New Urbanism vs urban sprawl

[slightlyslack 22]

I agree with much of mpetryni's post, but I should point out that per capita energy usage figures are kinda misleading.  What is more important, in my mind, is energy usage per dollar of GDP.  In that regard, the United States has seen vast improvement (a greater than 50% reduction) since the first oil crisis in 1973.  China, on the other hand, has actually gotten worse in the past ten years.  Because of ill-advised investment strategies in both roads and transit, cars are sitting in gridlock and wasting huge amounts of fuel.  (This, even as declining cities in the north and west are building ever-bigger freeway systems to accommodate cars that will never travel on them.)  Underinvestment in power plants means that factories in Guangdong (the country's leading manufacturing province) have to use diesel generators to keep running.

The principal reason that the US Senate unanimously (environmentalists and the auto and oil lobbies, Democrats and Republicans) refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocols is that it is manifestly unfair to put ourselves through a great deal of short- and medium-term economic pain even as China becomes ever more profligate with energy usage.  I'm willing to bet that if Kyoto were revised to mandate that China, India, and Brazil reduce their emissions as well (say, to 2000 levels), most senators would go along with it.

[ldvger 19]

What a great discussion we have going here!

I agree, too with most of what mpetryni wrote as well...musch the same as I've been saying but better stated.  In the end, the death of suvurbia won't have anything to do with what anyone in America wants or likes, it will be based on what the average American can afford.  Which is why it's so nice to have an economist enter into the discussion!

 

Slightlyslack, you make some excellent points as well, but I think (personal opinion) it may be a mistake to discount use ratios of Americans to other nations world wide in regard to energy, especially petroleum resources.  I don't have the exact figures at hand, but last I checked I seem to recall that America only accounts for 10% of the world's population, yet we use 60% of the world's energy resources.  You folks closer to the world of stats can probably redefine that one for me, but even so, I don't think anyone can discount the fact that we are energy gluttons due to go on a much needed diet.

 

The recent hurricanes in the Gulf Coast are causing some ripples in the economic world, especially in regard to oil supply for Americans and what reduced or interuppted supply could mean to our national economy as well as markets across the globe.  There was an excellent article in Newsweek a couple of weeks ago by Robert J. Samuelson, who I consider to be a gloom and doom economist (he always seems to write about worst case scenarios) that advocates increasing the national gas tax slowly over the next 5-10 years to help Americans wean themselves off cheap gasoline.  He avers that the days of cheap gas ar over and that the increases at the pump that we are seeing now are just the beginning. 

 

And let's face it, without cheap fuel, suburbia can't survive as a haven for the middle class.  So the task before us now is to upgrade our cities, which is what New Urbanism is attempting to do.  Granted, there are a lot of monkey wrenches in the machine right now...any society in the beginning stages of major socio-economic change is bound to flounder around for a while.  Still, we have to start somewhere...

 

Lora/LD

 

 

[slightlyslack 22]

The US population is ~300 million, or about 5% of the world's population.  As of 1998, we consumed 40% of the world's oil production ( http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html ); growth in China, India, and Brazil has doubtlessly caused that share to fall.

 

I'd like to modify your statement a bit: future urban development paradigms will be a function of energy prices given our underlying preferences.  Much of the intellectual groundwork for New Urbanism was laid by quasi-Marxist social commentators in the '60s and '70s who considered our love affair with the automobile to be an example of false consciousness imposed by a devious cabal of automakers and oil companies.  Needless to say, I don't buy that for a second.

 

On the other hand, preferences can actually change as a result of consumption patterns (an example of behavior economists call endogeneity).  I think the New Urbanists are counting on people suddenly discovering that they like 1920s-style towns, shifting their preferences away from the little cabins in the woods model (an ideal that has deep roots in the English-speaking world--from the days when English was just badly pronounced German, really), but I'm not gonna put any money on that.

[6SpeedTA95 0]

Well guys there's a bit if misinformation floating around about our energy use.  We are 5% of the worlds population.  We use approximately 24 million barrels of oil per day (this number ranges from 22 million up to just over 26 so i too the middle number, according to the american oil and gas journal its 23.9 mil).  The total world consumption is right at 90 million barrels.  Our consumption has stayed pretty flat in recent years thanks to more effecient technologies.  There are currently plans in the works for a few rather large 1000megawatts and up Nuclear plants.  This could be the start of something good, we could in as little as 25 years have power available in mass quantities via nuclear fission.  There are also nuclear fusion in our future.  How far no one really knows.  But focusing on fission power is a good clean way to generate lots of energy. 

