the person who said that, but the two are one-and-the same for me. I'd guess that it's pretty rare for someone to like visiting pedestrian-friendly, compact old cities (Paris, Prague, Edinburgh) but prefer to live in modern car-dependent ones (Atlanta, Dubai etc)...
      - pif 10y ago
        You seem to imply that a city can be either pedestrian-friendly or car-dependent, but there is an intermediate state: pedestrian-and-car-friendly. Furthermore, pedestrian-friendly is nice if you manage to sleep in a nice accommodation at a walkable distance from your centers of interest: this is usually the case when you visit a town as a tourist, but not so easy when you leave there.
        willvarfar 10y ago
return0 10y ago
Thats the reason why most american cities lack a city center culture.
pacala 10y ago
Historical Florence is a great place to visit for a few days. Not so sure it's that great to live in long term, especially with kids.
- merraksh 10y ago
  About 100k people seem to live there, I assume many of them with kids. I lived for different periods of a few years in two cities of similar structure and size of ancient Florence and Atlanta, and found the quality of life to be much higher in the Florence-like city.
  - willvarfar 10y ago
    Does the mafia have any impact on daily life? In Naples, with the waste situation, I understand they make it hell.
    - merraksh 10y ago
      Yes, and increasingly in northern Italy and elsewhere in Europe [1], although it is barely felt by any citizen. The impact of such organizations goes from rigging construction contracts, for instance by imposing their affiliates' construction materials under the threat of burning the construction site, to controlling legal and illegal activities, such as the transport of toxic waste (which they just bury somewhere around Naples) [2]. More recently, members of both major parties have been caught asking votes controlled by the various mafias in exchange for favors. [3] [1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-vendetta-of-san-luca-in-duisburg-a-deadly-mafia-export-from-italy-a-500016.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-vendetta-of-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_death_(Italy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_death_(Italy) [3] http://napoli.fanpage.it/napoli-perquisizione-al-comitato-elettorali-del-pd-2-indagati http://napoli.fanpage.it/napoli-perquisizione-al-comitato-el... (sorry, couldn't find it in English)
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  This. Maybe I'm just an uncouth American but the idea of living with so many other people in such a small places makes me claustrophobic.
gmazza 10y ago
On a plus side, you don't have this in Atlanta Interchange: http://www.lanazione.it/firenze/voragine-lungarno-torrigiani-1.2193570 http://www.lanazione.it/firenze/voragine-lungarno-torrigiani...
athenot 10y ago
One nitpick: this is not "a nameless interchange", this is known to us in Atlanta as "Spaghetti Junction"[1]. The side-view[2] shows that a bit better. [1] Yes there's an official name but almost nobody uses it. [2] http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/img/photos/2014/01/17/a7/56/TSPOST_focal.jpg http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/img/photos/2014/01/17/a7/...
- szarecor 10y ago
  Actually, I don't think that's spaghetti junction (Tom Moreland interchange) at 285/85. I think it's the 285/75 interchange at Cumberland.
  - athenot 10y ago
    It's I-85 southbound at mile post 95.8 (see the sign on the median). ;) But I agree that 285/75 is comparable in size.
- chucksmash 10y ago
  I believe your nitpick is incorrect - it looks more like I-285/I-75 interchange than Spaghetti Junction (which, for out of towners, is the intersection of I-85/I-285 on the northeast side of Atlanta).
quantumhobbit 10y ago
I've always suspected that one of the driving forces of the expolsion of the suburbs in post war america was due to atomic weapons. This picture, if true to scale, reminds me of that. Older cities could be easily wiped out in ww3. Atlanta, which saw a huge amount of growth in the second half of the twentieth century, would be harder to completely destroy. I've never really seen evidence that there was a real effort to spread out cities due to the cold war. Most histories of suburbia focus on white flight and yhe automobile.
- merraksh 10y ago
  I would suspect atomic weapons scale much more easily than cities. Even if that wasn't the case, assuming the target is the commercial center of a city you don't even have to use more powerful warheads. I see a much less scary, but still ignoble, incentive behind this: the cementification of cities and the money it brings to all people involved.
- eitally 10y ago
