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America can build; but America does not want to build, or at least a large portion of America doesn’t. And they try their darnedest to slow everyone else down.
by snowwrestler 4y ago
America can build; but America does not want to build, or at least a large portion of America doesn’t. And they try their darnedest to slow everyone else down.
And there may be a good reason for that. Consider this nugget from the article:
> The entire $160 million-per-mile road lane project, and the five years of gridlock it created, were justified by the promise of shaving one minute per mile off commute time for its users. The final indictment of the project was a Metro study that found that Sepulveda had actually made commute times longer.
Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop. Roads are added and they are soon choked with traffic. New homes are built but prices go up anyway.
Or worse, they are actively harmful. The “big project” urban highway builds of the late 20th Century ruined waterfronts and neighborhoods and in some cases were weapons wielded at minority communities. It took a horrible earthquake to reclaim San Francisco’s waterfront from the highway. It took a famously difficult “Big Dig” to reclaim downtown Boston.
Or look beyond roads at the huge ecological damage done by the big project dams of the 20th Century. Look at abandoned mines and coal power plants all over the country.
So: it’s hard to build because so many people are against building. And so many people are against building because there is so much evidence that most building projects are pointless or harmful.
The end result is a much higher bar for projects to clear to get started, and a higher bar for them to clear while underway. These may be good things in the long run.
- colinsane 4y ago> Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop. this feels like an incomplete metric to me. if you value getting from point A to point B in 30 minutes, surely other people do too. so you add another lane. now instead of 10000 people making that trip every day, 15000 do. even if the transit time doesn’t decrease (or goes up by a couple percent), that new lane still adds net value? sure, if adding a lane doesn’t decrease transit time nor increase trips, it’s hard to make the case that it’s an improvement. but you gotta look at both of these things before you make that claim.
- noahmasur 4y agoThe problem is that "inducing demand" for people who would otherwise take public transit doesn't actually increase efficiency. Putting more cars on the road is not necessarily a net benefit. See this video from CityNerd for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ
- maccolgan 4y agoYou are making the assumption that deliberately causing an undersupply of road space so that people are forced to use public transit is a net virtue, while in reality it's just acting against the market.
- tashi 4y agoNot to say they've found a good strategy(!), but when the market fails to price in externalities like pollution from cars, acting against the market would be the right thing to do, wouldn't it?
- aporetics 4y agoYes. The market is not a good in itself. Nor is it a perfect system.
- chronometry888 4y agoAnd you are making the assumption that acting in accordance with the market is automatically a net virtue.
- sagarm 4y agoPublicly funded road infrastructure is has nothing to do with the "market."