10 ms·

unsurprisingly, London is all for the better for these projects having been canned in the 60's - very few massive roads cutting up neigbourhoods, and helped avo

unsurprisingly, London is all for the better for these projects having been canned in the 60's - very few massive roads cutting up neigbourhoods, and helped avoid the massive tipping into redesigning cities for single/low occupancy cars. it's so successful, that in 2022, 46% of households in greater London have *zero* cars. if you're curious what it what have looked like, go for a walk around Notting Hill and see how Westway has damaged the human environment and walkability. so, yay. obligatory jay foreman video on the topic: https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY

geogra4 5y ago
American cities were utterly destroyed by these kinds of projects.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  There's no winning. You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. My pet favorite solution is more park & ride transition points on the outskirts and light rail in the dense areas but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. As much as I hate the NIMBYs for insisting on violating other people's property rights you at least have to give them +1 for consistency. Looking back with hindsight we'd probably be better off if we had just built all the urban highways and rail lines (and other transit infrastructure projects) that have been seriously considered over the years.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    IDK where you live, but I live in a country with a lot of trams and trains (the Czech Republic), and the NIMBYs attack absolutely everything. It may take decades to overcome their resistance. One example of many: in the city I was born (Ostrava), there is a tram line planned since the 1990s (on the chance that anyone knows Ostrava here: Poruba VIII. obvod). That is not a very beautiful neighbourhood, rather a standard Communist high-rise zone with a lot of loud car and bus traffic through the main arteries. But the NIMBYs are absolutely relentless in attacking the tram project and anything even slightly connected (e.g. relocation of gas lines) in courts.
  - scratcheee 5y ago
    Rail lines have more than 10x the throughput though, so you need vastly less of them to do vastly more work. A city with enough roads for 100% car usage is approaching not being a city anymore, just an unending suburban hellscape, but a city with barely any roads and more rail than it really needs can still be a beautiful city. To add to that, underground railways exist in many cities, but underground road networks effectively don't. The throughput by volume dug out the ground is viable for a rail service, its totally non-viable to bury an equivalent throughput 20 lane highway underground.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting Here’s a thought experiment for you. You are on foot, perhaps with a kid in a stroller, perhaps with a dog on a leash, perhaps an armful of groceries. It is a gorgeous day for a walk. You have multiple destinations on the other side of several transit arteries: * a subway that passes under city streets with sidewalks, if you’re lucky maybe it goes under a park that’s between you and your destination * a light rail line with trains passing every few minutes, clearly visible, with lots of time in between to cross the tracks, if you’re lucky maybe the area around the line has some pretty plants and trees * an elevated highway with cars zooming along the feeder roads in its shadow, if you’re lucky there’s a crosswalk with pedestrian lights * a ground-level highway, 8-14 lanes of constant high speed traffic in both directions, if you are very lucky there is a pedestrian overpass no more than 2-3 blocks out of your way and you’ll only be inhaling exhaust for a little while Which one of these would you rather cross? Which one of these feels like an integrated part of the neighborhood, which ones feel like a raw open wound in the city when you try to cross them on foot?
  - Angostura 5y ago
    > You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. The green belt policy around London where you were prevented from developing was quite good at preventing sprawl for decades.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Similar policies in Oregon now, which force increased density in existing (orm as an option, brand new) urban areas, rather than just spreading. Or at least, there were a decade ago. I hope they've survived.
  - brimble 5y ago
    > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Huh? Don't highways enable sprawl? The brand new neighborhood built way out "in the country" (not for long...) next to the brand new highway in Yates' Revolutionary Road comes to mind.
  - harg 5y ago
    > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Highways create urban sprawl, they don't prevent it. > the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. But a subway/tram line is completely different from a highway. Trains can move an order of magnitude more people/stuff, don't result in local air pollution, don't create a lot of noise, don't result in road accidents that kill people and destroy property. And that's even before you realise that a subway is underground so you don't need to tear apart neighborhoods to build them and you basically wouldn't know it's there.
petercooper 5y ago
I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit - the two Westfields are perhaps the best options there right now, and those are shopping centres not intended for such use and, ironically, located right next to the expressway projects that did happen (the Westway and the A12 respectively). Maybe CrossRail will help? Park and ride from Abbey Wood, perhaps? I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now.
- bananapub 5y ago
  > I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit encouraging more cars into the center is explicitly an anti-goal, so not sure why you wish these projects had been built? yes there should be more park and ride on the outskirts, but Stratford isn't really outskirts anymore, and wasting lots of land for parking in Stratford or White City instead of homes also seems a silly waste of their good connectedness. > I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now. I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher. The trouble with public transport advocacy is that it so often relies on the stick rather than the carrot as the main incentive. The better solution is almost always to provide attractive public transport options. If you can do that then people will use them anyway. If you don't do that then people will do what you don't want instead unless you totally prohibit it. And if you prohibit it then maybe they won't come at all. The catch is that providing good public transport is a challenge even in densely populated areas and for long distance travel. Our biggest cities also tend to be very old and that means layouts that are far from ideal for running an efficient public transport network. The other catch is that good public transport is never going to be cost-effective in smaller towns and rural areas. So doing it would require a massive commitment from both local and wider government and in the UK we don't have that. Politicians tend to be very good at talking about grand ideas but no-one is willing to say "We need to put your taxes up 5% to subsidise loss-making transport infrastructure so there's a sensible alternative to cars for everyone who doesn't live in one of the biggest cities." This is why I'm not sure emphasizing public transport is the right long term policy here. Better infrastructure to support small-scale private transport seems a more promising direction to look -- bikes, e-scooters, future electric vehicles designed for one or two passengers and light baggage, etc.
pjc50 5y ago
See also Glasgow, where the megaproject did happen and the American-style M8 terminates directly in the center of the city. It's never quite caught up with good public transport options. I'd suggest trams if the massive cost and time overruns of the Edinburgh scheme hadn't put me off. (There _is_ a subway in Glasgow, but due to tunneling difficulties and its age the trains are unusually small. It feels like a 2/3 scale model of the London Underground)
- beardyw 5y ago
  I have distant memories of an on ramp coming down on the right hand / fast lane side. Am I right?
  - ilikejam 5y ago
    Yep. Charing Cross exit, J18 is on the right side.
choeger 5y ago
You're celebrating the fact that people don't own something that they probably (judging by looking at other people) would find quite useful. Many, many people pay a lot of money every month to own their own private mode of transportation. So are these 46% really voluntarily abstaining or are they forced into abstinence? I know that many, especially young, childless, people think they don't need a car. I know several such people that happily pay (and can afford to) quite a steep price for leaving their city, either by train, plane, or rental car. But they're not typical, I'd say. In my case, our family car is moved only very little, say 10000km/a. There are some use cases where a rental car or train tickets just don't cut it - we would pay double the price and still have longer travel and additional complications (mental load is a real thing for parents). Obviously, I am not driving through the city if I can avoid it. But every now and then I want to leave it/return to it. I consider ownership the best option here and I gladly pay for the parking space. So in conclusion, I think that every city should make it trivial to rent a parking space in some garage. People that don't own cars might benefit from such additional storage space as well. I also don't think it should be more expensive than renting a very simple apartment. But instead, cities try to cram more and more people with less and less space into the same buildings. And I would not be surprised if these road projects were designed with a much smaller and less densely populated city in mind.
- klelatti 5y ago
  This argument doesn’t take account of the impact on others of the thing that stays in your garage most of the time. The environmental impact of manufacturing it, of creating infrastructure to carry it etc. We should absolutely celebrate lower car ownership in cities and work towards making it a viable option for more people.
  - choeger 5y ago
    I don't buy the infrastructure, except for parking, it's needed for logistics anyways. the environmental impact of manufacture is a red herring as it's pretty much impossible to spend money without a similar impact.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

geogra4 5y ago

American cities were utterly destroyed by these kinds of projects.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
There's no winning. You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. My pet favorite solution is more park & ride transition points on the outskirts and light rail in the dense areas but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. As much as I hate the NIMBYs for insisting on violating other people's property rights you at least have to give them +1 for consistency. Looking back with hindsight we'd probably be better off if we had just built all the urban highways and rail lines (and other transit infrastructure projects) that have been seriously considered over the years.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  IDK where you live, but I live in a country with a lot of trams and trains (the Czech Republic), and the NIMBYs attack absolutely everything. It may take decades to overcome their resistance. One example of many: in the city I was born (Ostrava), there is a tram line planned since the 1990s (on the chance that anyone knows Ostrava here: Poruba VIII. obvod). That is not a very beautiful neighbourhood, rather a standard Communist high-rise zone with a lot of loud car and bus traffic through the main arteries. But the NIMBYs are absolutely relentless in attacking the tram project and anything even slightly connected (e.g. relocation of gas lines) in courts.
- scratcheee 5y ago
  Rail lines have more than 10x the throughput though, so you need vastly less of them to do vastly more work. A city with enough roads for 100% car usage is approaching not being a city anymore, just an unending suburban hellscape, but a city with barely any roads and more rail than it really needs can still be a beautiful city. To add to that, underground railways exist in many cities, but underground road networks effectively don't. The throughput by volume dug out the ground is viable for a rail service, its totally non-viable to bury an equivalent throughput 20 lane highway underground.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting Here’s a thought experiment for you. You are on foot, perhaps with a kid in a stroller, perhaps with a dog on a leash, perhaps an armful of groceries. It is a gorgeous day for a walk. You have multiple destinations on the other side of several transit arteries: * a subway that passes under city streets with sidewalks, if you’re lucky maybe it goes under a park that’s between you and your destination * a light rail line with trains passing every few minutes, clearly visible, with lots of time in between to cross the tracks, if you’re lucky maybe the area around the line has some pretty plants and trees * an elevated highway with cars zooming along the feeder roads in its shadow, if you’re lucky there’s a crosswalk with pedestrian lights * a ground-level highway, 8-14 lanes of constant high speed traffic in both directions, if you are very lucky there is a pedestrian overpass no more than 2-3 blocks out of your way and you’ll only be inhaling exhaust for a little while Which one of these would you rather cross? Which one of these feels like an integrated part of the neighborhood, which ones feel like a raw open wound in the city when you try to cross them on foot?
- Angostura 5y ago
  > You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. The green belt policy around London where you were prevented from developing was quite good at preventing sprawl for decades.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Similar policies in Oregon now, which force increased density in existing (orm as an option, brand new) urban areas, rather than just spreading. Or at least, there were a decade ago. I hope they've survived.
- brimble 5y ago
  > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Huh? Don't highways enable sprawl? The brand new neighborhood built way out "in the country" (not for long...) next to the brand new highway in Yates' Revolutionary Road comes to mind.
- harg 5y ago
  > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Highways create urban sprawl, they don't prevent it. > the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. But a subway/tram line is completely different from a highway. Trains can move an order of magnitude more people/stuff, don't result in local air pollution, don't create a lot of noise, don't result in road accidents that kill people and destroy property. And that's even before you realise that a subway is underground so you don't need to tear apart neighborhoods to build them and you basically wouldn't know it's there.