[PennDOTguy 5]

The arguments in this thread are interesting....

 

Question:

How is mass transit more expensive than a car? I pay 40 bucks a month for a monthly pass to go anywhere within 10 miles of hburg, PA. It costs up to 40 alone to fill up a tank of gas, plus hundreds for insurance, car payments, car inspections, registration. . . . . .i'm a cheapskate so you can see why i never learned to drive when you look at it this way...

 

mass transit is clearly cheaper. Unfortunately, in harrisburg, it is not convienent. The city has been hollowed out and everything of consequence is in the 'burbs with poor or little mass transit access....and the buses stop running after 7pm or so. I may have to bite the bullet and let the automotive industry rape my wallet......grr

 

 

I should add, Harrisburg does have some new urbanist type developments in the city--one in the Uptown neighborhood for low income and middle income people and one in Midtown for yuppies and others, but again you need a car if you want to go anywhere efficiently. If you have an afternoon to kill, then yes the bus is available.

[louisville327 0]

Date: 9/29/2005 10:36:31 AM
Author: 6SpeedTA95
There are currently plans in the works for a few rather large 1000megawatts and up Nuclear plants. This could be the start of something good, we could in as little as 25 years have power available in mass quantities via nuclear fission. There are also nuclear fusion in our future. How far no one really knows. But focusing on fission power is a good clean way to generate lots of energy.

quote>

Understanding, of course, that nuclear fission is a political time bomb, with much of the American public absolutely terrified of it. Ever since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (even though the latter was relatively minor), any politician seriously playing the nuclear power card quickly develops serious political baggage. Simply the knowledge that fission produces High Level Waste is enough for many people to oppose it on principle, even though a few countries (including France) now utilize extensive networks of fission plants much to their own benefit.

Hopefully the development of Synroc as an efficient waste disposal method will calm the paranoia many people have over the use of fission---but years and years of negative publicity are going to give the use of nuclear fission quite a battle.

[mpetryni 0]

Slightlyslack: You're right, per dollar of GDP is probably a more accurate number to use. Thanks for the help there.

 

To everyone else: I think preferences will be significant, but again there is going to be a balance between them and affordability, and economic necessities will win out. Now there is some question as to whether or not there is a way our preference can become or remain economically sustainable. But the major point stands: whether or not people like New Urbanism or some other more sustainable model is irrelevant. Even if people like suburbia better, they will not always get what they want.

 

American Surburbia, and the infrastructure of centralized agriculture, large highways, and overseas importation from cheap labor, will not always be available in its current form. About one-third of american energy goes into transportation, and another sixth into the shipping industry. Right now, this is fine: gas and oil are relatively cheap. But eventually, this level of inefficiency will not be able to continue, especially when petroleum products are even more greatly needed for non-luxury items like plastic, chemistry, fertilizers and agriculture, and other major industrial uses. There is debate over how long this will take; some think it is on the very near horizon or in the process of happening, others believe it could take another century or so. I personally believe its somewhere in the middle of the two numbers.

 

But I will quote a Physics professor at the University of Oregon named Stephen Kevan to make the main point that most people already are aware of: Whether or not you think it's going to be a long time or tomorrow, it doesn't matter. It will run out. Someday. Probably sooner than later. And to continue pretending it's an unlimited resource is not only counter to current scientific knowledge, it's also irresponsible.

 

As for the cabal of automakers and whatever that the Marxist-Groucho-treehuggers or whatever label we wish to use believe in, I'm not entirely sure of such a cabal. I believe it is less of a conspiracy and more of a consumer-generated phenomenon. I will admit that massive amounts of money have been expended somewhat irrationally by the American government to subsidize and maintain a huge fossil-fuel based infrastructure. I don't think that this, however, is a matter of political/economic/secret meetings of the Illuminati/cloak-and-dagger coniving but rather a reflection of the general preference of American people of the past century for suburbia and its enabling infrastructure. And also this preference's relationship with the American people's awareness of environmental and economic problems. I'm not entirely sure if this is where New Urbanism comes from because Jane Jacobs laid the more realistic basis for New Urbanism in 1961, even slightly before Carson's Silent Spring. Jacobs mostly speaks of Urbanism not as some kind of environmentalist or socialist scheme, but more from the standpoint of the importance of civic diversity and design to a city's economic strength and social structure. Of course, I could be wrong and New Urbanism could be an Earth Day concept, but that's ultimately irrelevant.

 

Yes, I think there are people who profit from the sale of suburbia. And they profit tremendously. But America's vast natural resources, relatively speaking, have made the environmental impacts of our economic choices less relevant to our daily life.

 

Simply speaking, we have a lot of earth to scorch, so it seems more ok to do so. This is not a negative statement about Americans in general; every single nation does pretty much the same thing (some do it even worse - they don't have much earth to scorch and scorch it all anyway). It just other countries don't have that same vast expanse of earth or have used it up at some point in the past instead. Americans do also have a long-standing conservationist history and were one of the first western nations to begin embracing nature as some kind of beauty and not as a threat to civilization. ((Aside: Ironically, this very approach toward nature in the western world in fact generated suburbia. The cabin in the woods idea that someone mentioned - louisville? - that came out of England was really adopted into modern city planning theory as The Garden City by Ebenezer Howard in the 1890's (shortly following the transcendentalist 'movement'). The Garden City model is the fundemental basis of modern-day suburbia with dwellings in the park. I don't know what Howard would think about how suburbia stretched the former city stench of the industrial revolution into an environmental issue that quite possibly threatens the whole of the global ecosystem's stability))

 

Also, the powerful force of capitalism in America has made conservation unreasonable except where economically necessary. What's fascinating about the fact oil is a limited resource is that it puts, or much more accurately, has the potential to put, the smart businessmen looking search for economic efficiency and the peace-loving environmentalists who want to see more respect for god's creation in a position of agreement: Economic necessities resulting from the depletion of a nonrenewable resource will create the demand for alternatives that rely on resources can be more easily renewed in the global ecosystem.

 

There is an important disclaimer to this: from a business perspective, it might be initially more favorable to switch over to some other nonrenewable when oil-based energy becomes too expensive (ie. oil shale/tar sands, coal (a big ugh in SimCity terms), perhaps nuclear energy), but these things also run out someday - especially as emerging nations begin using more energy. The other disclaimer is that many of the potentially renewable sources of energy are mostly science-fiction at this point (ie. the hydrogen economy, solar and wind farms as far as the eye can see, ethanol, whatever).

 

Damn it! Too long again...

[slightlyslack 22]

Good post, mpetryni.  One quibble: because of its thermodynamic efficiency, nuclear energy is as closer to a renewable than any other form of energy produced by a chemical reaction.  Because we don't engage in reprocessing, we waste enormous amounts of nuclear fuel; however, if uranium mines ever started to run dry (which probably wouldn't happen for a couple thousand years given what's in the ground), we'd still have a lot of radioactive material sitting around that could be converted into something useful.  Nuclear power may technically be a nonrenewable, but uranium is so abundant in the Earth's crust that I am willing to wager large sums that we won't we run out of it before we figure out fusion.

 

louisville: I can understand widespread nuclear paranoia.  While the science is easily understood by the layman, the hysteria-inducing connection of it to nuclear weapons by greens of the '70s and '80s (e.g., putting an image of the Trinity test next to a picture of Three Mile Island) is one of the most successful and most disingenuous propaganda campaigns of modern history.  However, while there's always room for efficiency improvement in electricity consumption, the fact that much of our energy usage in transportation is going to shift from petroleum to electricity (plug-in hybrid cars and buses, electric trains, etc.) means that electricity output is going to have to increase pretty substantially.  Solar power might be able to close a lot of this gap, but it has its own waste disposal issues to deal with.  (Wind power may actually be nearing its maximum market penetration--we learned a lot about aerodynamics during the Cold War, yet nobody's yet figured out how to build a viable windfarm in more than about 20 places in the US.  Oh, and there's the bird fatality issue, too.)

[slightlyslack 22]

Date: 9/29/2005 1:35:54 PM Author: PennDOTguy

How is mass transit more expensive than a car?

quote>

Even the most heavily ridden mass transit systems, such as the NYC subways or the Chicago El, are heavily subsidized.  Fares are charged to recover some of costs; however, even systems that were cheap to build and are heavily ridden still cost more per rider than is collected at the ticket booth.  The Blue Line light rail line in Los Angeles, which is the country's most heavily ridden (70,000 daily boardings) and was relatively cheap to build (MTA had owned the right-of-way for 20+ years when construction started), is still subsidized to the tune of $15/passenger/day.  (Source: my transportation policy prof at USC, a transit skeptic but one of the most honest and competent people I've ever met.)  Some of this money comes out of gas taxes, some from sales taxes, but most of it comes out of general taxation--i.e., state and federal personal and corporate income taxes.

