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The headline seems to conflate roads with driving, as in a personal vehicle. Roads also support the transportation of goods as well as public transportation and

The headline seems to conflate roads with driving, as in a personal vehicle. Roads also support the transportation of goods as well as public transportation and bike lanes. Even if we had zero personal vehicles we'd still build many roads, so the cost difference is what should be reported with this headline.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
There are of course rails for transporting goods.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Many people prefer to buy groceries at the grocery store rather than pick them up at the rail depot. As GP observes, moving freight by rail doesn’t eliminate roads.
  - crote 3y ago
    How about designing neighborhoods in such a way that there is a grocery store within a 15-minute walk from your house? And place a school next to it, so you can grab some groceries when you drop off your kid. That'd already massively reduce the amount of driving required, as you suddenly no longer need to drive a few miles for your groceries. And because you don't arrive by car the grocery store doesn't need a huge parking lot either.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      This subthread is about “how would the grocery store fill its shelves without roads?” more than it is “how could we avoid the final driving by grocery customers?”
      - crote 3y ago
        The roads are mostly filled with cars, though. If we only needed roads for trucks to stock stores, we could get rid of 90% of them. Nobody is proposing getting rid of all roads, they clearly have value. People are just proposing making it possible to live without requiring a car for something as basic as grocery shopping. As long as cities are built from a car-centric perspective first, they will require a car to live in.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Also, if traffic is lower, lower quality roads could be built.
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    Fewer lanes, asphalt replaced far less often, (almost) no parking lots.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Or simply smaller. If you drive around most urban areas in the US at any time but rush hour, it’s striking how the roads are barely utilized – if it was just transit and last mile delivery, you’d almost never need more than one lane. Most of those billion dollar projects are trying to handle car commuting spikes.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    If cars are lighter they consume roads less. Road consumption is by the fourth power of the load on axles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
    - underdeserver 3y ago
      This is interesting! If I understand it correctly, it means that damage to roads is completely dominated by trucks, as long as you have more than 10,000 cars per truck. Near my home I would estimate it at around 100 cars for every truck. This means that cars are completely negligible, and that supporting road construction and repair by taxes (ideally, direct taxes on the truck users, which is then rolled on to consumers through higher prices) is correct.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Cars add cost by requiring the roads to be very smooth. A large truck might be fine with an unpaved road. Places like mines or forests with large traffic of heavy vehicles don't typically pave their roads, I think.
- pmontra 3y ago
  Only between stations. You have to bring goods there and from there to homes. Some factories have their own rails, some farms too. Often they don't. Some people can walk to shops (I did when I lived in a city) or use rails, others can't. I can't anymore, I have to use a car. I bought one again after many years without it.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
> we'd still build many roads "Many" is doing a lot of work in your claim. I recently moved to Houston where it feels like every road is a six lane stroad. If transportation were reduced to mass transit, bike lanes, and commercial transit like deliveries, how many of those roads would we need?
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  No one serious about decent public transit, reducing personal automobile use or transport by bike lives in Houston. In addition those 6-lane highways are all toll roads so they shouldn't be counted as subsidizing private car traffic.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    Like any city, Houston has its own set of pro-pedestrian urbanists who are stuck here and are forced to promote the changes they want to see. Very few people are able to shop around for cities based on their car culture ideals. > In addition those 6-lane highways are all toll roads 6-lane means total lanes, so 3-4 in each direction like Richmond Ave or Westheimer Rd in Houston which you have to take just to get to the gym or grocery store. But I think you need to go to Houston on Google Maps and look at all of the freeways that are 5-6 lanes in each direction bursting out like tentacles from the center in all directions. It seems like you're not aware that these exist?
- gerad 3y ago
  I just got back from the Netherlands, which is an interesting contrast. They use probably the same amount of space as a six lane stroad in some places, but instead of being entirely for cars, it looks like this: - 1 or 2 car lanes (each way) - a tram line (one each way on each side of the street, or in the middle) - a separated, 2 way bike lane on either side of the street - a separated (from the bike lane) sidewalk - a canal As you can imagine, this takes up a lot of space. Despite this, things feel much more walkable. The reason? No enormous parking lots around every store. Parking is generally almost entirely done at P+R parking lots outside of town, then taking public transit in.
jgoodhcg 3y ago
Just the cost of parking lots would be significant. Parking areas in car centric commercial zones are gigantic and increase the amount of all other infrastructure like electric lines and water lines.
tonyarkles 3y ago
I suspect that in a hypothetical world without significantly fewer personal vehicles, roads wouldn't need to be nearly as wide. Not really the case where I live, but when I see those gigantic 6-lane+ highways around major cities that are loaded to capacity and at a standstill, it does definitely give me pause. Where I live, we don't really have those, but... > lost productivity from sitting in traffic That part of the cost equation is flipped upside down here (where I live) if you start looking at any of the currently-available alternatives. Public transit is a nightmare to navigate. What would be a 12-minute drive from my house to the work shop ends up taking a bit over an hour, assuming the buses all arrive on time and you don't end up missing a connection. And there won't be much productivity happening on that trip, the city uses the busses to move high school students around right around the same time I'd be going to and from work. In the summer it would quicker to bike for sure. Ultimately, though, I've found the best way of all to cut down on the commute: just work from home! Can't do it every day when we're in the middle of a hardware build, but lots of days it works out just fine.
throw0101a 3y ago
> Roads also support the transportation of goods […] There were roads before cars and trucks: > Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change. * https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic Various goods managed to be delivered even before cars/trucks. And it would be possible to restrict/prioritize use towards commercial vehicles.
rsynnott 3y ago
Much less parking, though. One thing that shocked me about San Francisco, a city with a horrendous housing crisis and absurdly high property values, was the amount of space given over to parking, even in quite expensive areas.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

There are of course rails for transporting goods.

sokoloff 3y ago
Many people prefer to buy groceries at the grocery store rather than pick them up at the rail depot. As GP observes, moving freight by rail doesn’t eliminate roads.
- crote 3y ago
  How about designing neighborhoods in such a way that there is a grocery store within a 15-minute walk from your house? And place a school next to it, so you can grab some groceries when you drop off your kid. That'd already massively reduce the amount of driving required, as you suddenly no longer need to drive a few miles for your groceries. And because you don't arrive by car the grocery store doesn't need a huge parking lot either.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    This subthread is about “how would the grocery store fill its shelves without roads?” more than it is “how could we avoid the final driving by grocery customers?”
    - crote 3y ago
      The roads are mostly filled with cars, though. If we only needed roads for trucks to stock stores, we could get rid of 90% of them. Nobody is proposing getting rid of all roads, they clearly have value. People are just proposing making it possible to live without requiring a car for something as basic as grocery shopping. As long as cities are built from a car-centric perspective first, they will require a car to live in.
pfdietz 3y ago
Also, if traffic is lower, lower quality roads could be built.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  Fewer lanes, asphalt replaced far less often, (almost) no parking lots.
- acdha 3y ago
  Or simply smaller. If you drive around most urban areas in the US at any time but rush hour, it’s striking how the roads are barely utilized – if it was just transit and last mile delivery, you’d almost never need more than one lane. Most of those billion dollar projects are trying to handle car commuting spikes.
- pmontra 3y ago
  If cars are lighter they consume roads less. Road consumption is by the fourth power of the load on axles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
  - underdeserver 3y ago
    This is interesting! If I understand it correctly, it means that damage to roads is completely dominated by trucks, as long as you have more than 10,000 cars per truck. Near my home I would estimate it at around 100 cars for every truck. This means that cars are completely negligible, and that supporting road construction and repair by taxes (ideally, direct taxes on the truck users, which is then rolled on to consumers through higher prices) is correct.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Cars add cost by requiring the roads to be very smooth. A large truck might be fine with an unpaved road. Places like mines or forests with large traffic of heavy vehicles don't typically pave their roads, I think.
pmontra 3y ago
Only between stations. You have to bring goods there and from there to homes. Some factories have their own rails, some farms too. Often they don't. Some people can walk to shops (I did when I lived in a city) or use rails, others can't. I can't anymore, I have to use a car. I bought one again after many years without it.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

> we'd still build many roads "Many" is doing a lot of work in your claim. I recently moved to Houston where it feels like every road is a six lane stroad. If transportation were reduced to mass transit, bike lanes, and commercial transit like deliveries, how many of those roads would we need?

skeeter2020 3y ago
No one serious about decent public transit, reducing personal automobile use or transport by bike lives in Houston. In addition those 6-lane highways are all toll roads so they shouldn't be counted as subsidizing private car traffic.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Like any city, Houston has its own set of pro-pedestrian urbanists who are stuck here and are forced to promote the changes they want to see. Very few people are able to shop around for cities based on their car culture ideals. > In addition those 6-lane highways are all toll roads 6-lane means total lanes, so 3-4 in each direction like Richmond Ave or Westheimer Rd in Houston which you have to take just to get to the gym or grocery store. But I think you need to go to Houston on Google Maps and look at all of the freeways that are 5-6 lanes in each direction bursting out like tentacles from the center in all directions. It seems like you're not aware that these exist?
gerad 3y ago
I just got back from the Netherlands, which is an interesting contrast. They use probably the same amount of space as a six lane stroad in some places, but instead of being entirely for cars, it looks like this: - 1 or 2 car lanes (each way) - a tram line (one each way on each side of the street, or in the middle) - a separated, 2 way bike lane on either side of the street - a separated (from the bike lane) sidewalk - a canal As you can imagine, this takes up a lot of space. Despite this, things feel much more walkable. The reason? No enormous parking lots around every store. Parking is generally almost entirely done at P+R parking lots outside of town, then taking public transit in.

jgoodhcg 3y ago

Just the cost of parking lots would be significant. Parking areas in car centric commercial zones are gigantic and increase the amount of all other infrastructure like electric lines and water lines.

tonyarkles 3y ago

I suspect that in a hypothetical world without significantly fewer personal vehicles, roads wouldn't need to be nearly as wide. Not really the case where I live, but when I see those gigantic 6-lane+ highways around major cities that are loaded to capacity and at a standstill, it does definitely give me pause. Where I live, we don't really have those, but... > lost productivity from sitting in traffic That part of the cost equation is flipped upside down here (where I live) if you start looking at any of the currently-available alternatives. Public transit is a nightmare to navigate. What would be a 12-minute drive from my house to the work shop ends up taking a bit over an hour, assuming the buses all arrive on time and you don't end up missing a connection. And there won't be much productivity happening on that trip, the city uses the busses to move high school students around right around the same time I'd be going to and from work. In the summer it would quicker to bike for sure. Ultimately, though, I've found the best way of all to cut down on the commute: just work from home! Can't do it every day when we're in the middle of a hardware build, but lots of days it works out just fine.

throw0101a 3y ago

> Roads also support the transportation of goods […] There were roads before cars and trucks: > Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change. * https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic Various goods managed to be delivered even before cars/trucks. And it would be possible to restrict/prioritize use towards commercial vehicles.

rsynnott 3y ago

Much less parking, though. One thing that shocked me about San Francisco, a city with a horrendous housing crisis and absurdly high property values, was the amount of space given over to parking, even in quite expensive areas.