  No, it was pretty much just cars and building technology that allowed for quick construction of private homes that were much nicer and larger than any housing available in city centers. The trend continues today.
- ghaff 10y ago
  The notion that people moved to suburbia because of the cold war assumes a level of centralized planning that the US, by and large, did not have. Many people did not want to live in cities, given the choice, for white flight and other reasons and the suburbs/automobile provided an option for more living space. Even today, there's a strong migration to cities meme that the numbers don't really bear out. There's something of a trend for college-educated 20-somethings to live in a handful of specific urban locations but it's not a lot broader than that.
- adricnet 10y ago
  Speaking vaguely on purpose without sources (apologies), the folks who were concerned about weapons targeting a few decades back had no expectation that any part of the greater metropolitan Atlanta area would survive a nuclear strike. The historical maps are still around and might be FOIA'able from US gov or others. shiver The doctrine and culture around MAD is, even a few decades on, really quite frightening.
arbuge 10y ago
From that graphic, it looks like this argument is being made to work by stretching the definition of interchange. Most people would think of the area right around the clover loops. What is being discussed here is actually an extent defined by the furthest service road entrances and exits connected to that interchange.
aaron695 10y ago
Unless there are people living on the interchange it's a little pointless. We need very high density around where people live. This is the most important thing ever. Low energy costs for transport which I would say equals better communities and a better way of life for a large proportion of the population. Of course acknowledging there exists at any time a smaller proportion of the population for who this doesn't work, but this also allows them an easier access to their lifestyle. Allowing/encouraging high density building is whats it's about, not roads which are just the side effect.
- djrobstep 10y ago
  Money talks. We need to shift the tax burden to encourage higher density land use. We need high enough land taxes on the highest value land to encourage high density buildings on that land.
  - themartorana 10y ago
    Do we, though? I agree encouraging density in the places people want to live densely is a Good Idea - think SF, NYC, etc. People and entrenched interests working to prevent density where appropriate are worth defeating. That said, some people want to live in sprawling suburbs, and taxing them unnecessarily for the inconvenience seems like a Bad Idea.
    - djrobstep 10y ago
      Shifting more of the tax burden onto expensive land shifts it off cheaper land.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Making the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure is not “taxing them unnecessarily”. Currently suburban infrastructure and the automobile commuter pattern of life is heavily subsidized, while other development patterns are penalized or banned outright.
      - 10y ago
ctdonath 10y ago
That interchange is on the outskirts of Atlanta, a sprawling region with no geographically limiting factors. Move the camera 15 miles away from Florence and you'll likely find similarly sparse areas. Move the camera to downtown Atlanta, and you'll find high rises and other features similarly spectacular, populated, and dense.
chasing 10y ago
This is blogspam, by the way. If you click through to the Treehugger article you'll get a link here -- http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/costs-of-sprawl---the-speed.html http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/costs-of-sprawl---the-spee... -- which appears to be the original article. It has more to say, as well, than just some sort of dopey "Atlanta should replace its highways with Duomos" argument.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  It is not "blogspam". Streetsblog is a well-known and valuable site that rounds up links from related sites into a once-daily post.
  - chasing 10y ago
    Someone posted a blog post to Hacker News which summarized another summary of an original article -- and neither summary adds any thought to the original idea. In fact, they strip the original article down to a single idea and attempt to make it as outrageous as possible. Blogspam?
  - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