 

On a basis of minimizing per-rider federal subsidies, one common refrain you'll hear among transportation planning academics is that the federal government's money would be best spent by putting almost all of expenditures into the New York subway and commuter rail system (especially in getting another cross-Hudson rail tunnel built), with maybe a smattering in Boston, D.C., and Chicago.  Little wonder that cities are turning to self-finance of transit systems; for example, the Seattle monorail gets no state or local money, instead being financed by fares and by a surcharge on motor vehicles (both private and commercial) registered to addresses within the city.  Whether or not you think Seattle's project is a folly, one thing is indisputable: unless you live in the City of Seattle, you aren't paying a dime for it!

[PennDOTguy 5]

Alright, essentially, mass transit is more expensive on the community as a whole...but in terms of the average non-car driving consumer(i.e. someone like me) , it's considerably cheaper. I see how that works now.

 

(PS I'm actually a transportation planner trainee...so this is an education!)

[louisville327 0]

Author: slightlyslack

Even the most heavily ridden mass transit systems, such as the NYC subways or the Chicago 'El,' are heavily subsidized. Fares are charged to recover some of costs; however, even systems that were cheap to build and are heavily ridden still cost more per rider than is collected at the ticket booth.

quote>

I find the constant criticism of mass transit as too expensive or not profitable as absolutely amazing. What's the most subsidized form of transportation in the country?

CARS!!!!!!!

The United States government, the state governments, county governments and city governments spend billions of dollars PER DAY to maintain the enormous highway and road system in this country. While the cars themselves are privately purchased and maintained, the transportation network on which they operate is completely public-funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And that's not even counting the yearly pork fest called the federal transportation bill (a total of $286 billion this year alone). With the exception of toll roads (a very small minority of the larger interstate highway system), government makes no direct return on their investment at all.

Can you imagine how cheap mass transit would be---for the riders---if that amount of money was spent on an equally-enormous transit system (commuter rail, light rail, subways and trams)? The government might be spending a fortune, but individuals would see their living expenses cut by huge margins, since they wouldn't be buying cars or fueling them. The rise in living standards would be unprecedented, theoretically.

We all know that government doesn't build roads to make a profit from the roads. They build roads to facilitate travel, which facilitates the economy, which facilitates tax-paying. Interstate 64 here in Louisville is not exactly profitable in the traditional sense of the term, since it's completely free to use. It's 100% subsidized by tax money. It does, however, facilitate fast east-west travel through the city of Louisville and the economic impact is tremendous.

Why do we expect profitability from mass transit and not expect it from highways? We know that highways don't have to produce income of their own to benefit the economy, so why do we expect more of mass transit? We get so caught up thinking about fares and subsidies for subways and light rail systems that we forget how expensive it is to maintain roads and own cars---and how unprofitable THAT sytem is.


(EDIT: Transportation bill total cost edited per comment below---thanks PennDOTguy!)

[PennDOTguy 5]

SAFETEA-LU (the Transportation bill) is actually 286 billion dollars.

 

The bills main archetect, Don Young of AK, got 2 very expensive bridges to nowhere. Literally nowhere.

[slightlyslack 22]

Louisville: You're right to an extent about the accounting for transit systems seeming a little arbitrary, but it is undeniable that transit systems have a much higher up-front cost than road improvements.  This is why cities were facing a big problem right after World War II: other than in NYC, transit systems had gotten essentially no net investment since the early 1920s (they were privately owned, and most investment consisted of ripping up unprofitable loss-leader streetcars and replacing them with buses--long before the mythical National City Lines conspiracy), while surface streets had gotten enough incremental investment that automobile ownership was highly attractive.   Investing in roads was a natural continuation of good roads policy dating to the pre-railroad era, and was even encouraged by railroads in order to make it easier for goods to get to freight stations (q.v.). The result was that there were too damn many cars on the road even before freeways started to come on the scene.

