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Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them?
- EGreg 11y agoAha so the great American success of Federal governent that progressives tout also displaced a lot of disenfranchised residents of cities. I guess there's no such thing as a slam dunk when it comes to giant projects like this.
- pekk 11y agoThe Interstate system is typically attributed to Eisenhower, a Republican. The attitude that infrastructure is worth having isn't really a "progressive" attitude.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoEisenhower described himself as a "progressive conservative".
- pekk 11y agoThis kind of equivocation is really harmful. Nobody today says "progressive" meaning "Eisenhower," but by splitting hairs we can convey something dishonest to almost anybody who reads us.
- MichaelApproved 11y agoRepublicans tend to be conservative but they're not exclusively so. They can also be progressive. Of couse, not to the same extent as Democratic party but it's possible.
- nostromo 11y agoEisenhower is from the era when the South was all Democrats and the North East was all Republicans. The most Republican state in 1952, his first election, was Vermont and the most Democratic state was Georgia. Point being: political parties have changed so much over the generations, they aren't very useful as labels. This is why people are so confused about our first Republican president -- that guy from Illinois that fought against state's right and to free the slaves.
- brandon73 11y agoDon't make the mistake of conflating liberal with progressive, republican with conservative, nor the idea that someone who values small govt is necessarily a conservative. Those are all substantially different things, even though current majorities make them SEEM equivalent. As a thought experiment, consider that most of our nation's founders were liberal but they favored small govt. Also, there is a number of people today who believe in classical liberalism but don't identify as progressive nor conservative; they are usually called libertarian. Libertarians would generally eschew both Eisenhower, big govt programs, AND progressivism.
- nostromo 11y agoThis is why I hate how we Americans have bastardized the word "liberal." Liberal used to mean something concrete. Liberalism was about liberty, including economic liberty and free markets. The most liberal party in the US today is the Libertarian party. Yet in most American's eyes, anything the Democrats do is de facto liberal -- which is not the case. I would describe someone like Elizabeth Warren not as liberal but as a moderate democratic socialist. And progressive... I don't think anyone really knows what that means in a modern context.
- lukeschlather 11y agoThat's really an oversimplification. In the early history of the USA, there were two camps, the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists explicitly wanted a strong central government. The anti-federalists, which you might describe as the "small government" side, wanted a freedom from monopolies written into the constitution, with the understanding that the government would revoke corporate charters if any company got too powerful. Even so, the federalists didn't really want an environment where strong corporations check the power of government, they wanted an explicit oligarchy where the most wealthy men around were Senators. Neither of these camps really sound like modern libertarians to me.
- brandon73 11y agoDon't make the mistake of conflating liberal with progressive, republican with conservative, nor the idea that someone who values small govt is necessarily a conservative. Those are all substantially different things, even though current majorities make them SEEM equivalent. As a thought experiment, consider that most of our nation's founders were liberal but they favored small govt. Also, there is a number of people today who believe in classical liberalism but don't identify as progressive nor conservative; they are usually called libertarian. Libertarians would generally eschew both Eisenhower, big govt programs, AND progressivism.
- alexqgb 11y agoThere's a big difference between a network of highways connecting cities and highway construction that guts urban cores. It's possible to value the former while regretting the latter.
- bitJericho 11y agoWell there are a lot of people wondering if civilization in general was a good thing for humanity! I guess we'll find out if we last much longer.
- mehwoot 11y agoWell the projects were successful, it's just people didn't care as much about disenfranchisement at the time. So of course the projects didn't magically care about that. In this case the federal government succeeded pretty well in doing what it set out to.
- bluthru 11y ago>Aha so the great American success of Federal governent that progressives tout This is like saying "LOL Progressives your federal military invaded Iraq under false pretenses! So much for the federal gubmint!" The Interstate Highway Act was basically a big subsidy for the privatization of transit.
- theVirginian 11y agoThis would have been an interesting article if it didn't try to expose the highway system as some giant racist conspiracy.
- selimthegrim 11y agoMaybe you want to read a little about Robert Moses and then come back here.
- pekk 11y agoMany different people of varying motivations were involved in making the interstate system. It isn't obvious that any significant part of the motivations for that system were racist, let alone the primary ones. Moses' involvement in road planning around New York hardly makes him the architect of the interstate system. Everybody wants to benefit from good first-world infrastructure, but fewer people want to pay for it, and anywhere you build it there will be NIMBYs who don't want it there.
