4 ms·

It’s nice they look at the costs, but it would be fair to also look at the positive effects of roads for economies, that value probably greatly outweighs the co

• jacquesm 3y ago
  NL is an easy case to make though: super densely populated so there is a large tax base for such projects. Doing the same in the United States, Canada or Eastern Europe is a completely different proposition from a financial point of view.
  • sarchertech 3y ago
    Calculating exactly how many roads are “necessary” to create a thriving society is very difficult. For example, we need some amount of farms in rural areas, so we need at a minimum roads to those cars. But we probably also don’t want to force farmers to live completely isolated, so farmers need some amount of rural community. Stores, schools etc… then we need fire, police, water, power. And all of those things require roads for access and maintenance. Then add in the fact that none of this is centrally planned, and that there’s a definite need for redundancy.
  • ta1243 3y ago
    Netherlands (1100/sqm) has a lower population density than New Jersey (1200) The entire eastern seaboard from Boston down to Washington has a population of 50 million and a density of 900/sqm, 3 times the density of France, and 50% higher than Germany, and similar to Benelux (1000/sqm, 30 million) The "America is big" argument doesn't really apply when you look at regions. Southern California is similar density to Italy and Switzerland.
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      It does apply because just like America NL is still divided up into provinces so 'Federal' level in the United States is the same as 'Country' level in NL. You can't compare 'New Jersey' with the Netherlands (though, you could compared it to say the province of Utrecht) they are at different levels in the 'org' and that has massive effects for things like public transport. In order to get coast to coast public transport you'd have to take the whole of the country (the United States) into account and then you'll find that that average population density suddenly matters a lot. Of course you can always chop up that big country into many small pieces and then focus on the few that are above the average of any other country but that's not a useful thing to do.
      • thecopy 3y ago
        >In order to get coast to coast public transport you'd have to take the whole of the country (the United States) into account and then you'll find that that average population density suddenly matters a lot. Sure, but coast-to-coast is not what matters. Moving people between where they need/want to go is what matters. I suppose a very large portion of all trips people in NJ makes on an annual basis is not coast-to-coast. It is within New Jersey or adjacent communities.
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          People in France will happily hop the TGV and be in Marseille (or Amsterdam... using the Thalys) a few hours later. Similar connections exist in and between other EU countries, for instance, Germany with the ICE. In the United States, almost without exception anything like that would be an airplane trip. And maybe it's me but I don't see aircraft as 'public transport', though I guess you could lump them in by some definition. So even if you zoom out from let's say NL to all of Europe and you compare Europe with the United States you still end up with a difference in how public transport is arranged. There simply isn't a nearly empty heartland.
          • ta1243 3y ago
            You're looking at the very rare long distance journeys. People don't travel from Paris to Marseille (400 miles) any more than people travel from Washington to Boston (400 miles). They typically would travel from Paris to Athens by jumping on a plane, just like you'd get a plane from New York to Houston (about the same distance) Compare public transport in the Berlin metro area (6 million, 500 per square mile) with the bay area (7 million, 1100 per square mile), or the Rhine-Main region (5 million, 1000 per square mile)
  • throw0101a 3y ago
    > NL is an easy case to make though: super densely populated so there is a large tax base for such projects. See "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ We don't care about the densities of entire countries, we care about the densities of where people live: cities. For the US, 40% of the population lives in counties on a coast: * https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html 200M people live with-in 100 mi (160 km) of a border: * https://www.aclu.org/documents/constitution-100-mile-border-zone https://www.aclu.org/documents/constitution-100-mile-border-... The US population is already highly concentrated: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:County_population_map.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:County_population_map.web... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_coun... There are large swaths of the US where there's a whole lotta nothing (population-wise).
  • sjmulder 3y ago
    In any built up area it really doesn't matter how large the country as a whole is, or its population density, to how I can get to the dentist, supermarket, running track or a local friend. Those are mostly results of local planning decisions.
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      That must be then why the typical European drives just as much as the typical American.
• ta1243 3y ago
  The question is where do the benefits of those positive effects land and where do the negatives If I benefit by $5k and you lose out by $1k that's a net gain of $4k (yeay), but it's not good or you.