 

Freeways got built in the '40s because their supporters (automobile companies, suburban land owners, urban planners who thought that they were the key to reaching Garden City nirvana) painted them as a logical extension of street system upgrades.  Nonsense: they didn't follow traditional routes--nobody ever tears down houses to put in transit lines--and required massive capital investment.  However, because paying for them was essentially invisible, in that it didn't come out of general funds.  The Interstate system, at least, was financed almost entirely by a gas tax that nobody much minded when gas was $1.00/gallon in 2005 dollars,  Because of these factors, the notion set in that freeways were somehow cheaper than transit investments.  Obviously, once you factor maintenance and environmental costs into the equation, freeways don't look all that attractive, but the nature of electoral politics in the United States means that far-sighted analysis of this sort simply does not ever take place. 

 

You also seem to be neglecting the chief weakness of transit infrastructure investment: short-haul freight.  You can't put freight on a grade-separated light rail line, let alone a subway.  Both of these things were done in the very early 20th century, admittedly, but were abandoned almost as soon as roads started being paved and trucks got big enough engines to carry cargo--that was about 1915.  Building roads (as opposed to freeways) is a natural extension of 19th-century commerce and early-20th-century policy.  Freight haulers were also some of the fiercest advocates for freeway construction.

[louisville327 0]

Slightlyslack: I appreciate the history lesson, though I'm already aware of the facts behind our sorry state of affairs. I'm not exactly sure where it is we disagree here.

I wasn't criticizing road-building in general, but freeway-building in particular, which you seem to agree is NOT the natural extension of an efficient road system and proves extremely costly to maintain---let alone to finance the initial construction.

I'm not against roads, I was just pointing out the contradiction between demanding profitability from one transit system and not another.

As for what exactly would be the natural extension of early 20th century policy, I agree with you that expanding the road system makes sense. However, the current pattern of surface street building is extraordinarily wasteful. Forget for a moment freeways. The cul-de-sac and every other form of suburban road-building is an enormous drain on government funds, as it is immensely wasteful and inefficient. Because densities are so low and interconnection an afterthought, miles and miles of streets are built to service a relatively small population. A system based on rail (freight and passenger, even if grade-separated) would be far more efficient and affordable than what is currently being constructed on the edges of every major city in the United States. Streets in the late-19th and early-20th centuries were laid out according to the needs of the people that used them, not the cars that we now drive. The automobile warped our concept of how a proper street network should be constructed, and we're paying far more than we should have to. It's no secret that infrastructure costs in the suburbs are horrendous and a drain on the governments that pay them---that's my main concern.

A system that combines well laid-out, interconnected roads (for short trips and short-haul freight), light rail and subways for city commuting, and high-speed rail (both passenger and heavy freight) to bridge the gaps between cities, would be far more favorable than paving everything over and paying a trillion dollars just to maintain it---even before you factor in fuel costs, environmental damage and a total lack of sustainability.

Where is it that we disagree? I can't tell.

[slightlyslack 22]

I don't think we disagree at all, we're just coming at it from different angles--mine primarily economic, yours primarily aesthetic, with considerable overlap between the two.  Neither approach is better or should be privileged more than the other.

Tangent: In the course of my studies, I have learned that there's no better way to become aware of the limited analytical powers of the neoclassical framework, for four decades the dominant mode of economic thinking, than by asking a neoclassical economist if something is good or right.  Let's put it this way: deer in the headlights doesn't even begin to describe the befuddlement I've seen on the faces of econ professors when I ask them this question.  Why am I getting a PhD in urban planning, instead of economics?  It might be that I have something resembling a soul.

[hym 358]

Date: 12/16/2004 10:28:11 PM Author: DuskTrooper I'd go with a hybrid.

quote>

Hybrid models work best.

 

Personally, I like urban environments the most because of the skyscrapers and such.  However, urban sprawl creates a future tax base for the city and it stretches the city limits so that when it eventually collides with another major city, and can expand no futher in any directions, the city has more land to build up. Suburbs also create urban demand, so that when the downtown district expands, it doesn't decay because of lack of demand (St. Louis is a good example of this--the urban environment resembles City 17 from Half-Life 2.)

 

Baro: Interestingly enough, research seems to indicate that surburban sprawl causes obesity.

 

I don't know how many of you guys live in states near Texas.  Texas is planning a super-highway that is 55 lanes in each direction at its widest points. And you know what, analysts say that an entirely urban Texas could support up to 100 million people (that's their numbers, not mine) and at that population size, Texas would need that highway to handle all of the people.

 

So to sum up my analysis:  Urban sprawl is the first, and necessary, step to building or expanding an urban environment.