- selimthegrim 11y agoMoses consulted in a number of other cities and towns (New Orleans, where he wanted to build a highway through what's now the French Market and Jackson Square (!) and under what is now Harrah's), Rio de Janeiro, Portland (OR), etc, etc)
- tedunangst 11y agoStraight from Wikipedia: > Close associates of Moses claimed that they could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold.
- Spooky23 11y agoRead the Robert Caro book about Robert Moses. Racism was definitely a part of the man, but his existence wasn't defined by it. He was a man of his times. He screwed over many a German farmer on Long Island, and those low bridges on the Northern and Southern State Parkways weren't seen as a problem for the powers that be in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Hell, the KKK was active there in my dad's memory.
- m_mueller 11y agoAs somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather than added to it. That really doesn't make any sense to me. The way I see it, any healthy city needs local transport like metro or streetcar so sou can do your business there without wasting time (getting back to your car, drive to the next place you need to go, find a parking lot, walk). It seems like shopping malls have replaced that 'going to the city' activity - the problem there is that you have no choice in the individual stores - they tend to have one, max two of the bigger stores you need. Low competition results in low quality - then the next big thing gets built further away, people drive there instead and the whole cycle continues. The lesson here is to stop lobbying from becoming too powerful - building highways is not the problem, ripping apart public transport is.
- sologoub 11y agoLos Angeles is the prime example of it. So what are we doing now? We are having to build it back up! Unfortunately, the current construction is a far cry from what the old red car network was and doesn't really touch the San Fernando valley in a meaningful way. I am excited about the Expo line phase 2 though...
- phamilton 11y agoI actually think LA is very different case. The 101 is the backbone of California for a reason - it's been there since the Spanish built the California missions. Los Angeles grew up around the highway, rather than the other way around. So instead of a beltway being built around a city, you've got a city stretched out along the highway. That said, there are plenty of micro examples of defaulting to pavement over rail for public trans in LA. The so-called "black and blue" line in the San Fernando valley is a pretty amusing example. (Rather than put in light rail, they built roads that only buses could go on. This caused a lot of confusion and there were a lot of accidents in the first 6 months, thus earning it the nickname "black and blue") It was sort of a clever solution. The city knew how to build roads and so it stuck to what it was good at.
- tedunangst 11y ago> Curiously, urban planners were absent — the profession barely existed at the time. Huh? Wouldn't it have been even more curious to include people who didn't exist?
- droidist2 11y agoI guess the urban planners at the time included people like Robert Moses. From his Wikipedia page: > His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
- RickHull 11y agoMost curious would be whatever is happening in some alternate universe where up is down and left is right. But I'm guessing you knew that already. I think what is curious about urban planners being absent is that most people would expect the blame to be placed on their shoulders. That the blame is not placed on their shoulders is curious only if you aren't aware that the profession barely existed at that time. In other words, the fact of the profession barely existing at that time is not a premise to the curiosity of their absence. For more of this, you should follow me on Twitter where I explain why jokes are funny.
- vidarh 11y agoIt's exaggeration. Hippodamus (5th century BC) was described by Aristotle as "the first city planner". Europe is full of examples of detailed urban planning dating back a millennium or more. Roman cities were carefully planned out to ensure transport, water supply, defence capabilities etc. After the Roman expansion, we have tons of plan-drawings for new city developments across Europe spanning hundreds of years. The US too had any number of prominent examples of detailed city planning dating back to e.g. Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington D.C. in 1791. It might be more reasonable to say that in the US, city planners were still not considered relevant to planning major transport infrastructure. City planners were employed to handle the layout of the interior of cities, and more often landmarks and politically important parts of the downtown areas. Why would you consult them when you wanted to figure out how to move people between cities? It was not seen as their domain. Europe was different in this respect mostly because Europe already had the road networks, and population density along them, that means building freeways have been largely about upgrading/replacing existing "working" road connections that were already integrated into the urban fabric, sometimes through centuries, or even dating back to Roman times, and much less about creating entirely new road connections. Add on to this difference that freeways were seen as a sign of the future even in Europe to the point where e.g. the London suburb where I live was proud to get a flyover cutting straight through the historic city centre in the 50's - it passes right by a market dating back to the 1300's, and a church dating back to some time before 960... Today it stands as a monument to the lack of respect for the integrity of the town the planners at the time had; then it was a monument to progress.
- ak217 11y agoI'd say heavy-handed urban freeway construction is all the more unfortunate, even tragic in how it caused the pendulum to swing too far the other way, resulting in the current culture of nimbyism and reign of misguided anti-development community activists.
- ojbyrne 11y agoMy understanding is that a significant part of the motivation for the interstate system was military, which doesn't seem to get any consideration in this article. Wikipedia says: "The Interstate Highway System gained a champion in President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was influenced by his experiences as a young Army officer crossing the country in the 1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America. Eisenhower gained an appreciation of the Reichsautobahn system, the first "national" implementation of modern Germany's Autobahn network, as a necessary component of a national defense system while he was serving as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. He recognized that the proposed system would also provide key ground transport routes for military supplies and troop deployments in case of an emergency or foreign invasion." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
- thrownaway2424 11y agoEisenhower never intended the IHS to go through city centers, though.
- hippich 11y agoI don't know much about autobahns. Do these go through cities, or go near cities?
- mschuster91 11y agoYup, just look at Berlin and Munich. Munich is surrounded by a (partially) 8-lane ring, and numerous Autobahns end within 10min driving distance of the city center.
- bane 11y agoI subscribe to reddit's /r/retrofuturism and I've formulated a hypothesis about this. The future we used to want was full of what I like to call "garden cities" [1][2][3][4]. Massive structures spaced far away from each other and in between carefully curated green spaces. The obvious problem with this vision is that getting around anywhere turns into a huge problem. This appealed to transportation companies and car makers came out on top and we ended up with the rest of the problems, without ending up with the garden cities. It turns out these visions of the future are bad for a whole host of reasons, transport was only one. 1 - http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951403247/HORIZONS-MURAL-Rober-McCall.jpg?token=PHSPVatsg2T5xuH1MoAbv97PN%2BI%3D http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951... 2 - http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg 3 - https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379 https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379 4 - http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-crazy-visions-of-the-future/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-crazy...
- DanBC 11y agoHave you read William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum A dodgy Russian site has the text http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt
- bane 11y agoNo, but this sounds kind of amazing. I'm adding it to my queue right now! I'm going to give the TV adaptation a quick watch also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BmRiDxrnPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BmRiDxrnPQ
- ghaff 11y agoBrilliant story. A number of years back, I used the theme as an intro to a consulting report I wrote. It's probably the best counterpoint to the Zeppelin-filled skies of utopian science fiction of a certain period.
- ak217 11y ago
- Spooky23 11y agoChalking everything up as racism is a real one dimensional way to look at this issue. You really got to think through process in context... The world had just been through two devastating world wars. The past was 30 years of depravity... People were focused on building a better future. I think in those days, nobody saw vibrant neighborhoods. They saw cold water flats, often desperate poverty and the legacy of the past. A rare visionary would look at a 1950 industrial waterfront or tenement neighborhood and see a valuable public resource that the public needed to be connected with.
- jqm 11y agoExactly. What I got out of the article was that GM and some racists conspired to destroy America's cities and pollute the environment so the rich could get richer. (FWITW, I'm highly in favor of green cities and efficient public transportation. And highly against politically charged exaggerated one sided articles.).
- csomar 11y agoThe article criticises the cost of the entire interstate-highway and yet he focused on the couple highways that are inside the city. I think that the cost of the interstate highway was mainly due to, you guessed it, building the highway interstate (I might be wrong). The interstate highway also serves a different purpose than driving to work. It links states. Any industrialised country should have highways to link major cities. Heck, my underdeveloped country has highways that links all of the main cities (around 80% of the population)
- mirimir 11y ago> But this new arrangement had the backing of President Eisenhower, who was especially interested in seeing the system built, partly so it could be used for troop movements and mass evacuations in the event of a nuclear attack. I've read that US interstates were designed to accomodate mobile ICBM launchers. That was the pre-silo plan, as I recall. Does anyone else recall that?
- mieses 11y agoRail guts cities. We have a cotton candy view of it since we don't see it much.