7 ms·

Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing

by seoaeu 4y ago

Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process)

yadaeno 4y ago
And its one of the best investments the government ever made. 600% ROI transforming the American economy, connecting communities. The amount of displacement caused by a national rail system or bike lanes would be minuscule in comparison but have a similar impact. Politics nowadays seems too risk averse to pull large infra projects. Sometimes you have demolish some homes but nobody is brave enough to make these tough decisions anymore. https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/happy-60th-birthday-interstate-highway-system/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/ha...
- kbenson 4y ago
  It's possible there are far more negative externalities than you're accounting for. What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race? How negatively has that effected the nation, or even just the economy, over decades? It's important to note that the argument is not as simple as "highways or no highways", but more nuanced, as perhaps 10% harder to accomplish yields a 50% reduction in problems. Finding that sane middle ground is hard, but we should be careful not to reduce the problem to such simplicity that the many of the important parts of the solution are no longer even assessed.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    >>What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race? I don't see improvements in the physical economy appreciably increasing inequality. Most inequality seems to step from housing scarcity driving up housing costs. [1] (see Figure 3) Improvements in transportation could even mitigate this sort of inequality by overcoming spatial misallocations caused by housing scarcity in the highest productivity zones. [2] [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
    - kbenson 4y ago
      The context you're missing, which is being alluded to in many comments, is that when the highways were put in place and they chose to put them through cities instead of around them politicians and planners had to choose where they went and what neighborhoods they bisected and displaced. Which neighborhoods do you think bore the brunt of that problem? Where do you think they decided to put the highways that made it harder to reach different parts of the city, by relegating city traffic to specific overpasses and underpasses? Class and race had a lot to do with it in many cases. You've possibly heard of "the wrong side of the tracks". That statement could be considered even more accurate in many modern context if stated as "the wrong side of the highway". The interesting part is why it's apt though, which is what we're talking about. For one take on this, see https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...
      - overlordalex 4y ago
        > highways that made it harder to reach different parts of the city One blatant example of exclusionary infrastructure was Robert Moses building bridges in New York that were too low for busses to pass under, in order to discourage travel to his parks and beaches. I can also recommend the Well There's Your Problem podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Highways certainly boost ROI, but there's devil in the details. The interstates that linked up major cities certainly boosted investment. But Europe also built a network of such highways; the major difference is that they built their system to go mostly around cities, whereas the US just plowed them straight through cities. (The reasoning being that you don't really want to subject traffic passing through to high levels of commuter congestion, you want to minimize impacts to high concentrations of people and businesses, land acquisition is cheaper outside cities than inside, etc.) Because they did not impact nearly as many people to the same degree, Europe didn't experience the same overcorrection in terms of public process. (There is NIMBY-ism in Europe, to be sure, but they are definitely more successful at actually building things and keeping costs low compared to the US.) There is also the subject of diminishing returns. Cutting travel time between the coasts from weeks to days is certainly a huge return on investment. Today most expansion projects look like "let's cut 30 seconds of waiting at this traffic light" at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars at times. The report you linked is from ASCE, which is not exactly a neutral party for infrastructure development. Here's a critique of an earlier report from the same organization: > Consider the following from the report: > ASCE estimated the "costs to households and businesses" from transportation deficiencies in 2010 to be $130 billion. (page 3) > ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to businesses will be $430 billion by 2020. (page 5) > ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to households will be $482 billion by 2020. (page 5) > If you add these together, the total cost to households and businesses is $1.042 trillion. Well, ASCE states that to reach "minimum tolerable conditions" (a pretty sad standard) would take an investment of $220 billion annually. Over 10 years, that's $2.2 trillion. Yeah, you read that right. The American Society of Civil Engineers wrote a report suggesting that over the next decade we spend $2.2 trillion so we can save $1.0 trillion.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  It's kind of hilarious that that's your takeaway from this. Where I live in Dallas, all of downtown is walled off by elevated and sunken highways with only one or two bridges across them, all but guaranteeing adjacent neighborhoods are completely cut off for pedestrians, to prevent them from ever becoming larger communities. There was no reason for this whatsoever except the east, south, and west side neighborhoods were all predominantly black and planners wanted to keep them out. We're still suffering from these decisions today, with all manner of proposal to make the area walkable dead in the water due to the expense that would be entailed by rerouting or rebuilding highways. There is no return on investment anyone got from this that couldn't have been gotten from highways moved another mile or two away into the purely industrial districts where they wouldn't have disrupted anybody.
- mindslight 4y ago
  Have you ever visited an urban area that has been cut up by a highway? I've never seen one that wasn't a dodgy neglected hellhole, even in traditionally denser east coast cities. The affected communities end up disconnected rather than connected to elsewhere, and the outlying areas that do end up being connected could just as well have been connected by a highway routed around the urban area. There's an argument to be made for cut and cover construction and then putting in a park or newer homes or something, but surface highways through cities are not a goal to strive for.