 

 

 

[slightlyslack 22]

Hym: most cities have already done an awful lot of outward expansion, though.  The first step has been taken.  For the vast majority of urban areas, land area has increased at a much greater rate than population in the past 50 years.  Some areas that have actually lost people (mainly in New England and the Rust Belt) have grown outward dramatically, to the point that their regional population densities are lower than sprawlvilles like Dallas and Atlanta.

Also, as cities like Phoenix and Houston have discovered, when a central city annexes a huge swath of undeveloped land in order to increase its tax base, it may well be that the cost of providing services to that area is greater than the tax yield from it.  Los Angeles spends way more per capita on road and sewer maintenance in the San Fernando Valley than in the Metropolitan section of the city south of the Santa Monica Mountains (although illegal immigration and re-zoning are rapidly increasing the Valley's population density).

 

In places like Los Angeles where viable land for development is beginning to run short, developers are starting to increase density.  I have a friend who's an architect down in Orange County, and he tells me that pretty much all the projects on drawing boards right now are two- and three-story apartment buildings.  It's not quite smart growth, let alone New Urbanism, but economics is pushing the development pattern that way.  Employers simply do not want to lose the benefits of aggregation in job centers, so they're not moving to exurbia nearly as fast as workers are; with fuel prices and traffic congestion being what they are, the spatial mismatch between employers and employees is simply unsustainable.

[louisville327 0]

Date: 10/2/2005 11:24:04 PM
Author: hym

I don't know how many of you guys live in states near Texas. Texas is planning a super-highway that is 55 lanes in each direction at its widest points. And you know what, analysts say that an entirely urban Texas could support up to 100 million people (that's their numbers, not mine) and at that population size, Texas would need that highway to handle all of the people.

quote>

That's assuming that Texas will ever be entirely urban. Somehow I don't see that happening.

So to sum up my analysis: Urban sprawl is the first, and necessary, step to building or expanding an urban environment.

quote>

You're forgetting two important things here: the history of urban development pre-1950 and the true nature of sprawl.

First, sprawl is a very recent style of development, made possible only by the automobile (and favorable political/economic factors in the second half of the 20th century). In the grand history of urban development---some 4000 years (that we know of), sprawl has had absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of cities. True urban areas do not rely on sprawl for initial development, they suffer from it.

Second, slightlyslack addressed this above, but I'll reiterate it: sprawl is low-density expansion outward from urban centers. It drains the urban center of its workers, leaving a vacuum behind that until recent years showed no signs of being filled by anything, let alone new development. Sprawl is not the first step to increased urban density, it's the first step to a loss of density. As fuel prices increase and traffic problems worsen, sprawl will have to retract back towards traditional urban centers or it will simply cease to function.

The spatial limitations that govern human action have not been overcome. 30 miles is not a practical morning commute, no matter how fast you manage to go in gridlock traffic---and gas isn't getting any cheaper. The days of sprawl are on the way out. It won't matter much to true city development, though, since cities have developed without it for thousands of years.

[Wilfried Webber 22]

You can have sprawl another way, of course. A way it doesn't eat up the whole world and is mass transit oriented. A grid is however not the correct answer on sprawl problems.

 

Take an example from my creations:

   

[simbiotic 0]

Date: 12/18/2004 3:15:41 AM Author: Baro How dare you!  Telling a city it shouldn't sprawl is like telling a fat dieing person they should put down the tub of butter.  That tub of butter/suburban life style TASTES good and it's their choice and they deserve it and how dare you try to save them from them selves.  It isn't a matter of living or dieing, it isn't a matter of how long that lifestyle can last, it's a matter of 'preferance' or what 'feels good' at the time.

 

Except ,of course, that it doesnt actually taste (or look, or feel) good. And its not actually a question of trying to save themselves, its a question of stopping subsidisation of a lifestyle that is destructive to themsleves, their neighbours, their community, their city, their country, and the world.

[Voar Tok 4]

Personally, I like the idea of Urbanism.  Being able to walk to just about everything greatly appeals to me.  No need for a car.

[Rabid Tangerine 0]

55 lane highway? In either direction? That's darn near, if not quite over, a two mile wide highway!!!  Ludicrous.

Edit: Nevermind, just turned the math over in my head again. I guess it would only (har) be around a thousand feet across, for some reason I was thinking lanes are 10 feet wide....and that there were 550 lanes....Did I ever mention I suck at arithmetic?

[stepper77 0]

I can

[Jasoncw 11,949]

I think that highways are good in that they connect places that are far apart with a convienient fast and free (you can control when and where you stop) path. But the negative concequences outweight the positive ones, unfortunatly.

In Sim City, once my main avenues leave the developed area they turn into highways (they do not bypass development, they bypass forests). For my cities purposes, they are basicly avenues with a faster speed limit, and without any stops becuase there is nowhere to get off to. Occasionaly there will be some on/off ramp, but nowhere near as much as in real life.

I think it's interesting that alot of the people here could make better decisions for cities then the governments themselves could make.

[Voar Tok 4]

Date: 10/27/2005 1:52:05 AM Author: Rabid Tangerine

55 lane highway? In either direction? That's darn near, if not quite over, a two mile wide highway!!!  Ludicrous.

Edit: Nevermind, just turned the math over in my head again. I guess it would only (har) be around a thousand feet across, for some reason I was thinking lanes are 10 feet wide....and that there were 550 lanes....Did I ever mention I suck at arithmetic?

quote>

A standard highway lane is 12 feet wide (at least according to my relative that does highway construction).  Also, the plan never said that it would actually have 55 lanes in each direction, just that it would be up to a quarter-mile wide at its widest points.  That's wide enough for 55 lanes in each direction, but the general plan was also to have high-speed trains and the like in the median between the lanes going in each direction.  Hence, it would never actually have that many lanes.

[louisville327 0]

I'll change the subject a bit and offer this:

The Most Horrible Thing I've Ever Seen.

(Panorama of residential sprawl near San Ramon, CA, courtesy of Exuberance.com)

[mpetryni 0]

Date: 10/1/2005 1:25:05 AM Author: louisville327 Slightlyslack: I appreciate the history lesson, though I'm already aware of the facts behind our sorry state of affairs.  I'm not exactly sure where it is we disagree here.  I wasn't criticizing road-building in general, but freeway-building in particular, which you seem to agree is NOT the natural extension of an efficient road system and proves extremely costly to maintain---let alone to finance the initial construction. I'm not against roads, I was just pointing out the contradiction between demanding profitability from one transit system and not another.  As for what exactly would be the natural extension of early 20th century policy, I agree with you that expanding the road system makes sense.  However, the current pattern of surface street building is extraordinarily wasteful.  Forget for a moment freeways.  The cul-de-sac and every other form of suburban road-building is an enormous drain on government funds, as it is immensely wasteful and inefficient.  Because densities are so low and interconnection an afterthought, miles and miles of streets are built to service a relatively small population.  A system based on rail (freight and passenger, even if grade-separated) would be far more efficient and affordable than what is currently being constructed on the edges of every major city in the United States.  Streets in the late-19th and early-20th centuries were laid out according to the needs of the people that used them, not the cars that we now drive.  The automobile warped our concept of how a proper street network should be constructed, and we're paying far more than we should have to.  It's no secret that infrastructure costs in the suburbs are horrendous and a drain on the governments that pay them---that's my main concern. A system that combines well laid-out, interconnected roads (for short trips and short-haul freight), light rail and subways for city commuting, and high-speed rail (both passenger and heavy freight) to bridge the gaps between cities, would be far more favorable than paving everything over and paying a trillion dollars just to maintain it---even before you factor in fuel costs, environmental damage and a total lack of sustainability.  Where is it that we disagree?  I can't tell.

I think this is an incredibly insightful thread. I just wish I had more time to read it. I like (and when I say like, I mean hate) those pictures of San Ramon. Was that farmland originally? Oh well... life goes on I suppose. Also some of the developer mutations of New Urbanism are becoming quite rancid in themselves - there's one developer in Meridian, Idaho that believes it's better to go up then out and is buying parcels of land out on rural intersections (which they refer to as clean slates) to build 10 and 15 story condo buildings on. These buildings are typically mixed-use and have non-surface parking, but in the middle of freaking nowhere?! That's, um, sorta missed the point.

 

Anyway, my purpose in quoting above is a simple note on freeway transit: Some of our insustainable subsidies like the transportation infrastructure is sort of an accident or byproduct of another subsidy. The freeway system was originally built as a national security measure in the United States during the cold war. It kinda became its own problem, at least if I have my facts right - which I might not, long after that. Anyway, the point I suggest is that I don't believe anyone sat down and said let's make large freeways the primary transit corridors or if they did, they said it something like we need this infrastructure for military deployment - during peacetime it can make itself useful by being the primary transit corridors.

 

This is fairly irrelevant in terms of city planning because all of the problems of intracity transport and cul-de-sacs are, in my opinion, a big enough problem on their own. What I would suggest, however, is possibly that the mistakes of the past weren't made entirely out of warped and perverse city planning ideologies, or of selfish economic policies (although these may have played a part, no doubt) but instead are problems (side effects?) rooting in other intentions that are, on their own valid and entirely positive - like national security or something. I'm out. Great comments in here btw!

 

PS: That Texas thing - 55 lane highway - this is what they must have. Disgusting, simply disgusting. I wouldn't want to be one of those hundred million citizens, provided I had the choice.

[ldvger 19]

mpetryni-

Yes, the interstate highway system was originally built for national defense purposes, as a transportation network for moving troops quickly from one population center to another in case of foriegn invasion or other imagined possible national security crisis.  Ike Eisenhower signed the Interstate Transportation Act in 1954 (I think) in response to a country at peace and prosperous but whipped into a frenzy of fear of Commies by senator Joe McCarthy and others of his ilk who had no other way to find leverage into the circles of power that controlled the purse strings of the national treasury.  To this day, the US military has priority for using the interstate system. 

 

The system was designed to run in as straight a line as possible between population centers, bypassing natural and then existing towns/cities of lesser population.  And, it was built that way.  The Eisenhower Tunnel, at an elevation of nearly 11,000 feet, on I-70 between Las Vegas and Denver, is the highest and longest multi-lane highway in the world.  Although why Las Vegas was chosen as a link on the network remains a mystery to me as, in 1954, it was not the sprawling population center it is now...can you say Mafia?

 

But I digress. 

 

There was no intent, originally, to provide access to major population centers from what was then rural America.  We already had the US Highway system in place and it had been working just fine for many decades as a network of linking cities to each other and linking rural area to cities.  Most of the interchanges than now exist on any of the Interstates near you were added many years after the original interstates were built.  In fact, because the imagined threat of foreign invasion never materialized, the interstate system became to be seen as a tremendous waste of money in the first years it was built and many people across America suspected the entire project was a scam to put money into the pockets of civil military contractors.  Be taht as it may...

 

The unintended consequence of building the interstates was the opening of undeveloped and, at that time, cheap land.  What began as a national defense measure became the genesis of suburban sprawl. 

 

And now, in 2005, just a few weeks ago, congress passed a $55 billion transportation bill, much of the money aimed at maintaining the Interstate highway system...adding new on/off ramps, increasing capacity, etc.  The shameless pork-barrel projects notwithstanding, the national defense purpose for which these highways were built are long forgotten. 

 

Lora/LD

[Wilfried Webber 22]

Lora, how come you believe that freeways were built for military purposes only?

The first American freeway, the Pennsylvania Turnpike of 1940, was a toll road intended for the use by the average car driver who just wanted to go faster and safer from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg.

The German Reichsautobahnen of the 1930s weren't used by armed forces, either.

 

All those roads were built only to serve the people. They were either propaganda projects, or simply a brand-new must-have thing. Drivers were excited about them and so more and more freeways were built.

I think that military purpose thing is just a pretext. It's commonly believed in the US as well as in Europe.

 

~WW

[ldvger 19]

Wilfried-

Hmmm, you misread my post, me thinks.  You are addressing high capacity highways around the world, whereas I was writing specifically about the US Interstates, a network of highways built under the authority of an act of congress (The Interstate Transportation Act).  High capacity highways existed prior to the passing of this Act, it's true, both in the US and elsewhere.  And, as you state, prior to the advent of the Interstates, highways were indeed built primarily to allow commerce to flow easily between population centers.  However, as the then system of highways had grown in a bit of a hodge-podge fashion over the 50 years of the automobile, there was no true nationwide planning or standards that had governed either constuction or routing.  Even the US Highway network (not to be confused with the Interstate network), begun in the 30's as a make-work project (WPA) to relieve enemployemnt during The Great Depression didn't really attempt to create a planned road network, as it basically just enlarged the capacity of existing routes.

And, in my discussion, I am not addressing state highways at all, toll or otherwise.

 

 

For an excellent detailed history of the evolution of the Interstates, check out this web site and you will see that national and civil defense is cited as the primary motivation for building it:

 

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/history.htm

 

Lora/LD