    It doesn't matter if it is a good blog. Any time a blog links to another blog is blogspam. Blogspam is fine in some contexts — it's a great way to share articles between communities that would otherwise be unconnected — but it doesn't belong on a link aggregator like Hacker News. It's mandatory to always link to the original article.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  Related note: representing information with a red and green overlay is completely useless to 6% of men in the general population, and up to 8% of men in certain European ancestries. I cannot tell what is going on in the graphs on this page, and I have a comparatively mild form of red-green colorblindness.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 10y ago
ProfChronos 10y ago
"Because of the need for speed, Atlanta has a great big expensive hole the size of Florence that does very little beside getting a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs a bit sooner, barring any accidents." => how can you compare a city in a country like Italy (60M people, 116K sq miles) with an interchange in the US (323M people, 3.8M sq miles) and conclude that? Of course the US have enormous transport infrastructures, simply because it was a need during the 19th century to have a full "colonization" of the land instead of only large cities with high density (just think about agriculture) and it is now a need for a competitive economy to have low costs of transports per km. Sure we have to improve the energetic efficiency of our transports, but that won't be done my taking comparisons that make absolutely no sense
- sgnelson 10y ago
  No, it's a thousand times worse than that. They're comparing a city from the 1400's to a tiny piece of a city of the 21st century. It's such a bad comparison, it blows my mind.
grb423 10y ago
How many Walden Ponds would fit in the Moscone Center?
peterwwillis 10y ago
Of all the densely populated metropolitan cities in Italy, I don't know of any of them that are located right next to each other. Sure, we have sprawl. We also have some of the most densely populated cities in the world, and we're one of the biggest countries in the world. There's going to be some wasted space.
oldmanjay 10y ago
I don't want to flag this because it's not offensive, but this is pretty stupid on a lot of levels. I don't see the point in emotionally charged inapplicable comparisons.
johngalt 10y ago
Interchanges have a beauty of their own. Maybe just to an engineerish person. Tons of steel reinforced concrete arching through the air in smooth curves. Grade separated to allow the constant flow of traffic zipping through without stopping. Roads and highways that connect your driveway with an entire continent, and interchanges are at the heart of it. Trumpet interchange is beautiful in it's simplicity: https://www.flickr.com/photos/shanta/2220012922/in/set-72157603793833860/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/shanta/2220012922/in/set-72157... Or the Dallas High 5 stack interchange in it's complexity: http://googlesightseeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/HF1-atrb.jpg http://googlesightseeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/HF1-...
- madcaptenor 10y ago
  You might like Nicholas Rougeux's "Interchange choreography": http://www.c82.net/work/?id=350 http://www.c82.net/work/?id=350
  - legodt 10y ago
    Or Sufjan Steven's The BQE! https://vimeo.com/100146540 https://vimeo.com/100146540
- brudgers 10y ago
  We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. -- The Futurist Manifesto, 1908 [1] It didn't turn out well. http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
SteveMouzon 10y ago
I'm the author of the original post on originalgreen.org. While the images are sensational and actually went viral a couple years ago, the real message is to point out that the need for speed necessitates massive waste of land and resources. At speeds experienced in Florence, the curb radii of the streets are essentially invisible, whereas the expressway radii each take up much of the Atlanta image. Yet which place provides wonderful experiences? Isn't it time to slow down?
- zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago
  So how's that war on urban sprawl going in San Francisco? Oh right...
- blendo 10y ago
  The need for speed also leads to urban pedestrians having to see and avoid vehicles that are optimized for Atlanta-sized interchanges. And the trendiest "green" cars are the worst: the Tesla Model S P85D weighs about 5,000 lbs and accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds in "Insane Mode". Really hoping something like the Toyota i-ROAD takes off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgygLfbzLqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgygLfbzLqM
g8oz 10y ago
Also relevant "Why suburbia sucks" https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/ https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/

109 points by Doctor_Fegg 10y ago

The opening statement of this piece about "how much we've given up" to accommodate cars in the US leaves me pretty cold. This isn't Italy and we aren't bound by how far we can travel by foot. The US still has huge swaths of undeveloped land. Drive from Kansas City to Denver sometime, it's a mind-numbing exercise in endurance. Energy usage concerns (which are very real) not withstanding the actual physical footprint of all this infrastructure is a drop in the ocean. The US is huge.

lmm 10y ago
There are empty parts of Italy too - it's not like the whole country's the same density as Florence. The point (and it's an inherently subjective one) is how much nicer it is to live in Florence than in Atlanta.
Lazare 10y ago
Yeah. It's a fascinating comparison, but it's being presented as a clearly problematic tradeoff, but it's not clear why. The unspoken conceit of the argument is that all land is equally valuable. Which...maybe so! But if you believe that, I'd love to chat with you about doing a land deal... Edit: Plus if you look at the comments at the link, there's some pretty serious criticism of the basic accuracy too...
pif 10y ago
I'm Italian, I LOVE Florence and I upvoted you. Indeed, nothing was given up to build that interchange. If you want to build a new Florence in the US, you won't be room-bound. OTOH, one of the factor of Florence's charm is its history, and one cannot build several centuries of history out of a blueprint.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
return0 10y ago
Visitors in the US can't help to notice just how much emphasis was put on cars when designing cities (e.g. LA). I wonder if that design has paid off, given that today's technology can be used to significantly lower city traffic.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
  A lot of that emphasis only dates from the mud 20th century, with the unholy trinity of urban renewal, the interstate highway system, and tearing out commuter rail/interurban/streetcar lines.
bitslayer 10y ago
The US is huge, and we could build anything we want. The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together. The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another. The "square" that I pass through every morning is a massive intersection of two suburban highways. Behind our tinted windows, we wait in long lines for out turn signal. We drive to the gym and fight for that close up parking space so we won't have to walk. Why? Because the exterior environment we have built is horrific. This is not the life I want to live. I reject the idea that we can't live in nicer places. Americans learn the wrong lesson from visiting Europe. They think that a place has to be hundreds of years old to be livable. But we can build anything we want. Politics need to get out in front and not drag us back. Moneyed interests need to take a chance. Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  > the exterior environment we have built is horrific So true. Growing up in one of the most sprawled cities in America I had no sense for how ugly and disgusting our city was to pedestrians and why that might matter. Then I lived in Washington DC where walking almost anywhere was a pleasant experience. Now I hate the sprawl and what we've given up.
- VLM 10y ago
  > Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world. Try an inductive proof. Assume that is true, see if characteristics under those circumstances match real world observations. So, wards of the state on welfare were ordered by the state to move to the unwanted burbs which they hated and wished they could live packed together in giant ultra dense urban projects. There are no slums or poor/bad neighborhoods in cities because cities being more desirable than burbs means slums and slum dwellers are all pushed into the burbs. Starving college students and recent grads live in the burbs because they're poor and McMansions are less desirable, then if or as they get higher incomes and have kids, they move into downtown because thats nicer. All economic development in the city is via private investment because everybody wants to live there, whereas all burb development is taxpayer funded. The suburbs are full of burned out abandoned buildings and empty lots whereas continuous construction and redevelopment fills the cities. Crime rates are extremely low in cities because the less well adjusted members of society are all pushed economically into the burbs, which are overflowing with violent crime, resulting in more poverty in an anti-virtuous cycle. The cities, being more desirable, have the best public schools and the burbs, being less desirable, have 50% dropout rates and massive discipline problems. It would make an interesting alternative history, but seems to have no relationship with reality. Therefore I think that's probably proven false.
tehwalrus 10y ago
It's not that you've give up the (unscarce) land, it's that you've given up the ability to walk through town on foot.
Shivetya 10y ago
still very many countries have incredible amounts of land going unused, usually owned by the state. with technology we no longer need to live on top of each other and should be free to choose to or to not too. cities are not inexpensive places to live and in some areas they aren't the safest either. still it should always be choice. we as a world are far from running out of space or arable lands
matwood 10y ago
> Drive from Kansas City to Denver sometime, it's a mind-numbing exercise in endurance. I just had terrible flashbacks from doing that drive multiple times when I moved from the east coast to Denver (and then back!).
wobbleblob 10y ago
Driving is nice there, but I think you've taken it too far. Why are there no sidewalks in the suburbs? People actively campaign their local government to stop them from building sidewalks along their street. Sometimes we visit relatives in Atlanta. The mall is literally across the street from where they live. The only legal way to get there is by car. You couldn't even walk to the next crosswalk. It's a mile or two down, and then back up to the mall, but as there is no sidewalk, the police will stop you and ask you why you are walking. Crazy.
- soundwave106 10y ago
  I agree that America has in the past de-emphasized safe pedestrian paths way too much in favor of car culture (the South in particular is pretty bad... Atlanta's not great, but I don't think their walking-unfriendliness compares to Houston or Dallas). I think the culture is changing somewhat though. I think there's a much greater desire for pedestrian friendliness than there used to be. Of course, any demand for improvements will always be the usual mix of NIMBY, people who think almost any government spending is useless, people who don't like change of any sort, people who fear sidewalks will bring in "undesirables", or people who don't seem to understand what an easement is. It really depends on the neighborhood culture, though. Personally around here (Tampa Florida) I think I've seen more concerns along the lines of "why can't my child safely walk to school". The statistics probably help shed light on the problem too... Florida cities in general has very high pedestrian fatality rates (due to the issue of being a traditional retirement area + poor pedestrian considerations in road design).
- mikeash 10y ago
  Exactly this, there is no reason you can't have something that's good for both cars and people with some effort, but so much of the US is just a giant middle finger to pedestrians. I live in a fairly walkable area of the suburbs. I routinely walk to the grocery store, hardware store, restaurants, etc. And yet, the infrastructure kind of sucks. The most direct paths are missing sidewalks in a couple of places. The main road only has a sidewalk on one side for most of it. Many of the intersections have crosswalks on only one, two, or three sides. There are a couple of businesses I almost never visit simply because getting there requires crossing three crosswalks of the same intersection, then doing it again on the way back. And it's a dangerous intersection to cross which requires great care, because people routinely blow through red lights to turn right on red. Naturally, there is zero police enforcement of this. It even goes beyond a lack of infrastructure and sometimes involves intentional barriers. I used to take a shortcut through the neighborhood next door, which gave me some variety and bypassed one of the bits of missing sidewalk. Then they put up a fence and I can't go that way anymore. So many places in this country are within a reasonable walking distance of things, but make it unnecessarily difficult to take advantage of that fact. Get rid of pointless fences, put sidewalks and crosswalks everywhere, and you'd improve things significantly.

