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I am of the opinion that continuing to build out all these long 'runs' of infrastructure to serve a even more spread out populace is a dead end. Where I live we

I am of the opinion that continuing to build out all these long 'runs' of infrastructure to serve a even more spread out populace is a dead end. Where I live we spent tens of billions expanding highway infrastructure, and it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been. We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people.

BurningFrog 5y ago
If you double your highways and traffic stays as bad, your highway system is delivering twice as much transportation. That is a clear improvement.
- francisofascii 5y ago
  Not really. Doubling your commute length is not an improvement. I have noticed places with heavier traffic tend to have shorter distances to your destination. So your total time is the same regardless.
  - rictic 5y ago
    Life is more than just commute time. When commuting further distances you have more options of where to live and where to work.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    I think you misread me. Doubling your commute length had nothing to do with my argument.
    - francisofascii 5y ago
      I was just using commute as an example. More transportation does not always translate to a positive good. It depends on other factors.
- nitwit005 5y ago
  Assuming the transportation is doing anything useful, which can be hard to gauge. Ideally, everyone would be conveniently near their workplace and the places they frequently shop.
joe_the_user 5y ago
This is one of the key points. The US isn't just spread-out but oriented to solving it's problem by spreading out more. And this paradigm has effectively become unsustainable. However, that's not the only factor at play here. Part of thing that makes spreading out the population look like a reasonable strategy is the mess involved in building in existing cities. A lot here is "soft" corruption - local government treats public grants as candy to give out to their friends and particular processes described in the article are just ways to do this.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  A lot of things appear unsustainable because the income of builders is inflated with fed money. I don't think much will improve until a normal person can afford to build a house again.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    I could can buy a kit for a 3 bedroom house for say, $35K or less. But PG&E charges $20K+ to connect your electricity, the fire department charges $20k+ assessments and etc, bringing construction costs to $200K in a rural area and more in an urban area. A lot of this is prop 13 bs - cities can't tax so they finance themselves with new home assessments. But prop 13 itself is all about protecting those who built yesterday from the costs of maintenance today. The thing is, those costs are real. The "a normal person can afford to build a house" isn't coming back. The single family home system has diseconomies of scale (roads and electricity get harder as the scale of suburbia increases, think about it). A modern society can't afford to do things that way and it's continuing by because those doing it are pushing the costs onto other people.
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      Ah, I agree, but a lot of that is specific to CA. There has to be a way to fix it. Over regulation is a thing; a relative that is a civil PE related a story about how someone from CA was trying to push for these ultra-specific signoff requirements on buildings and everyone laughed at him.
trylfthsk 5y ago
Chuck Marohn did my favorite exploration of this issue in "The Growth Ponzi Scheme"[0]. I wish this was front and center in the Zeitgeist. [0]https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
- foepys 5y ago
  If you prefer videos, Not Just Bikes on YouTube made a series of videos about Strong Towns: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... Here is here video about The Growth Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
amalcon 5y ago
The particular project highlighted in the article isn't one of those, though. Somerville (one of the cities reached by the extension) has the highest population density in the state of Massachusetts, and I think it's something like top 20 in the United States by that metric. This is not an "even more spread out populace", it's linking a reasonably dense bedroom community to a regional commercial hub.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  Somerville is not a bedroom community. It's not even really a suburb. It's more analogous to a city neighborhood that happens to be under different jurisdiction for historical reasons. You can walk from Somerville to fidelity's headquarters, Harvard, MIT, all the FAANG offices, Amgen/Biogen/AstriskGen, etc. There's definitely stuff more far flung and less dense within the city limits of Boston and/or on the Orange and Red lines. The suburbs kind of start somewhere in Watertown/Newton. The closest bedroom community to Boston, moving west, is probably Worcester.
  - amalcon 5y ago
    Maybe I've been using that terminology wrong; I'd meant something along the lines of "primarily residential annex of a city". I didn't mean to imply that it's a long distance or low density (in fact, I specifically emphasized Somerville's relatively high density), or that it doesn't have its own identity -- it definitely does. Somerville (and to a lesser extent Medford/Charlestown/Watertown/Quincy) is just where you go if you want to live in that area but can't or won't pay Boston/Cambridge/Brookline rent.
    - throwawaygh 5y ago
      I see. "Bedroom Community" typically means something more like Worcester or Lynn, at least from my understanding. A distinct hub beyond the suburbs from which people commute into the city.
dntrkv 5y ago
I don't see how this is relevant to this discussion. NYC is plenty dense yet it has the same issues with cost.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  NYC has much different issues with cost. You're paying for bad management that does long term projects as a series of short term projects and lets all the contractors go in between, for instance. You're paying the union for the right to use a tunnel boring machine, and you have an oiler watching your cranes because it's still 1910 and that's a full-time position. You're paying to move legacy infrastructure out of the way. You're paying to mine out cavernous underground subway stations through small shafts because apparently that's how America and America only designs the stations. I could go on.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    My point is that OP's comment is not relevant. It's not like the costs are high per capita, the costs are high per mile. In which case, the population density doesn't matter.
criddell 5y ago
> We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people. I suspect the current trend is in the opposite direction. If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization. If there was unlimited money, how would you even start to fix cities? A big part of the attraction to living in the 'burbs or beyond is cheap space and very little noise pollution.
- munk-a 5y ago
  > If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization. Urbanization is more than just hatred of vehicles - Europe has managed to development walkable cities where cars are significantly less convenient than other modes of transport - even if the cars are automated they're going to continue to be suboptimal compared to well planned and zoned cities. At the heart of the issue is whether a city is oriented toward foot traffic or optimized for car storage - America leans the latter way and it's pretty darn weird since, outside of the central south (Arizona, Texas and such) - most people would prefer a ten minute walk to five minute drive.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    > outside of the central south That's an odd take. Most of the northern states (excepting the temperate coastline) get cold enough during the winter that a 5 minute drive is far better than a 10 minute walk. When the polar vortex comes through and it is a windy night, a 10 minute walk is short enough to get frostbite on exposed skin. Then, 90-100 degree summer days aren't uncommon, except the humidity makes them more dangerous because you can sweat all you want, but it wont evaporate to cool you down. Some cities- Minneapolis and St. Paul- have indoor walkways and climate controlled sky bridges for pedestrians, but they're pretty primarily used for business people's lunchtime, since they're fairly limited in where you can actually get to.
  - criddell 5y ago
    > even if the cars are automated they're going to continue to be suboptimal That’s kind of irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you can convince taxpayers to fund. If self-driving cars become a thing, people will move further and further out of the city. Who cares if they have a 90 minute commute to work if they can eat or sleep or work or play games during that time. Taxpayers will continue to fund big road projects and car storage is going to be more important in the future. Or maybe remote work spreads more to even more jobs and being in a city matters less. People may drive less often and live in a place where they can have (and afford) more space to build exactly the home they want to live in. Lots of us enjoy having room for hobbies like gardening, woodworking, outdoor cooking, etc…
rictic 5y ago
> it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been The latter does not imply the former. If the increased infrastructure means that more people can live and work in an area, then even if the traffic for each person in that area is exactly as bad as it was before, it still helped those people who took the option to move there. We do not build infrastructure that it might stay idle. Compare "we upgraded our internet to gigabit but we're seeing a similar utilization ratio, therefor the upgrade didn't improve the lives of anyone in the home".

BurningFrog 5y ago

If you double your highways and traffic stays as bad, your highway system is delivering twice as much transportation. That is a clear improvement.

francisofascii 5y ago
Not really. Doubling your commute length is not an improvement. I have noticed places with heavier traffic tend to have shorter distances to your destination. So your total time is the same regardless.
- rictic 5y ago
  Life is more than just commute time. When commuting further distances you have more options of where to live and where to work.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  I think you misread me. Doubling your commute length had nothing to do with my argument.
  - francisofascii 5y ago
    I was just using commute as an example. More transportation does not always translate to a positive good. It depends on other factors.
nitwit005 5y ago
Assuming the transportation is doing anything useful, which can be hard to gauge. Ideally, everyone would be conveniently near their workplace and the places they frequently shop.

joe_the_user 5y ago

This is one of the key points. The US isn't just spread-out but oriented to solving it's problem by spreading out more. And this paradigm has effectively become unsustainable. However, that's not the only factor at play here. Part of thing that makes spreading out the population look like a reasonable strategy is the mess involved in building in existing cities. A lot here is "soft" corruption - local government treats public grants as candy to give out to their friends and particular processes described in the article are just ways to do this.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
R0b0t1 5y ago
A lot of things appear unsustainable because the income of builders is inflated with fed money. I don't think much will improve until a normal person can afford to build a house again.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  I could can buy a kit for a 3 bedroom house for say, $35K or less. But PG&E charges $20K+ to connect your electricity, the fire department charges $20k+ assessments and etc, bringing construction costs to $200K in a rural area and more in an urban area. A lot of this is prop 13 bs - cities can't tax so they finance themselves with new home assessments. But prop 13 itself is all about protecting those who built yesterday from the costs of maintenance today. The thing is, those costs are real. The "a normal person can afford to build a house" isn't coming back. The single family home system has diseconomies of scale (roads and electricity get harder as the scale of suburbia increases, think about it). A modern society can't afford to do things that way and it's continuing by because those doing it are pushing the costs onto other people.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    Ah, I agree, but a lot of that is specific to CA. There has to be a way to fix it. Over regulation is a thing; a relative that is a civil PE related a story about how someone from CA was trying to push for these ultra-specific signoff requirements on buildings and everyone laughed at him.

trylfthsk 5y ago

Chuck Marohn did my favorite exploration of this issue in "The Growth Ponzi Scheme"[0]. I wish this was front and center in the Zeitgeist. [0]https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/

foepys 5y ago
If you prefer videos, Not Just Bikes on YouTube made a series of videos about Strong Towns: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... Here is here video about The Growth Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

amalcon 5y ago

The particular project highlighted in the article isn't one of those, though. Somerville (one of the cities reached by the extension) has the highest population density in the state of Massachusetts, and I think it's something like top 20 in the United States by that metric. This is not an "even more spread out populace", it's linking a reasonably dense bedroom community to a regional commercial hub.

throwawaygh 5y ago
Somerville is not a bedroom community. It's not even really a suburb. It's more analogous to a city neighborhood that happens to be under different jurisdiction for historical reasons. You can walk from Somerville to fidelity's headquarters, Harvard, MIT, all the FAANG offices, Amgen/Biogen/AstriskGen, etc. There's definitely stuff more far flung and less dense within the city limits of Boston and/or on the Orange and Red lines. The suburbs kind of start somewhere in Watertown/Newton. The closest bedroom community to Boston, moving west, is probably Worcester.
- amalcon 5y ago
  Maybe I've been using that terminology wrong; I'd meant something along the lines of "primarily residential annex of a city". I didn't mean to imply that it's a long distance or low density (in fact, I specifically emphasized Somerville's relatively high density), or that it doesn't have its own identity -- it definitely does. Somerville (and to a lesser extent Medford/Charlestown/Watertown/Quincy) is just where you go if you want to live in that area but can't or won't pay Boston/Cambridge/Brookline rent.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    I see. "Bedroom Community" typically means something more like Worcester or Lynn, at least from my understanding. A distinct hub beyond the suburbs from which people commute into the city.

dntrkv 5y ago

I don't see how this is relevant to this discussion. NYC is plenty dense yet it has the same issues with cost.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
NYC has much different issues with cost. You're paying for bad management that does long term projects as a series of short term projects and lets all the contractors go in between, for instance. You're paying the union for the right to use a tunnel boring machine, and you have an oiler watching your cranes because it's still 1910 and that's a full-time position. You're paying to move legacy infrastructure out of the way. You're paying to mine out cavernous underground subway stations through small shafts because apparently that's how America and America only designs the stations. I could go on.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  My point is that OP's comment is not relevant. It's not like the costs are high per capita, the costs are high per mile. In which case, the population density doesn't matter.

criddell 5y ago

> We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people. I suspect the current trend is in the opposite direction. If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization. If there was unlimited money, how would you even start to fix cities? A big part of the attraction to living in the 'burbs or beyond is cheap space and very little noise pollution.

munk-a 5y ago
> If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization. Urbanization is more than just hatred of vehicles - Europe has managed to development walkable cities where cars are significantly less convenient than other modes of transport - even if the cars are automated they're going to continue to be suboptimal compared to well planned and zoned cities. At the heart of the issue is whether a city is oriented toward foot traffic or optimized for car storage - America leans the latter way and it's pretty darn weird since, outside of the central south (Arizona, Texas and such) - most people would prefer a ten minute walk to five minute drive.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  > outside of the central south That's an odd take. Most of the northern states (excepting the temperate coastline) get cold enough during the winter that a 5 minute drive is far better than a 10 minute walk. When the polar vortex comes through and it is a windy night, a 10 minute walk is short enough to get frostbite on exposed skin. Then, 90-100 degree summer days aren't uncommon, except the humidity makes them more dangerous because you can sweat all you want, but it wont evaporate to cool you down. Some cities- Minneapolis and St. Paul- have indoor walkways and climate controlled sky bridges for pedestrians, but they're pretty primarily used for business people's lunchtime, since they're fairly limited in where you can actually get to.
- criddell 5y ago
  > even if the cars are automated they're going to continue to be suboptimal That’s kind of irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you can convince taxpayers to fund. If self-driving cars become a thing, people will move further and further out of the city. Who cares if they have a 90 minute commute to work if they can eat or sleep or work or play games during that time. Taxpayers will continue to fund big road projects and car storage is going to be more important in the future. Or maybe remote work spreads more to even more jobs and being in a city matters less. People may drive less often and live in a place where they can have (and afford) more space to build exactly the home they want to live in. Lots of us enjoy having room for hobbies like gardening, woodworking, outdoor cooking, etc…

rictic 5y ago

> it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been The latter does not imply the former. If the increased infrastructure means that more people can live and work in an area, then even if the traffic for each person in that area is exactly as bad as it was before, it still helped those people who took the option to move there. We do not build infrastructure that it might stay idle. Compare "we upgraded our internet to gigabit but we're seeing a similar utilization ratio, therefor the upgrade didn't improve the lives of anyone in the home".