- dionidium 4y ago
  The Interstates between cities are a modern marvel whose impact can barely be overstated; the Interstates within cities were an unnecessary, destructive mistake.
  - xienze 4y ago
    Are interstates just supposed to end once you reach a city, and in order to continue on you’re supposed to navigate a series of roads that take you to the other edge of town, where the interstate starts again? Seems less than ideal.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Going around is an option.
    - dionidium 4y ago
      We could have built the interstates around urban cores and connected them to existing thoroughfares within cities. Most of our urban cores have expanded out to where those highways would have been built then, anyway. There was no need to go right through existing neighborhoods.
    - Anarch157a 4y ago
      Every city in the path of an Interstate should have a ring road around it, instead of cutting the city in two or more parts. Basically, a giant roundabout.
    - jdsully 4y ago
      This is traditionally accomplished with ring roads that go around the city. Take Minneapolis for example, you'd be crazy to take I-94 through the heart of the city. If your driving through on your way out west your going to take the 694 bypass.
      - eropple 4y ago
        It is, but less so on the East Coast. Not enough to make the point irrelevant, but enough to complicate the generality some. Like, if you're going north from southern New England, for example, you're probably taking I-93 straight through the city. Which is a lot better than it used to be thanks to the Big Dig (which gets so much bad press but really is a great example of an infrastructure project that did, eventually, work), but is still not pleasant, and it's because taking 95 (or, further out, 495) all-the-way-around is as significant detour.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Parent’s comment stayed neutral, but the homes and area that were destroyed weren’t from some random population. In almost every cases it’s poorer and/or minority neighborhoods that were run over and/or separated from the rest of the town by a huge highway, with redlining making sure they don’t come back the other side. “connecting communities” only applies to some specific flavor of communities, and the ROI mostly benefited these specific groups as well.
- ramblenode 4y ago
  > And its one of the best investments the government ever made. I don't think the experiment is over. The benefits of a highway-based society have been reaped during a period of 1) cheap fossil fuel energy and 2) cheap land. Both of these are becoming more scarce which threatens to tip the ROI negative. Strongtowns.org has done some research that most American cities and suburbs will be facing insolvency in coming years because their revenue is insufficient to cover the costs of a road-based infrastructure (including water and power lines) that scales quadratically. To say that highways have been a good investment you would need to compare them with alternatives and examine their opportunity cost. A major problem with car transport is that it has worse scaling than most public transport: each household must personally invest in a car, garage, and fuel; private businesses must invest in parking, which drives up real estate prices; each car decreases the throughput of the roadway, requiring more roads to handle more cars--and when you run out of space for roadway then commute times increase. With most aspects of car transport you never get better than linear scaling. So the real question is: if you took all the money that has been spent on cars, roadways, fuel, repairs, etc. would it have been better spent on trains, buses, or some hybrid system?
- huimang 4y ago
  It's brave now to deliberately choose to route infrastructure through neighborhoods that have minorities living in them? I think with today's politicians it's more of an issue of credit. These projects take a very long time, piss off people until they're done, and there's a high chance a different politician will be in the office at that time and claim credit.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
It's interesting that the pendulum has swung, and yet it's still mainly impacting the same group of people.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  That's because these marginalized people generally still have no political power.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Unfortunately, the dependence on enforcement from an adversarial legal system means that you need to be able to afford a lawyer. You're only guaranteed one for a defense, and even then public legal aid is barely keeping it together with the workload.
jvanderbot 4y ago
Imagine playing sim city, except you don't get terrain shaping, bulldozer, or rezoning.
- usrn 4y ago
  OpenTTD simulates some of this. If you piss of localities they stop letting you do certain things (including bulldozing, building new infrastructure etc.)
- seoaeu 4y ago
  The difference is that SimCity is a game, while real life city planning has material impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods. It shouldn’t be easy to demolish someone’s home or to establish a heavy industrial zone near a residential area just because the folks in charge feel like it. Conversely, if there’s an actually justifiable reason to seize property or rezone an area, that shouldn’t be impossible either
  - solveit 4y ago
    I have a justifiable reason, you have a respectable argument, they just feel like it. What I'm saying, of course, is that you're obviously right but our problem isn't because anyone disagrees with your position, but because we can't agree on what constitutes a justifiable reason in individual cases.
- mindslight 4y ago
  Maybe this is the real explanation for why we're presently being overrun by churches.
nobody9999 4y ago
>Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process) Absolutely. In fact, I'd like to take a moment and give a heartfelt "fuck you!" to Robert Moses[0]. I don't believe in an afterlife, but in his case, I hope he spends eternity in agony as repayment for all the suffering he caused. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

by seoaeu 4y ago

yadaeno 4y ago

And its one of the best investments the government ever made. 600% ROI transforming the American economy, connecting communities. The amount of displacement caused by a national rail system or bike lanes would be minuscule in comparison but have a similar impact. Politics nowadays seems too risk averse to pull large infra projects. Sometimes you have demolish some homes but nobody is brave enough to make these tough decisions anymore. https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/happy-60th-birthday-interstate-highway-system/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/ha...

kbenson 4y ago
It's possible there are far more negative externalities than you're accounting for. What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race? How negatively has that effected the nation, or even just the economy, over decades? It's important to note that the argument is not as simple as "highways or no highways", but more nuanced, as perhaps 10% harder to accomplish yields a 50% reduction in problems. Finding that sane middle ground is hard, but we should be careful not to reduce the problem to such simplicity that the many of the important parts of the solution are no longer even assessed.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  >>What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race? I don't see improvements in the physical economy appreciably increasing inequality. Most inequality seems to step from housing scarcity driving up housing costs. [1] (see Figure 3) Improvements in transportation could even mitigate this sort of inequality by overcoming spatial misallocations caused by housing scarcity in the highest productivity zones. [2] [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
  - kbenson 4y ago
    The context you're missing, which is being alluded to in many comments, is that when the highways were put in place and they chose to put them through cities instead of around them politicians and planners had to choose where they went and what neighborhoods they bisected and displaced. Which neighborhoods do you think bore the brunt of that problem? Where do you think they decided to put the highways that made it harder to reach different parts of the city, by relegating city traffic to specific overpasses and underpasses? Class and race had a lot to do with it in many cases. You've possibly heard of "the wrong side of the tracks". That statement could be considered even more accurate in many modern context if stated as "the wrong side of the highway". The interesting part is why it's apt though, which is what we're talking about. For one take on this, see https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...
    - overlordalex 4y ago
      > highways that made it harder to reach different parts of the city One blatant example of exclusionary infrastructure was Robert Moses building bridges in New York that were too low for busses to pass under, in order to discourage travel to his parks and beaches. I can also recommend the Well There's Your Problem podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc
bobthepanda 4y ago
Highways certainly boost ROI, but there's devil in the details. The interstates that linked up major cities certainly boosted investment. But Europe also built a network of such highways; the major difference is that they built their system to go mostly around cities, whereas the US just plowed them straight through cities. (The reasoning being that you don't really want to subject traffic passing through to high levels of commuter congestion, you want to minimize impacts to high concentrations of people and businesses, land acquisition is cheaper outside cities than inside, etc.) Because they did not impact nearly as many people to the same degree, Europe didn't experience the same overcorrection in terms of public process. (There is NIMBY-ism in Europe, to be sure, but they are definitely more successful at actually building things and keeping costs low compared to the US.) There is also the subject of diminishing returns. Cutting travel time between the coasts from weeks to days is certainly a huge return on investment. Today most expansion projects look like "let's cut 30 seconds of waiting at this traffic light" at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars at times. The report you linked is from ASCE, which is not exactly a neutral party for infrastructure development. Here's a critique of an earlier report from the same organization: > Consider the following from the report: > ASCE estimated the "costs to households and businesses" from transportation deficiencies in 2010 to be $130 billion. (page 3) > ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to businesses will be $430 billion by 2020. (page 5) > ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to households will be $482 billion by 2020. (page 5) > If you add these together, the total cost to households and businesses is $1.042 trillion. Well, ASCE states that to reach "minimum tolerable conditions" (a pretty sad standard) would take an investment of $220 billion annually. Over 10 years, that's $2.2 trillion. Yeah, you read that right. The American Society of Civil Engineers wrote a report suggesting that over the next decade we spend $2.2 trillion so we can save $1.0 trillion.
nonameiguess 4y ago
It's kind of hilarious that that's your takeaway from this. Where I live in Dallas, all of downtown is walled off by elevated and sunken highways with only one or two bridges across them, all but guaranteeing adjacent neighborhoods are completely cut off for pedestrians, to prevent them from ever becoming larger communities. There was no reason for this whatsoever except the east, south, and west side neighborhoods were all predominantly black and planners wanted to keep them out. We're still suffering from these decisions today, with all manner of proposal to make the area walkable dead in the water due to the expense that would be entailed by rerouting or rebuilding highways. There is no return on investment anyone got from this that couldn't have been gotten from highways moved another mile or two away into the purely industrial districts where they wouldn't have disrupted anybody.
mindslight 4y ago
Have you ever visited an urban area that has been cut up by a highway? I've never seen one that wasn't a dodgy neglected hellhole, even in traditionally denser east coast cities. The affected communities end up disconnected rather than connected to elsewhere, and the outlying areas that do end up being connected could just as well have been connected by a highway routed around the urban area. There's an argument to be made for cut and cover construction and then putting in a park or newer homes or something, but surface highways through cities are not a goal to strive for.
dionidium 4y ago
The Interstates between cities are a modern marvel whose impact can barely be overstated; the Interstates within cities were an unnecessary, destructive mistake.
- xienze 4y ago
  Are interstates just supposed to end once you reach a city, and in order to continue on you’re supposed to navigate a series of roads that take you to the other edge of town, where the interstate starts again? Seems less than ideal.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Going around is an option.
  - dionidium 4y ago
    We could have built the interstates around urban cores and connected them to existing thoroughfares within cities. Most of our urban cores have expanded out to where those highways would have been built then, anyway. There was no need to go right through existing neighborhoods.
  - Anarch157a 4y ago
    Every city in the path of an Interstate should have a ring road around it, instead of cutting the city in two or more parts. Basically, a giant roundabout.
  - jdsully 4y ago
    This is traditionally accomplished with ring roads that go around the city. Take Minneapolis for example, you'd be crazy to take I-94 through the heart of the city. If your driving through on your way out west your going to take the 694 bypass.
    - eropple 4y ago
      It is, but less so on the East Coast. Not enough to make the point irrelevant, but enough to complicate the generality some. Like, if you're going north from southern New England, for example, you're probably taking I-93 straight through the city. Which is a lot better than it used to be thanks to the Big Dig (which gets so much bad press but really is a great example of an infrastructure project that did, eventually, work), but is still not pleasant, and it's because taking 95 (or, further out, 495) all-the-way-around is as significant detour.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Parent’s comment stayed neutral, but the homes and area that were destroyed weren’t from some random population. In almost every cases it’s poorer and/or minority neighborhoods that were run over and/or separated from the rest of the town by a huge highway, with redlining making sure they don’t come back the other side. “connecting communities” only applies to some specific flavor of communities, and the ROI mostly benefited these specific groups as well.
ramblenode 4y ago
> And its one of the best investments the government ever made. I don't think the experiment is over. The benefits of a highway-based society have been reaped during a period of 1) cheap fossil fuel energy and 2) cheap land. Both of these are becoming more scarce which threatens to tip the ROI negative. Strongtowns.org has done some research that most American cities and suburbs will be facing insolvency in coming years because their revenue is insufficient to cover the costs of a road-based infrastructure (including water and power lines) that scales quadratically. To say that highways have been a good investment you would need to compare them with alternatives and examine their opportunity cost. A major problem with car transport is that it has worse scaling than most public transport: each household must personally invest in a car, garage, and fuel; private businesses must invest in parking, which drives up real estate prices; each car decreases the throughput of the roadway, requiring more roads to handle more cars--and when you run out of space for roadway then commute times increase. With most aspects of car transport you never get better than linear scaling. So the real question is: if you took all the money that has been spent on cars, roadways, fuel, repairs, etc. would it have been better spent on trains, buses, or some hybrid system?
huimang 4y ago
It's brave now to deliberately choose to route infrastructure through neighborhoods that have minorities living in them? I think with today's politicians it's more of an issue of credit. These projects take a very long time, piss off people until they're done, and there's a high chance a different politician will be in the office at that time and claim credit.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

It's interesting that the pendulum has swung, and yet it's still mainly impacting the same group of people.

mrguyorama 4y ago
That's because these marginalized people generally still have no political power.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Unfortunately, the dependence on enforcement from an adversarial legal system means that you need to be able to afford a lawyer. You're only guaranteed one for a defense, and even then public legal aid is barely keeping it together with the workload.

jvanderbot 4y ago

Imagine playing sim city, except you don't get terrain shaping, bulldozer, or rezoning.

usrn 4y ago
OpenTTD simulates some of this. If you piss of localities they stop letting you do certain things (including bulldozing, building new infrastructure etc.)
seoaeu 4y ago
The difference is that SimCity is a game, while real life city planning has material impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods. It shouldn’t be easy to demolish someone’s home or to establish a heavy industrial zone near a residential area just because the folks in charge feel like it. Conversely, if there’s an actually justifiable reason to seize property or rezone an area, that shouldn’t be impossible either
- solveit 4y ago
  I have a justifiable reason, you have a respectable argument, they just feel like it. What I'm saying, of course, is that you're obviously right but our problem isn't because anyone disagrees with your position, but because we can't agree on what constitutes a justifiable reason in individual cases.
mindslight 4y ago
Maybe this is the real explanation for why we're presently being overrun by churches.

nobody9999 4y ago

>Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process) Absolutely. In fact, I'd like to take a moment and give a heartfelt "fuck you!" to Robert Moses[0]. I don't believe in an afterlife, but in his case, I hope he spends eternity in agony as repayment for all the suffering he caused. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses