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This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much 'stuff' you're build

This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much 'stuff' you're building the infrastructure for. Initially it's not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs/maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don't...it's not pretty.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
The problem boils down to this: we've vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We've paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt/gravel, but they got paved because it's a sign your neighborhood has "made it." It's a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50's, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that. Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes? If we hadn't allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we'd have neighborhoods with dirt/gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc. Instead we have a country where we're slaves to cars.
- rexreed 5y ago
  Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    Roman roads were built with extremely robust foundations below which required very large amounts of labor to put in place.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      We have excavators, bulldozers, graders, etc, we don't need to use slaves to hand-dig road foundations.
  - op00to 5y ago
    The Roman roads that last a long time are outliers. Most Roman roads are long gone.
  - mitigating 5y ago
    Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it dangerous? There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.
    - warning26 5y ago
      Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature. It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot faster!
      - rexreed 5y ago
        Indeed, that's the core of the argument made in this article here (from 2009) which is arguing for a return to cobbles / bricks for Georgetown: https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-some-streets-to-revert-to-cobblestones/ https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-...
        mark-r 5y ago
        The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones. Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.
      - prawn 5y ago
        I'm with you on the speed reduction. An urban planner friend talks about how you're best motivating a speed limit by the environment (tighter road, bends, etc) rather than a literal limit and threat of fine. But how would cyclists fare on cobblestones, especially if you were talking about suburban streets with kids playing, bikes going around, etc?
        TulliusCicero 5y ago
  - Naga 5y ago
    I'm assuming you're speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn't. I don't know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven't) and they were not affected as much by freeze/thaw cycles as North American roads are. My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I've seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there's physically less roads.
    - rexreed 5y ago
      Yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's an interesting thought exercise. For the high traffic streets where there is high speed and also lots of heavy traffic, for sure, asphalt dominates for many good reasons. But for the problems this article discusses for smaller cities where their population has moved to suburbs and exurbs and where the commercial centers have similarly moved out of city core, perhaps the more durable approach to cobbles (or brick) might be an interesting way to address ongoing maintenance challenges. It's mostly a thought exercise, but an interesting one.
  - occz 5y ago
    The roman roads didn't have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.
- acdha 5y ago
  The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like condos have something of a “hasn’t made it” stigma for a lot of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of inefficient land use. Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.
  - subroutine 5y ago
    Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only exacerbates the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surfac...
    - acdha 5y ago
      > Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that I did not restrict it to commuting — designing around car-only transportation means that almost every common activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people famously underestimate the amount of time they spend driving, looking for parking, etc. — usually “a 20 minute drive” means “25 minutes if you exceed the speed limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and parking right in front”. If you start measuring that, you realize how much time people spend on things like unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single purpose errands in addition to commuting. > So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built Definitely — and one big factor for this is that single-occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to “defeat” traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage so conditions usually only improve for a few months after opening.
- aperson_hello 5y ago
  To be fair, the "SUVs" that are being sold are effectively the same as station wagons of the past (but smaller and with better gas mileage). Hopefully self-driving cars will get us out of this pit of car-centric infrastructure, but that's a solution that's been a few years out for the past decade.
  - plorg 5y ago
    Can you outline how this is supposed to free us from car-centric infrastructure? Unless it's coupled with style kind of Uber-subscription dystopia we would still need room to park all of these vehicles. While downtown parking can be a problem, garages aren't, and neither of these problems is on there scale of the larger infrastructure problems. The biggest problems with car-centric infrastructure are that they require a huge amount of ever-larger roads to funnel people (in cars) often tens of miles to do anything. Even in the rent-a-taxi scenario you would still need these roads, which would probably need more maintenance, not less. And all of that sprawl has knock-on effects as roads create divisions in communities, and low-density housing, enabled by car infrastructure, means you have and know fewer neighbors.
    - mark-r 5y ago
      At least the Uber-style infrastructure doesn't require oversizing everything. Even if my car is used 90% of the time for commuting by myself, it has to be big enough for the other 10% of the time when I'm taking the family and our luggage.
- mitigating 5y ago
  This might be ideal for side roads leading to a few houses but if it's major parts of a town aren't you just move the cost of roads somewhere else? i.e. "I hope you can afford a truck, SUV, or constant repairs to your suspensions/tires"
- mark-r 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that if a bridge collapses underneath you, you're just as likely to die in a SUV as in a sedan.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    For anyone who thinks I might be being facetious, I live in Minneapolis where there was an actual bridge collapse that killed people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge#Collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  I think it's fine roads are paved. It's just that said roads are wider and effectively longer to service the same number of people, and this is due to zoning and the way property tax is handled.
refurb 5y ago
Strongtowns is an internet phenomenon (ask a normal person if they’ve heard of Strongtowns). Small towns are shrinking (and large ones, see Detroit). No surprise here. It’s a trend that started 20 years ago and seems to be reversing due to housing prices and WFH. Strongtowns is a day late and a dollar short.
- jackcosgrove 5y ago
  Downstate Illinois has been in decline for fifty years. The climate is harsh, agriculture requires far fewer workers, light industry departed, and like upstate New York the region is given short shrift by a metro-dominated state government. Urban planning may be a factor but smart planning could not have overcome the headwinds.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    > The climate is harsh Doesn't this seem like a fatal issue right there? Given that Americans are free to move anywhere in the US, I would expect a general trend towards places that are more comfortable to live. Population growth can cover up a lot emigration, but the era of large families is over. Cities can still draw people with cultural significance, but what is the draw of Galesburg IL? Even for people that like small towns, there are plenty of small towns farther south with better weather.
    - analog31 5y ago
      And farther north. Greetings from wisconsin.
    - Kon-Peki 5y ago
      > what is the draw of Galesburg IL? There are two liberal arts colleges in the Galesburg “metro” area that draw both students and faculty from elsewhere (ps - the big one has a special 5-year 2-campus 2-diploma engineering program gives you a BA from them as well as, for example, a CS degree from UIUC [1]). The student population and their locations support a “downtown” that no city of that size and location would otherwise be able to support and therefore likely draws a lot of the rural population for entertainment. We pass through there a few times a year on the way to our favorite camping spot. I’d say their biggest problem and much of the cause of the sprawl-style development is that there is a bypass road on the north side of the city built nearly to interstate standards, complete with on-ramps and off-ramps. But it is flagged as both a US highway and a state highway so the chance that Galesburg has any control over it at all is pretty close to 0. [1] https://www.knox.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/engineering https://www.knox.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/engineering
Retric 5y ago
> Initially it’s not so bad This assumes it’s significantly cheaper to build new roads than to rebuild them which seems false on the surface. It could be that replacing more roads at the same time would drive down costs. If replacing ~600’ of roads is 600$/foot how about replacing 10 miles of roads?
- rout39574 5y ago
  Roads are initially built with the promise of future returns in mind. These estimates of future returns tend to be affected by developers, who are acting to encourage the approval of development projects. Rebuilding projects are contemplated in the shadow of actual returns, which are harder to lie about.
  - pstoll 5y ago
    > Roads are initially built with the promise of future returns in mind. Roads are like startups! We should get VCs in on the action.
    - iratewizard 5y ago
      If a road could get a cut of all attached business's revenue, and revenues shifted back towards small businesses (i.e. away from mega corps), I could see private roads being a boon and lawsuits forcing regular, quality maintenance. In practice, though, I'm sure it would get muddy quick.
      - kbenson 5y ago
        > I'm sure it would get muddy quick. I see what you did there...
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Maybe it is caused by rising standards and rising human labor costs? There are many stories where rebuilding or just renovation of a bridge was vastly more expensive than constructing it 50 or 100 years ago (yes, obviously after adjusting for inflation).
tomohawk 5y ago
What Strong Towns hasn't figured out, but which is obvious to everyone else, is that cities have really bad failure modes. Unfixable failure modes. The people running the cities run them into the ground by applying more and more gold plating to the services they provide, making sure to lard the contracts for their friends who keep them elected, and pursuing their luxury beliefs through unworkable policies. Eventually it all collapses and is irretrievable. Then they whine about being underfunded. If only they had more money, they could make their luxury beliefs work. People move out of cities because they do not feel safe, and the services suck. It's really the only option they have, since the people running the cities are completely unaccountable.