mseebach 10y ago

It could also fit inside a decent-sized airport. Several large factories are bigger than this. Heck, so are single farms. The idea that there's a trade-off between centres of high culture and highway interchanges is entirely absurd.

willvarfar 10y ago
Can you have "high culture" and cars? Empirically, all the towns and cities I like to visit are the non-high-rise pedestrian ones. They don't have to be old, but it helps. My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. Small towns with small roads can be nice in the evenings, and that's about it.
- pif 10y ago
  > all the towns and cities I like to visit ... Warning: "like to visit" != "like to live in"
  - smcl 10y ago
    We can clarify with the person who said that, but the two are one-and-the same for me. I'd guess that it's pretty rare for someone to like visiting pedestrian-friendly, compact old cities (Paris, Prague, Edinburgh) but prefer to live in modern car-dependent ones (Atlanta, Dubai etc)...
    - pif 10y ago
      You seem to imply that a city can be either pedestrian-friendly or car-dependent, but there is an intermediate state: pedestrian-and-car-friendly. Furthermore, pedestrian-friendly is nice if you manage to sleep in a nice accommodation at a walkable distance from your centers of interest: this is usually the case when you visit a town as a tourist, but not so easy when you leave there.
      - willvarfar 10y ago

return0 10y ago

Thats the reason why most american cities lack a city center culture.

pacala 10y ago

Historical Florence is a great place to visit for a few days. Not so sure it's that great to live in long term, especially with kids.

merraksh 10y ago
About 100k people seem to live there, I assume many of them with kids. I lived for different periods of a few years in two cities of similar structure and size of ancient Florence and Atlanta, and found the quality of life to be much higher in the Florence-like city.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  Does the mafia have any impact on daily life? In Naples, with the waste situation, I understand they make it hell.
  - merraksh 10y ago
    Yes, and increasingly in northern Italy and elsewhere in Europe [1], although it is barely felt by any citizen. The impact of such organizations goes from rigging construction contracts, for instance by imposing their affiliates' construction materials under the threat of burning the construction site, to controlling legal and illegal activities, such as the transport of toxic waste (which they just bury somewhere around Naples) [2]. More recently, members of both major parties have been caught asking votes controlled by the various mafias in exchange for favors. [3] [1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-vendetta-of-san-luca-in-duisburg-a-deadly-mafia-export-from-italy-a-500016.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-vendetta-of-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_death_(Italy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_death_(Italy) [3] http://napoli.fanpage.it/napoli-perquisizione-al-comitato-elettorali-del-pd-2-indagati http://napoli.fanpage.it/napoli-perquisizione-al-comitato-el... (sorry, couldn't find it in English)
quantumhobbit 10y ago
This. Maybe I'm just an uncouth American but the idea of living with so many other people in such a small places makes me claustrophobic.

gmazza 10y ago

On a plus side, you don't have this in Atlanta Interchange: http://www.lanazione.it/firenze/voragine-lungarno-torrigiani-1.2193570 http://www.lanazione.it/firenze/voragine-lungarno-torrigiani...

athenot 10y ago

One nitpick: this is not "a nameless interchange", this is known to us in Atlanta as "Spaghetti Junction"[1]. The side-view[2] shows that a bit better. [1] Yes there's an official name but almost nobody uses it. [2] http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/img/photos/2014/01/17/a7/56/TSPOST_focal.jpg http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/img/photos/2014/01/17/a7/...

szarecor 10y ago
Actually, I don't think that's spaghetti junction (Tom Moreland interchange) at 285/85. I think it's the 285/75 interchange at Cumberland.
- athenot 10y ago
  It's I-85 southbound at mile post 95.8 (see the sign on the median). ;) But I agree that 285/75 is comparable in size.
chucksmash 10y ago
I believe your nitpick is incorrect - it looks more like I-285/I-75 interchange than Spaghetti Junction (which, for out of towners, is the intersection of I-85/I-285 on the northeast side of Atlanta).

quantumhobbit 10y ago

I've always suspected that one of the driving forces of the expolsion of the suburbs in post war america was due to atomic weapons. This picture, if true to scale, reminds me of that. Older cities could be easily wiped out in ww3. Atlanta, which saw a huge amount of growth in the second half of the twentieth century, would be harder to completely destroy. I've never really seen evidence that there was a real effort to spread out cities due to the cold war. Most histories of suburbia focus on white flight and yhe automobile.

merraksh 10y ago
I would suspect atomic weapons scale much more easily than cities. Even if that wasn't the case, assuming the target is the commercial center of a city you don't even have to use more powerful warheads. I see a much less scary, but still ignoble, incentive behind this: the cementification of cities and the money it brings to all people involved.
eitally 10y ago
No, it was pretty much just cars and building technology that allowed for quick construction of private homes that were much nicer and larger than any housing available in city centers. The trend continues today.
ghaff 10y ago
The notion that people moved to suburbia because of the cold war assumes a level of centralized planning that the US, by and large, did not have. Many people did not want to live in cities, given the choice, for white flight and other reasons and the suburbs/automobile provided an option for more living space. Even today, there's a strong migration to cities meme that the numbers don't really bear out. There's something of a trend for college-educated 20-somethings to live in a handful of specific urban locations but it's not a lot broader than that.
adricnet 10y ago
Speaking vaguely on purpose without sources (apologies), the folks who were concerned about weapons targeting a few decades back had no expectation that any part of the greater metropolitan Atlanta area would survive a nuclear strike. The historical maps are still around and might be FOIA'able from US gov or others. shiver The doctrine and culture around MAD is, even a few decades on, really quite frightening.

arbuge 10y ago

From that graphic, it looks like this argument is being made to work by stretching the definition of interchange. Most people would think of the area right around the clover loops. What is being discussed here is actually an extent defined by the furthest service road entrances and exits connected to that interchange.

aaron695 10y ago

Unless there are people living on the interchange it's a little pointless. We need very high density around where people live. This is the most important thing ever. Low energy costs for transport which I would say equals better communities and a better way of life for a large proportion of the population. Of course acknowledging there exists at any time a smaller proportion of the population for who this doesn't work, but this also allows them an easier access to their lifestyle. Allowing/encouraging high density building is whats it's about, not roads which are just the side effect.

djrobstep 10y ago
Money talks. We need to shift the tax burden to encourage higher density land use. We need high enough land taxes on the highest value land to encourage high density buildings on that land.
- themartorana 10y ago
  Do we, though? I agree encouraging density in the places people want to live densely is a Good Idea - think SF, NYC, etc. People and entrenched interests working to prevent density where appropriate are worth defeating. That said, some people want to live in sprawling suburbs, and taxing them unnecessarily for the inconvenience seems like a Bad Idea.
  - djrobstep 10y ago
    Shifting more of the tax burden onto expensive land shifts it off cheaper land.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Making the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure is not “taxing them unnecessarily”. Currently suburban infrastructure and the automobile commuter pattern of life is heavily subsidized, while other development patterns are penalized or banned outright.
    - 10y ago

ctdonath 10y ago

That interchange is on the outskirts of Atlanta, a sprawling region with no geographically limiting factors. Move the camera 15 miles away from Florence and you'll likely find similarly sparse areas. Move the camera to downtown Atlanta, and you'll find high rises and other features similarly spectacular, populated, and dense.

chasing 10y ago

This is blogspam, by the way. If you click through to the Treehugger article you'll get a link here -- http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/costs-of-sprawl---the-speed.html http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/costs-of-sprawl---the-spee... -- which appears to be the original article. It has more to say, as well, than just some sort of dopey "Atlanta should replace its highways with Duomos" argument.

honkhonkpants 10y ago
It is not "blogspam". Streetsblog is a well-known and valuable site that rounds up links from related sites into a once-daily post.
- chasing 10y ago
  Someone posted a blog post to Hacker News which summarized another summary of an original article -- and neither summary adds any thought to the original idea. In fact, they strip the original article down to a single idea and attempt to make it as outrageous as possible. Blogspam?
- thescriptkiddie 10y ago
  It doesn't matter if it is a good blog. Any time a blog links to another blog is blogspam. Blogspam is fine in some contexts — it's a great way to share articles between communities that would otherwise be unconnected — but it doesn't belong on a link aggregator like Hacker News. It's mandatory to always link to the original article.
Declanomous 10y ago
Related note: representing information with a red and green overlay is completely useless to 6% of men in the general population, and up to 8% of men in certain European ancestries. I cannot tell what is going on in the graphs on this page, and I have a comparatively mild form of red-green colorblindness.
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ProfChronos 10y ago

"Because of the need for speed, Atlanta has a great big expensive hole the size of Florence that does very little beside getting a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs a bit sooner, barring any accidents." => how can you compare a city in a country like Italy (60M people, 116K sq miles) with an interchange in the US (323M people, 3.8M sq miles) and conclude that? Of course the US have enormous transport infrastructures, simply because it was a need during the 19th century to have a full "colonization" of the land instead of only large cities with high density (just think about agriculture) and it is now a need for a competitive economy to have low costs of transports per km. Sure we have to improve the energetic efficiency of our transports, but that won't be done my taking comparisons that make absolutely no sense

sgnelson 10y ago
No, it's a thousand times worse than that. They're comparing a city from the 1400's to a tiny piece of a city of the 21st century. It's such a bad comparison, it blows my mind.

grb423 10y ago

How many Walden Ponds would fit in the Moscone Center?

peterwwillis 10y ago

Of all the densely populated metropolitan cities in Italy, I don't know of any of them that are located right next to each other. Sure, we have sprawl. We also have some of the most densely populated cities in the world, and we're one of the biggest countries in the world. There's going to be some wasted space.

oldmanjay 10y ago

I don't want to flag this because it's not offensive, but this is pretty stupid on a lot of levels. I don't see the point in emotionally charged inapplicable comparisons.

johngalt 10y ago

Interchanges have a beauty of their own. Maybe just to an engineerish person. Tons of steel reinforced concrete arching through the air in smooth curves. Grade separated to allow the constant flow of traffic zipping through without stopping. Roads and highways that connect your driveway with an entire continent, and interchanges are at the heart of it. Trumpet interchange is beautiful in it's simplicity: https://www.flickr.com/photos/shanta/2220012922/in/set-72157603793833860/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/shanta/2220012922/in/set-72157... Or the Dallas High 5 stack interchange in it's complexity: http://googlesightseeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/HF1-atrb.jpg http://googlesightseeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/HF1-...

madcaptenor 10y ago
You might like Nicholas Rougeux's "Interchange choreography": http://www.c82.net/work/?id=350 http://www.c82.net/work/?id=350
- legodt 10y ago
  Or Sufjan Steven's The BQE! https://vimeo.com/100146540 https://vimeo.com/100146540
brudgers 10y ago
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. -- The Futurist Manifesto, 1908 [1] It didn't turn out well. http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

SteveMouzon 10y ago

I'm the author of the original post on originalgreen.org. While the images are sensational and actually went viral a couple years ago, the real message is to point out that the need for speed necessitates massive waste of land and resources. At speeds experienced in Florence, the curb radii of the streets are essentially invisible, whereas the expressway radii each take up much of the Atlanta image. Yet which place provides wonderful experiences? Isn't it time to slow down?

zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago
So how's that war on urban sprawl going in San Francisco? Oh right...
blendo 10y ago
The need for speed also leads to urban pedestrians having to see and avoid vehicles that are optimized for Atlanta-sized interchanges. And the trendiest "green" cars are the worst: the Tesla Model S P85D weighs about 5,000 lbs and accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds in "Insane Mode". Really hoping something like the Toyota i-ROAD takes off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgygLfbzLqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgygLfbzLqM

g8oz 10y ago

Also relevant "Why suburbia sucks" https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/ https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/