• cykotic 3y ago
  What we have in the U.S. is highly inefficient, unhealthy, and environmentally destructive. Virtually every store must have a dedicated parking space that is unused most of the time. This causes a huge waste of land resources. What results is a landscape that is hostile to walking and congregating outside, ugly, too spread out, and overly expensive to maintain. It is good to have well maintained roads. It is not good to have what the U.S. has.
• littlestymaar 3y ago
  The positive effect of road is almost everywhere ruined by the lower density that car-based city planning cause, and by traffic. Sure you can move good farther and faster, but in fact you're still supplying the same amount of people and companies, so the net effect is zero. It can only work if you're: - space-constrained so your urban density doesn't reduce because of cars - have very good public transportation so that most people stay off the road no matter what, otherwise traffic makes your cars too slow to bring anything. These conditions are almost never met, but maybe they are in the Netherlands as an exception to the rule.
• crote 3y ago
  A very large portion of the goods from Rotterdam to Germany are transported either by rail or by boat. It arrives either in containers or in bulk, so transporting it using trucks makes little sense.
  • kneebonian 3y ago
    And there are multiple us states larger than Germany, and unlike Germany many of these places are not flowing with navigable rivers all over the place. The closest navigable river to me is an 8 hour drive, and that's still loads closer than where I grew up that didn't have any navigable rivers in the entire state. (Seriously people out East have no idea what a mountain is, and people out west have no idea what a river is in the US)
    • crote 3y ago
      Absolutely, but most people in the US live pretty close together, on their respective coasts. It is completely understandable that Iowa isn't going to have excellent infrastructure, but there is no reason why the Northeast Corridor or California can't be more similar to Western Europe rather than their current car paradise. If anything, being so large and not having waterways should provide a good incentive to use rail transport. Freight trains really suck for short distances, so cross-continental transport is pretty much ideal for them. Unfortunately the US is stuck with companies like CSX and Union Pacific actively sabotaging rail transport by using "precision-scheduled railroading", actively ripping up tracks and electrification, and strongly resisting any attempts to modernize the network. On paper they are doing great, but their service is really bad and their safety record is abysmal.
• throw0101a 3y ago
  > Goods need to be transported anyways and in many situations there might not be alternatives for roads (e.g. transport food to grocery stores). 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 And goods were delivered. Of course we can still allow automobiles for commercial purposes while discouraging their use for private transport (or at least prioritizing non-auto transport). A lot of things that seem to require an automobile do not: > "'One of the causes of frequent bickerings is the bicycle. The Plumbers' Union has a rule, which is rigidly enforced, prohibiting the members from utilizing the bike in connection with their work. The rule is regarded as necessary to protect the men. When the bicycle came into popular use, the plumbers found that some of their number would go spinning around town on their wheels for the benefit of the bosses. The result was that the plumber without a bike soon found himself at a disadvantage. One of them explained the matter in this wise: "'Suppose two men were sent out on a job and both had practically the same kind and the same amount of work to do. They would both leave the shop at the same time, but the fellow with the wheel would reach the place where the work was to be done before his brother plumber would. If some tool or piece of material had been forgotten, the man with the wheel would go spinning to the shop, while the other fellow would have to walk or take a streetcar. The man with the wheel could make better time on a job in consequence, and the boss would be liable to find him a more desirable man, notwithstanding that it was no fault of the other man. In fact, the man without the wheel might be the fastest and best workman. We want this rule against the bicycle enforced in all the shops.'" * https://heatinghelp.com/dead-men-tales/bicycles-and-heating-history/ https://heatinghelp.com/dead-men-tales/bicycles-and-heating-... The Plumbers' Union banned the used of bicycle as they were considered an unfair competitive advantage.
• dmbche 3y ago
  I was listening to a show (well there's your problem) talking about the failures of the american freight railway. If we think for a minute, railroads are WAY cheaper to set up and maintain, compared to a road covering the same route. They are also more fuel efficient than cars. We could have a system where parcels are brought to your towns post office by train, you get to the post office by feet. Freight is also much cheaper to move by train, but poor management moved a LOT of freight out of trains into trucks, because we are in a "just in time" manufacturing paradigm (you want to hold as little inventory as possible and receive loads when they need to be processed), where the flexibility of trucks beats trains. The sunk cost of roads puts us in a weird, uncomfortable place if we want to move forward with a more efficient/green transportation.
  • majewsky 3y ago
    > We used to have a system where parcels are brought to your towns post office by train, you get to the post office by feet. Fixed that for you.