- eldavido 5y ago
  I think this is an insightful comment and I'm sorry to see it get downvoted. I live in a large condo building. It has its pros and cons. It's great, in theory--750-1000 people pooling their expertise and funds to tackle infrastructure issues. Great recent example: we fixed a sewer lateral (the pipe that connects to the sewer under the building). Three of them, total cost 200k. Sounds a lot until you realize we spread it across ~350 units (600/unit), which is roughly 1/10th what a typical suburban homeowner would pay for the same thing. The other side of the coin is that, in larger political structures, governance REALLY matters. You can end up with a relatively well-run condo like mine, or a large, wasteful organization that squanders obscene sums on pet projects and outright corruption. Many people don't even know this, but SF has been under federal investigation for high-level corruption in the public works department for over a year [1]. The thrust of your comment is correct. Large cities attract large amounts of money, much of which gets wasted, or ends up lining pockets in hard, or even "soft" corruption, with jobs and contracts steered to friends (qualified or not) via patronage networks. What I think you miss though, is that there's a middle ground. You don't have to be either extreme drive-everywhere suburbia, or a giant mega-city like Beijing or New York. My home town, Homewood, IL, is a nice, walkable city of about 20,000, with a nice downtown, plenty to do, and relatively honest (if not always saintly) government. The mid-size towns and suburbs can do a lot more to encourage the kind of urbanism the author calls for. Getting explicit about cultivating nice, walkable downtowns is a start. Many, including Homewood, don't, because "development" and "jobs" are seen as unqualified goods, without thinking about the cost side of the equation (roads, plumbing, etc required to service this stuff). I've written for Strong Towns. What they get most right is that (1) LAND is the scare resource in a town, and (2) cities should explicitly encourage uses that lead to the highest taxable value of that land. Big box retail isn't this. Denser housing and retail districts (I own one of these buildings), is. The numbers on this are simple and don't lie. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Mohammed-Nuru-to-settle-federal-fraud-case-16710600.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Mohammed-Nuru-to-sett...
xyzzyz 5y ago
Can you name one city that did not escape it, and was drowned in infrastructure costs? Galesburg is certainly not one of them, given how roads constitute a small fraction of its spending.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  That's not really how this works. If you don't have enough money to adequately maintain your infrastructure, you'll just inadequately maintain it instead. You won't plow ahead and spend the ideal amount of money anyway, you just let things kind of go to crap. So the failure state to look for isn't a city going into massive debt as it drastically outspends its revenues year after year, it's a city with infrastructure that's decaying and falling apart because they don't have enough money to take care of it. Then that's the thing that can have ripple effects on the local economy and population.
trinovantes 5y ago
Many suburban cities in Canada like Mississauga are also experiencing this. They've finally ran out of land to sell so they started raising property taxes and instituted levies https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mississauga-a-cautionary-tale-as-cities-sprawl-out-across-southern/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mississauga-a...
- defaultname 5y ago
  Mississauga has a density of 2467 people per square kilometer. Mississauga neighbourhoods look like this- https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5675623,-79.740886,916m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5675623,-79.740886,916m/data=... That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get. Mississauga had to raise property taxes somewhat -- still extremely competitive -- as a revenue source dried up. But those new neighbourhoods all easily pay for themselves in property taxes. Nonetheless, loads of really silly narrative comes out of Toronto writers, still foreboding this dire scenario that they've been pitching for well over a decade. It's a bit farcical at this point.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    > That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get. You can get a little bit denser by going full street grid--Chicago's single family home districts look to mostly be rocking ~6-9k people/km².
    - idiotsecant 5y ago
      I might be the only one but I strongly prefer grid-layout cities to these winding suburb road layouts anyhow. When your city is a grid you can make street names mean something and a person can navigate from place to place easily and have an intuitive idea of how far away something is, both without a cellphone.
      - toofy 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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ashtonkem 5y ago
Critically the initial cost is born by developers and higher levels of government, either out of profits or general tax receipts. It’s when the maintenance comes due that the problems start, as the local municipalities have less ability to levy the taxes needed to maintain this infrastructure. This is particularly rough because money is extremely moveable at the local level as people move to nearby towns for lower taxes, and big box stores pit municipalities against each other for tax breaks.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

The problem boils down to this: we've vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We've paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt/gravel, but they got paved because it's a sign your neighborhood has "made it." It's a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50's, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that. Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes? If we hadn't allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we'd have neighborhoods with dirt/gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc. Instead we have a country where we're slaves to cars.

rexreed 5y ago
Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  Roman roads were built with extremely robust foundations below which required very large amounts of labor to put in place.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    We have excavators, bulldozers, graders, etc, we don't need to use slaves to hand-dig road foundations.
- op00to 5y ago
  The Roman roads that last a long time are outliers. Most Roman roads are long gone.
- mitigating 5y ago
  Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it dangerous? There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.
  - warning26 5y ago
    Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature. It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot faster!
    - rexreed 5y ago
      Indeed, that's the core of the argument made in this article here (from 2009) which is arguing for a return to cobbles / bricks for Georgetown: https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-some-streets-to-revert-to-cobblestones/ https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-...
      - mark-r 5y ago
        The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones. Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.
    - prawn 5y ago
      I'm with you on the speed reduction. An urban planner friend talks about how you're best motivating a speed limit by the environment (tighter road, bends, etc) rather than a literal limit and threat of fine. But how would cyclists fare on cobblestones, especially if you were talking about suburban streets with kids playing, bikes going around, etc?
      - TulliusCicero 5y ago
- Naga 5y ago
  I'm assuming you're speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn't. I don't know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven't) and they were not affected as much by freeze/thaw cycles as North American roads are. My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I've seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there's physically less roads.
  - rexreed 5y ago
    Yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's an interesting thought exercise. For the high traffic streets where there is high speed and also lots of heavy traffic, for sure, asphalt dominates for many good reasons. But for the problems this article discusses for smaller cities where their population has moved to suburbs and exurbs and where the commercial centers have similarly moved out of city core, perhaps the more durable approach to cobbles (or brick) might be an interesting way to address ongoing maintenance challenges. It's mostly a thought exercise, but an interesting one.
- occz 5y ago
  The roman roads didn't have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.
acdha 5y ago
The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like condos have something of a “hasn’t made it” stigma for a lot of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of inefficient land use. Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.
- subroutine 5y ago
  Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only exacerbates the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surfac...
  - acdha 5y ago
    > Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that I did not restrict it to commuting — designing around car-only transportation means that almost every common activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people famously underestimate the amount of time they spend driving, looking for parking, etc. — usually “a 20 minute drive” means “25 minutes if you exceed the speed limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and parking right in front”. If you start measuring that, you realize how much time people spend on things like unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single purpose errands in addition to commuting. > So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built Definitely — and one big factor for this is that single-occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to “defeat” traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage so conditions usually only improve for a few months after opening.
aperson_hello 5y ago
To be fair, the "SUVs" that are being sold are effectively the same as station wagons of the past (but smaller and with better gas mileage). Hopefully self-driving cars will get us out of this pit of car-centric infrastructure, but that's a solution that's been a few years out for the past decade.
- plorg 5y ago
  Can you outline how this is supposed to free us from car-centric infrastructure? Unless it's coupled with style kind of Uber-subscription dystopia we would still need room to park all of these vehicles. While downtown parking can be a problem, garages aren't, and neither of these problems is on there scale of the larger infrastructure problems. The biggest problems with car-centric infrastructure are that they require a huge amount of ever-larger roads to funnel people (in cars) often tens of miles to do anything. Even in the rent-a-taxi scenario you would still need these roads, which would probably need more maintenance, not less. And all of that sprawl has knock-on effects as roads create divisions in communities, and low-density housing, enabled by car infrastructure, means you have and know fewer neighbors.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    At least the Uber-style infrastructure doesn't require oversizing everything. Even if my car is used 90% of the time for commuting by myself, it has to be big enough for the other 10% of the time when I'm taking the family and our luggage.
mitigating 5y ago
This might be ideal for side roads leading to a few houses but if it's major parts of a town aren't you just move the cost of roads somewhere else? i.e. "I hope you can afford a truck, SUV, or constant repairs to your suspensions/tires"
mark-r 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that if a bridge collapses underneath you, you're just as likely to die in a SUV as in a sedan.
- mark-r 5y ago
  For anyone who thinks I might be being facetious, I live in Minneapolis where there was an actual bridge collapse that killed people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge#Collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...
TulliusCicero 5y ago
I think it's fine roads are paved. It's just that said roads are wider and effectively longer to service the same number of people, and this is due to zoning and the way property tax is handled.

refurb 5y ago

Strongtowns is an internet phenomenon (ask a normal person if they’ve heard of Strongtowns). Small towns are shrinking (and large ones, see Detroit). No surprise here. It’s a trend that started 20 years ago and seems to be reversing due to housing prices and WFH. Strongtowns is a day late and a dollar short.

jackcosgrove 5y ago
Downstate Illinois has been in decline for fifty years. The climate is harsh, agriculture requires far fewer workers, light industry departed, and like upstate New York the region is given short shrift by a metro-dominated state government. Urban planning may be a factor but smart planning could not have overcome the headwinds.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  > The climate is harsh Doesn't this seem like a fatal issue right there? Given that Americans are free to move anywhere in the US, I would expect a general trend towards places that are more comfortable to live. Population growth can cover up a lot emigration, but the era of large families is over. Cities can still draw people with cultural significance, but what is the draw of Galesburg IL? Even for people that like small towns, there are plenty of small towns farther south with better weather.
  - analog31 5y ago
    And farther north. Greetings from wisconsin.
  - Kon-Peki 5y ago
    > what is the draw of Galesburg IL? There are two liberal arts colleges in the Galesburg “metro” area that draw both students and faculty from elsewhere (ps - the big one has a special 5-year 2-campus 2-diploma engineering program gives you a BA from them as well as, for example, a CS degree from UIUC [1]). The student population and their locations support a “downtown” that no city of that size and location would otherwise be able to support and therefore likely draws a lot of the rural population for entertainment. We pass through there a few times a year on the way to our favorite camping spot. I’d say their biggest problem and much of the cause of the sprawl-style development is that there is a bypass road on the north side of the city built nearly to interstate standards, complete with on-ramps and off-ramps. But it is flagged as both a US highway and a state highway so the chance that Galesburg has any control over it at all is pretty close to 0. [1] https://www.knox.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/engineering https://www.knox.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/engineering

Retric 5y ago

> Initially it’s not so bad This assumes it’s significantly cheaper to build new roads than to rebuild them which seems false on the surface. It could be that replacing more roads at the same time would drive down costs. If replacing ~600’ of roads is 600$/foot how about replacing 10 miles of roads?

rout39574 5y ago
Roads are initially built with the promise of future returns in mind. These estimates of future returns tend to be affected by developers, who are acting to encourage the approval of development projects. Rebuilding projects are contemplated in the shadow of actual returns, which are harder to lie about.
- pstoll 5y ago
  > Roads are initially built with the promise of future returns in mind. Roads are like startups! We should get VCs in on the action.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    If a road could get a cut of all attached business's revenue, and revenues shifted back towards small businesses (i.e. away from mega corps), I could see private roads being a boon and lawsuits forcing regular, quality maintenance. In practice, though, I'm sure it would get muddy quick.
    - kbenson 5y ago
      > I'm sure it would get muddy quick. I see what you did there...
matkoniecz 5y ago
Maybe it is caused by rising standards and rising human labor costs? There are many stories where rebuilding or just renovation of a bridge was vastly more expensive than constructing it 50 or 100 years ago (yes, obviously after adjusting for inflation).

tomohawk 5y ago

What Strong Towns hasn't figured out, but which is obvious to everyone else, is that cities have really bad failure modes. Unfixable failure modes. The people running the cities run them into the ground by applying more and more gold plating to the services they provide, making sure to lard the contracts for their friends who keep them elected, and pursuing their luxury beliefs through unworkable policies. Eventually it all collapses and is irretrievable. Then they whine about being underfunded. If only they had more money, they could make their luxury beliefs work. People move out of cities because they do not feel safe, and the services suck. It's really the only option they have, since the people running the cities are completely unaccountable.

eldavido 5y ago
I think this is an insightful comment and I'm sorry to see it get downvoted. I live in a large condo building. It has its pros and cons. It's great, in theory--750-1000 people pooling their expertise and funds to tackle infrastructure issues. Great recent example: we fixed a sewer lateral (the pipe that connects to the sewer under the building). Three of them, total cost 200k. Sounds a lot until you realize we spread it across ~350 units (600/unit), which is roughly 1/10th what a typical suburban homeowner would pay for the same thing. The other side of the coin is that, in larger political structures, governance REALLY matters. You can end up with a relatively well-run condo like mine, or a large, wasteful organization that squanders obscene sums on pet projects and outright corruption. Many people don't even know this, but SF has been under federal investigation for high-level corruption in the public works department for over a year [1]. The thrust of your comment is correct. Large cities attract large amounts of money, much of which gets wasted, or ends up lining pockets in hard, or even "soft" corruption, with jobs and contracts steered to friends (qualified or not) via patronage networks. What I think you miss though, is that there's a middle ground. You don't have to be either extreme drive-everywhere suburbia, or a giant mega-city like Beijing or New York. My home town, Homewood, IL, is a nice, walkable city of about 20,000, with a nice downtown, plenty to do, and relatively honest (if not always saintly) government. The mid-size towns and suburbs can do a lot more to encourage the kind of urbanism the author calls for. Getting explicit about cultivating nice, walkable downtowns is a start. Many, including Homewood, don't, because "development" and "jobs" are seen as unqualified goods, without thinking about the cost side of the equation (roads, plumbing, etc required to service this stuff). I've written for Strong Towns. What they get most right is that (1) LAND is the scare resource in a town, and (2) cities should explicitly encourage uses that lead to the highest taxable value of that land. Big box retail isn't this. Denser housing and retail districts (I own one of these buildings), is. The numbers on this are simple and don't lie. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Mohammed-Nuru-to-settle-federal-fraud-case-16710600.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Mohammed-Nuru-to-sett...

xyzzyz 5y ago

Can you name one city that did not escape it, and was drowned in infrastructure costs? Galesburg is certainly not one of them, given how roads constitute a small fraction of its spending.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
That's not really how this works. If you don't have enough money to adequately maintain your infrastructure, you'll just inadequately maintain it instead. You won't plow ahead and spend the ideal amount of money anyway, you just let things kind of go to crap. So the failure state to look for isn't a city going into massive debt as it drastically outspends its revenues year after year, it's a city with infrastructure that's decaying and falling apart because they don't have enough money to take care of it. Then that's the thing that can have ripple effects on the local economy and population.

trinovantes 5y ago

Many suburban cities in Canada like Mississauga are also experiencing this. They've finally ran out of land to sell so they started raising property taxes and instituted levies https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mississauga-a-cautionary-tale-as-cities-sprawl-out-across-southern/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mississauga-a...

defaultname 5y ago
Mississauga has a density of 2467 people per square kilometer. Mississauga neighbourhoods look like this- https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5675623,-79.740886,916m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5675623,-79.740886,916m/data=... That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get. Mississauga had to raise property taxes somewhat -- still extremely competitive -- as a revenue source dried up. But those new neighbourhoods all easily pay for themselves in property taxes. Nonetheless, loads of really silly narrative comes out of Toronto writers, still foreboding this dire scenario that they've been pitching for well over a decade. It's a bit farcical at this point.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get. You can get a little bit denser by going full street grid--Chicago's single family home districts look to mostly be rocking ~6-9k people/km².
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    I might be the only one but I strongly prefer grid-layout cities to these winding suburb road layouts anyhow. When your city is a grid you can make street names mean something and a person can navigate from place to place easily and have an intuitive idea of how far away something is, both without a cellphone.
    - toofy 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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ashtonkem 5y ago

Critically the initial cost is born by developers and higher levels of government, either out of profits or general tax receipts. It’s when the maintenance comes due that the problems start, as the local municipalities have less ability to levy the taxes needed to maintain this infrastructure. This is particularly rough because money is extremely moveable at the local level as people move to nearby towns for lower taxes, and big box stores pit municipalities against each other for tax breaks.