petercooper 5y ago

I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit - the two Westfields are perhaps the best options there right now, and those are shopping centres not intended for such use and, ironically, located right next to the expressway projects that did happen (the Westway and the A12 respectively). Maybe CrossRail will help? Park and ride from Abbey Wood, perhaps? I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now.

bananapub 5y ago
> I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit encouraging more cars into the center is explicitly an anti-goal, so not sure why you wish these projects had been built? yes there should be more park and ride on the outskirts, but Stratford isn't really outskirts anymore, and wasting lots of land for parking in Stratford or White City instead of homes also seems a silly waste of their good connectedness. > I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now. I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher. The trouble with public transport advocacy is that it so often relies on the stick rather than the carrot as the main incentive. The better solution is almost always to provide attractive public transport options. If you can do that then people will use them anyway. If you don't do that then people will do what you don't want instead unless you totally prohibit it. And if you prohibit it then maybe they won't come at all. The catch is that providing good public transport is a challenge even in densely populated areas and for long distance travel. Our biggest cities also tend to be very old and that means layouts that are far from ideal for running an efficient public transport network. The other catch is that good public transport is never going to be cost-effective in smaller towns and rural areas. So doing it would require a massive commitment from both local and wider government and in the UK we don't have that. Politicians tend to be very good at talking about grand ideas but no-one is willing to say "We need to put your taxes up 5% to subsidise loss-making transport infrastructure so there's a sensible alternative to cars for everyone who doesn't live in one of the biggest cities." This is why I'm not sure emphasizing public transport is the right long term policy here. Better infrastructure to support small-scale private transport seems a more promising direction to look -- bikes, e-scooters, future electric vehicles designed for one or two passengers and light baggage, etc.

pjc50 5y ago

See also Glasgow, where the megaproject did happen and the American-style M8 terminates directly in the center of the city. It's never quite caught up with good public transport options. I'd suggest trams if the massive cost and time overruns of the Edinburgh scheme hadn't put me off. (There _is_ a subway in Glasgow, but due to tunneling difficulties and its age the trains are unusually small. It feels like a 2/3 scale model of the London Underground)

beardyw 5y ago
I have distant memories of an on ramp coming down on the right hand / fast lane side. Am I right?
- ilikejam 5y ago
  Yep. Charing Cross exit, J18 is on the right side.

choeger 5y ago

You're celebrating the fact that people don't own something that they probably (judging by looking at other people) would find quite useful. Many, many people pay a lot of money every month to own their own private mode of transportation. So are these 46% really voluntarily abstaining or are they forced into abstinence? I know that many, especially young, childless, people think they don't need a car. I know several such people that happily pay (and can afford to) quite a steep price for leaving their city, either by train, plane, or rental car. But they're not typical, I'd say. In my case, our family car is moved only very little, say 10000km/a. There are some use cases where a rental car or train tickets just don't cut it - we would pay double the price and still have longer travel and additional complications (mental load is a real thing for parents). Obviously, I am not driving through the city if I can avoid it. But every now and then I want to leave it/return to it. I consider ownership the best option here and I gladly pay for the parking space. So in conclusion, I think that every city should make it trivial to rent a parking space in some garage. People that don't own cars might benefit from such additional storage space as well. I also don't think it should be more expensive than renting a very simple apartment. But instead, cities try to cram more and more people with less and less space into the same buildings. And I would not be surprised if these road projects were designed with a much smaller and less densely populated city in mind.

klelatti 5y ago
This argument doesn’t take account of the impact on others of the thing that stays in your garage most of the time. The environmental impact of manufacturing it, of creating infrastructure to carry it etc. We should absolutely celebrate lower car ownership in cities and work towards making it a viable option for more people.
- choeger 5y ago
  I don't buy the infrastructure, except for parking, it's needed for logistics anyways. the environmental impact of manufacture is a red herring as it's pretty much impossible to spend money without a similar impact.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago