Aha 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.
The Interstate system is typically attributed to Eisenhower, a Republican. The attitude that infrastructure is worth having isn't really a "progressive" attitude.
This 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.
Republicans 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.
Eisenhower 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.
Don'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.
This 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.
That'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.
Don'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.
There'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.
Well 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.
Many 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.
Moses 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)
Read 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.
It wasn't a conspiracy. In a country where laws against interracial marriage weren't struck down until 1967 (SCOTUS: Loving v. Virginia), there was no need to be furtive about racism. Quite the contrary, segregation was a selling point.
American history (and the history of many other countries) has lots of open racism. But it doesn't follow that the building of the interstate system was essentially racist.
Saying "highways should exist" isn't racist. Saying "highways should exist, and we're going to bulldoze neighborhoods where mostly darker-skinned people live to build them and route them to connect mostly areas where lighter-skinned people live" is racist. And it's what we did.
That may be true, in all honesty, I don't know enough, but am trying to learn as much of this history as time permits. Not originally from US...
That said, US on average seems to be doing a hell of a lot better in owning up to such injustices than many other place. For example, I was bored last night and reading about the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia circa 1700s, and somehow managed to find out about TWO distinct ethnic groups and languages that barely exist today, but were more or less thriving as late as early 1900s in the area I would have considered nothing but Russian. If you are interested, read up on the history of Vyborg and Ingria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria. Good luck getting the current residents to even knowledge this...
At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully, more progress is made to that end.
>At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully, more progress is made to that end.
You are clearly in denial to the point where you need to look at other nations 500 years ago and conjure things that never happened, to make yourself feel better about the U.S., a country that has never been democratic nor free.
As for Ingria in Sweden, still exist, have their own language and the state/county is still named after them, Ångermanland.
How can I be in denial if I said I'm just learning about the US history and details? I absolutely acknowledge that I have not read enough on the subject to have a proper informed perspective.
As for Ingria, I think we are referring to different places. I'm referring to the area mostly in present day Leningradskaya Oblast in Russia. From the same wikipedia article:
"According to the Soviet census of 1989, there were 829 Izhorians, 449 of them in Russia (including other parts of the country) and 228 in Estonia."
Compared to:
"By 1897 (year of the Russian Empire Census) the number of Ingrian Finns had grown to 130,413, and by 1917 it had exceeded 140,000 (45,000 in Northern Ingria, 52,000 in Central (Eastern) Ingria and 30,000 in Western Ingria, the rest in Petrograd)."
So from 140k to maybe ~800? At least to me, that's pretty heinous...
Edit: Note that events I'm talking about are less than 100 years old and, as a resident of the country doing it, I had no idea it even happened...
Because that land was controlled by Sweden before 1700s. But in any case, the article I linked to is written better than I can explain and also links to other relevant info if you are interested.
As 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.
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...
I 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.
There's a reasonable argument for busways over light rail -- the non-disaster failure mode of buses is a lot more reasonable than the non-disaster failure mode of rail. If a bus has mechanical issues, it doesn't stop the entire bus system. With rail -- a bit of engine trouble breaks the whole system.
I've seen them work reasonably well in Pittsburgh, along with the Bus lane going opposite traffic on the one-way streets (as opposed to say, Philadelphia, where everyone drives in the bus lane).
The problem with buses IMO is the planning - most of the time planners take the cheap way out and just let them use the same road resources as cars. IMO a good local transport is completely separate from the roads used by cars, such that congestion on the car road network doesn't affect the second system - i.e. you always get a real alternative. Having one lane for buses, taxis and ambulances would be a pretty good solution, but that's usually not how it works out. Also, you have to look at the whole system in terms of how much surface space it needs - in any reasonably dense city you soon start to need to go either underground or stilted. Railways have a much narrower footprint due to their efficiency - so if you can make them reliable (which is clearly doable, see Japan and Switzerland as examples), it's just a more space saving solution, thus you need to tunnel / stilt less.
With rail -- a bit of engine trouble breaks the whole system.
That depends on how you engineer the system. With reasonably frequent crossings, you can route around stalled vehicles. If you've got dedicated rights-of-way (rather than mixed-mode auto-and-LRV routes) then wrong-side operations isn't so critical.
With sidings or triple-tracking, you can offer only modestly degraded service, though at markedly higher initial cost and land use. Still far better than highway / surface-street designs.
Or you can "bounce" vehicles to either side of an outage, running service to the problem location and running truncated shuttle service on either side.
It's largely a matter of political will, costs, and frequency of outages. Which, generally, even on less-reliable system aren't exceptionally prevalent.
The other issue is that busses tend to fail (for various reasons) more frequently than rail.
With enough patience, one could have travelled from Woodland Hills to Redlands or Corona. Unfortunately, I do not know the time it would have taken, but the current bus system makes it nearly impossible.
If the freeway system was built in the same way that I see BART being incorporated into say the 580 in the Bay Area (right down the middle of the highway), it would have been a great setup. Want to drive the car? No problem! Want to avoid driving a car? We have you covered as well!
The routes 101, 405, 5, 10, 110, etc. cover are great. There are many intersections allowing for "hubs" and so on. Unfortunately, only choices are either cars or buses that have little advantage because they sit in traffic all the same.
Busways may be a middle ground, but I have not seen them work out very well in San Fernando Valley. I'm guessing because there is still insufficient density and poor bus coverage of perpendicular routes to the busway itself. Just a guess though...
Article mentioned metro/streetcars - these were not profitable, so were closed. Of course you can make tax-paid public transportation, but I guess because it has to be funded locally vs. funded federally as in case of interstate highways, it never happened.
The article also explained how the road system is subsidized (gas tax only covering 40-75% of freeway costs if I remember correctly). That's not too different from subsidies needed for public transport. If you want to see an example for highly profitable and privately owned public transport systems for cities, just look at Japan.
There are just a handful of public transportation systems that aren't subsidized with tax money. The Tokyo subway system is a good example, but even there it's probably only profitable because the subway lines own prime real estate around stations.
When I was a kid, I used to go visit family in Dayton, Ohio. We would take a day to "go downtown" and hop on the local electrically powered trollybus, pay some minimal fee and get a comfortable ride from suburbia to city. We'd go and walk around and hit a few department stores, eat some food, maybe take the bus a couple more times, and then grab a trollybus to get back home.
It was easy, cheap and just worked. I understand some of the system is still active in the city. It's kind of mindblowing to me that there's only 5 such systems in all of the United States.
I was a regular bus rider for most of my childhood and all of my adolescence. Buses were never "smelly" to me. Nowadays all of our buses are hybrid anyways.
The US and Canada once had almost 100 municipalities with streetcar lines in the first half of the 20th century, there may be a dozen or so left now. One could blame GM [1] but many municipalities abandoned their systems without much pressure.
Toronto --which I believe has the largest streetcar system in North America-- has had to employ a blacksmith for the last 3 decades to forge parts for the aging streetcars [2], though they apparently expect to retire him as the fleet is modernized.
They certainly tend to stick around longer than bus routes. Streetcars represent significant infrastructure spending, while a bus route can be changed by a bureaucrat.
In the Bay Area, Foothill Expressway literally replaced a good sized chunk of a rail line.
Prior to the early 60s, one of the Penninsula Commute rail routes actually split off in Palo Alto (right where Groupon is now, and where a Y existed until 30 some years ago), went down across El Camino and through where the VA is, and down Foothill to Los Altos, ultimately connecting up with the extant Permanente Branch. That was an alternate commute route from San Jose to San Francisco, hitting the west valley and south of San Jose.
Outside of the Key System, that was I think the biggest loss of rail transit in the Bay Area.
No. Any city needs a good way to get around. Ideally any person could go from any point to any point with ease. Theres nothing fundamentally special about the mechanism used to do so. If cars can do it, great! If they can't but trains and trolleys can, good!
I maintain that a pre-requisite to "good" public transportation is bad infrastructure for cars. If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed.
Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you.
Self-driving cars are obviously the future. Well, part of the future at least. I'm very curious what the "ideal" city would look like with self-driving cars at the center. What would a city look like if built from the ground up with them in mind?
> Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you.
New Yorkers have long commutes because of how phenomenally efficient their public transportation system is. During rush hour, it takes up to two hours to drive the 15-17 miles from my parents house in the Virginia suburbs to the middle of DC. An hour and a half is typical, most of it parked on I-66 or GW Parkway. The Metro North from Greenwich to Manhattan makes that 30-mile trip in an hour flat, like clockwork, in a far denser metro area.
Nope. Having a good car infrastructure doesn't mean everyone has or can have a car.
No amount of car infrastructure will serve the need of having the city core fill up with workers driving in their own cars during the day, either.
In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again.
"In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again."
To be honest, since I suspect that world won't be fictional, I think this whole debate is really a waste of time now. It wouldn't even matter if an alien brain ray struck the entire world and suddenly everybody agreed that public transportation was totally the only way to do anything ever, and all public transport spending was 100% rerouted into public transport... self-driving cars would still obviate all the plans before we could possibly fully enact them.
In a world where that level of consensus isn't going to happen, it's even moreso a waste of time.
I think that is an implausible level of optimism about the ubiquity of self-driving cars.
Building for a mixed-used future, with public transit serving a lot of people's needs for the next 30-40 years, and self-driving cars potentially starting to fill in the gaps in our lifetimes, seems like a far more realistic solution than "do nothing and wait for self-driving cars".
It's realism about the fact that you aren't going to drop in public transport everywhere in the US in anything less than several decades anyhow, in the face of the realistic opposition you're going to encounter to such a plan. It's fundamentally a hard sell you're trying to make for a lot of people, to give up the freedom to go anywhere they want whenever they want in exchange for going where the public transportation is going when the public transportation is going there. In a dense city like NY that may not be much of a tradeoff, but in huge swathes of the US that's an attempt to sell an incredible shrinkage of personal power to feed the moral goals that are, statistically speaking, not even necessarily particularly shared by the people being asked to give up their cars.
Quite a lot of people don't live in the big cities, after all.
On the other hand, when you can either own a car for all the money the public transport people are generally complaining about, or you can use a self-driving car service that still takes you anywhere you want, anytime you want, for less than you could own a car for, you've got a much easier sell.
If self-driving cars don't happen, well, frankly, give up your public transportation dreams. Self-driving car transport networks the only realistic path forward. Perhaps there are alternate universes where everything worked out peachy, but that doesn't provide you any help moving forward here.
Nearly every city already has public transportation, mostly buses, though more light rail/streetcar lines are built year by year. I know that very, very small towns (e.g. of the size you can walk across in 20 minutes) often have no bus system, but of course one isn't needed when the town is small enough.
No one's restricting your freedom by building public transportation, either. I have no idea where you're getting any of this stuff.
I know of no US city that's looking at an auto ban in the city core, not like some European cities have done. If you do, I'd love to hear more.
I can't even make sense of the the last paragraph you wrote, "if self-driving cars don't happen, give up your public transportation dreams"? Public transportation already exists, and self-driving cars are decades off from being available to the general public.
"Nearly every city already has public transportation, mostly buses,"
Oh, well, then, problem solved.
Why are we even having this conversation, then?
Obviously, because you want more than we currently have, in a rather staggering quantity. You can't both have enough and want much, much more whenever it suits you in the argument.
Original post said "If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed." That is not true. Public transportation will always play a role.
Try visiting Hong Kong sometime. Great road infrastructure. Great (possibly best in the world) subways. Roads are full of buses, delivery trucks, and taxis. Individuals don't own cars unless they're enormously rich, because it's 4-8x as expensive to own a car as in countries like the US.
Cities with good public transportation have longer commutes because a long commute on public transportation is far more tolerable than a long commute by car.
I'm sorry, but this is just a load of bollocks. There is a fundamental difference between public transport and cars, other than the upfront investment that was pointed out in another comment: A car is a ~12m2 sized thing that you have to (a) somehow route into the system (road space requirements) and (b) leave somewhere when you do your business.
(a) is an overhead of a factor of ~40 compared to people standing and a factor or ~20 compared to people sitting for the transport alone (I'm assuming here people driving alone, which from experience is how this mostly works out).
(b) is an additional constant overhead of 12m2 for every participant that's not moving.
In computer science terms, your network protocol sucks, and leads to inefficient cities.
Would you like an example? L.A. metro area has about the same size as Greater Tokyo, produces about the same amount of carbon emissions total (!) [5], yet provides space for 2.5x less people and produces ~2.4x less GDP at purchase power parity [1],[2],[3],[4].
Self-driving cars don't have to be left somewhere. They can go and transport other people. Or they can drive themselves out of the way somewhere to hang out for awhile. Or some combination there of.
I'm not sure how much I want to comment on your math equation. It's obviously much more complicated. It can't be reduced to an equation.
ideal self-driving cars basically remove (b) from my equation. The thing is, even if self-driving cars are around the corner now, I reckon that the type you can just leave on its own without any humans inside are still far out. Even just a solution for driving in bad weather conditions hasn't been tackled at all yet - you can't just shut down the city transport just because snow has covered up most of the visual markers. So, self-driving cars isn't going to solve any network problems for quite a while, and even when they do you still have overhead (a), which intuitively I'd say is even more important. I don't think it's that complicated btw. - if you do, please provide things I haven't considered and significantly change the outcome of the calculation.
> As 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.
The population density and distribution of that density is massively different in Europe and Japan than in the US.
For effective shared or public transit, you need transportation hubs that are a convenient distance from where people are and where they want to go. If people and population centers are very spread out, then the transit becomes both more expensive and less useful. Even if you can take rail between two population centers, odds are good that you'll still have to drive a long way to the train station then drive another long way to get where you're actually trying to go. Because there's not a lot of population, transit can't run frequently without being a massive waste of energy, so schedules become less convenient.
Note how Europe is consistently dense over a very large area, with a core of highly dense areas all fairly close to each other like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Munich, and Bern, while the adjacent regions like Italy, the Balkans, and even Poland have fairly consistent population density. In Japan, the density is highly concentrated on Honshu, and even then it's concentrated into certain cities and prefectures.
The US, meanwhile, has only a few dense regions, mostly in the Northeast, with the rest of population centers spread out very large areas. Not coincidentally, those more densely populated cities tend to have more public transit than the average American city. There are notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles, but LA is not representative of most of the country.
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant.
If you consider that public transit makes areas walkable, creates street-level shops, restaurants, and cafes, and densifies areas as a result, then creating public transit is an argument for creating density.
Only if you ignore the fact that most of the US population centers developed long before the automobile.
The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant.
Suburbs are largely a 20th century phenomenon and rail was very important in the history of the US. US population spread itself out for primarily for economic reasons (and also likely socio-political reasons).
The population centers, yes, but the population growth, and residential areas developed for it, largely after.
Population of the US in 1900 was roughly 76 million. It's 316 million today.
Auto ownership took off in the 1950s (after WWII and the post-war boom began). At that time, total population was 151 million, less than half that today.
Both of the two most populous states in the U.S. (California and Texas) assumed that position well after the dominance of the Automobile. California in 1960, Texas in the 1990s. California's population has increased 3.6x since 1950, Texas has by 3.4x. The third-ranked state, New York, by 1.3x.
Florida, set to surpass New York in the near future, has grown 7x in the same period.
Still, the point is that the transportation systems in the US have co-evolved with the growth and spread of its population. So I suppose you could technically say it's a "chicken-egg" problem. But only in the sense that the "chicken-egg" actually does have a real answer and that answer is they evolved together. There were various major decisions made along the way along with millions of everyday choices made by individuals.
Because cars happen to be a very convenient way to travel between an arbitrary number of relatively small population centers spread out over a wide area, which makes sense given the geography and economics of North America during that period.
transportation systems in the US have co-evolved with the growth and spread of its population
For the post-1950 period, I disagree. The car was established. Development followed auto-driven growth dynamics.
Land use is a regional issue at the scale of metro areas (or CMSAs). Not nationwide.
Average annual mileage for the typical American is 15,000 miles/year. That's 40 miles/day, or 20 miles one-way radius. Even assuming no weekend travel (all commutes are work related) you're still at 75 miles, or 37.5 miles one-way.
That is: transportation use is a local phenomenon. Distribution of population centers across the country doesn't matter, land use within those centers does. And those patterns have developed and overwhelmingly been driven by auto use for the past 65 - 75 years, with very few exceptions (e.g., NYC).
Your figure makes more sense as a per driver figure. There are about 100 million Americans who do not have a license to drive (and reason to believe that most of them do not drive illegally):
The passenger vehicle fleet is also about 250 million (estimates arriving at that figure are including pickups that are used as cars).
I guess the typical American might be a modal driver, but it seems odd to use a definition of typical that discards ~1/3 of the population in question.
That utterly misses the point that 1) most households have at least one driver, and that the typical distances travelled on a daily basis are consistent with suburban, auto-centric land-use patterns.
You can corroborate this with other sources, e.g., US Census commute patterns. Insurance and US DOT should also have driving stats.
It doesn't miss any point, it's just pedantic. The mean American vehicle doesn't even go 15,000 miles a year (there's only ~12,000 available according to gov statistics), it's a little impossible for the mean American to do so. Of course average and typical have other meanings than the arithmetic mean (but I pointed out a problem with using the numbers as the mode in the previous reply).
I'm not going so far as to argue about whatever point it is you are making, I'm pointing out that somewhere in either your characterization of the numbers you are using or the numbers themselves, there is an inaccuracy.
I've largely abandoned all hope of achieving some reasonable understanding here, but just what case are you making?
That the monthly miles driven should be 12k rather than 15k? A 20% delta doesn't change my fundamental argument at all. 15k vs. 1.5k vs. 150k would.
That I'm incorrect in my description of regional growth dynamics 1950-2015? You've not argued that at all, and it's the information I'm principally interested in.
Range: low of 4,785 (females 65+), high of 18.9 (males 35-54), total combined average: 13,476. That appears to be from a 2000 study, and alternate data shows growth since then:
3 trillion vehicle miles, 246 million registered vehicles, 210 million licenced drivers, 68.5% of the total population.
Maths gives us 12,195 miles/vehicle, 14.285 miles/driver.
I think we've litigated that point to fucking death, and shown my initial round-number estimate was reasonably accurate.
I was loose in saying "per American" rather than "per vehicle" or "per driver", but again, it doesn't materially change my main point concerning urban-area growth (the vehicle / passenger miles data are used to illustrate it).
If you are in fact making a minor / pedantic point, it helps to call that out. I'll preface my own such comments with an "NB:", "ObPedant", or similar comment.
Otherwise, I actually do appreciate corrections and clarifications. But prefer they're clearly given as such (though I'll accept them even when they're not).
My objection is that you pasted a veneer of numerical support around your conclusion.
If you had said "I think people tend to commute a medium distance on a daily basis and community development has followed along that dynamic" I wouldn't have anything to object to, the problem is that you took a coarse estimate (the 15,000 miles) and then eventually stated it as a possible "37.5 miles one-way". That should be an "about 30 or 40", not a 37.5. Given the wide variance, it's also not a great place to use the mean as a representation of the typical.
So my point, if you are going to present your conclusions as being based on/supported by numerical analyses (which you do all the time...), please do be careful to not to exaggerate the precision with which they are done.
I'd appreciate an explanation of where I've been inaccurate.
I agree that I raised a concrete objection in my initial post and did not mention the abstract motivation for raising the objection, so no need to pursue that aspect of it.
> Development followed auto-driven growth dynamics.
Development was also driven by things people wanted: Their own land. Their own house. Escape from the noise, pollution, and general harshess of industrial zones. Land was more affordable in the US than in Europe and Japan. Building probably was as well. Cars enabled the kind of development that people wanted.
The US, meanwhile, has only a few dense regions, mostly in the Northeast, with the rest of population centers spread out very large areas. [...] There are notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles, but LA is not representative of most of the country.
I didn't say the US isn't dense enough for high-speed rail. My focus isn't limited to high-speed rail, but all manner of public transit. I also mentioned distribution of density as well as raw density.
Most importantly, I was not addressing whether it can work or cannot work. That is not the question. The question is whether shared transit is and has been more convenient and cost-effective than roads, highways and automobiles.
I am explaining why a simplistic comparison between the US and Europe is misguided. I am countering the point "I lived in Europe and their public transit was so great why can't we have that in the US?" Which everyone upvotes because they're starry-eyed idealists who haven't thought through the economics and messy details.
Furthermore, I went beyond describing density as simply a number, but also referenced distribution of the density. The shape matters.
Your article compares Spain to California. But their situations are far different. Spain is a less-dense adjacent to a dense region. A couple connections into France and a ferry to Italy and you've got bandwidth into the heart of the existing network in central Europe. California, on the other hand, is a denser region on the opposite side of deserts and mountain ranges. They could build a rail system for themselves, but unlike spain they wouldn't have the huge advantage of a cheap and easy connection into a large existing network. This all helps to explain why the US and Europe did not evolve the same manner of public transit systems.
I see that China is looking to build a high-speed rail between Moscow and Beijing. [1] The relevant points: it does not exist yet; and China is booming.
I think your arguments against HSR are valid. That's not to say that I think HSR couldn't be effective in the US, but I do see there is a bigger hurdle compared to Europe/Japan, which either means you have to make it cheaper per mile of railway or the ROI will be further out. What I still don't see is how this all applies to local transport. If I understand you correctly, you claim that local transport options in Europe and the US cannot be compared. Why is that? And if so, how is it not an urban planning policy problem that was mostly produced in the post war era? Isn't it worth it to think about what could be improved?
> What I still don't see is how this all applies to local transport. If I understand you correctly, you claim that local transport options in Europe and the US cannot be compared. Why is that?
In some cases it can be, but that's where the issues of density and context/surroundings really come into play. In order for a transit line to be viable, you have to a critical mass of people willing to use it. It's inefficient to run trains and busses with no passengers, so schedules are reduced, which makes things less convenient for users.
In my experience, there actually ARE local public transit systems in the US. Most of them use busses, but they exist. Most people don't use the public transit unless they have to, though, because cars are so much easier and more convenient. And while more investment into transit could make it more attractive, there are still issues and limits on how much it would actually be used due to the generally fewer number of people with access to any one transit line, as well as the destinations available from the pickup spot.
And btw. I wasn't even talking about HSR across country - this issue is debatable. What's IMO not debatable is the necessity of efficient local public transport within population centers, be it on (underground) rails, designated road lanes or street rails, I don't really care, as long as it's mass transport.
I tried this "public transport" in San Francisco. It was a disaster. It takes forever and doesn't run when you need it. This of course is a big city with nice weather; ponder waiting by the curb during an ice storm while your bus/tram/streetcar is cancelled.
Even if it did sort of work, I'm not lugging two to four carts of groceries home that way, nor am I willing to make multiple trips per day.
Besides more free parking, what we really need is land reform. People don't live where they work because property taxes are grandfathered, real estate agents gobble up 6% of the home value, and so many other stupid expenses.
Some public transport there works well. I've taken BART from the airport to a hotel downtown and it wasn't a bad way to get there. I felt safe, should I have been concerned?
Most of your other points about mass transit are quite valid. E.g. "lugging" groceries. But why not "think different"? Can't you purchase in small quantities from neighborhood stores?
When I grew up in NYC it wasn't uncommon to shop just a block or two from home. You bought 1 loaf of bread, 1 quart of milk, a few pounds of potatoes, etc. It was easily possible to carry that stuff back to the apartment. It wasn't only possible, it was what you had to do. Hardly anyone owned cars.
I wonder what percent of residents of San Francisco own a car? How many use a car daily?
I think this is a case of where you just can't imagine living in a differently working system anymore. What you describe are typical problems in a place with bad public transport and/or urban planning that's not made for public transport (i.e. suburbia).
Here's how this works out in any Japanese or Swiss town/city above ~80k inhabitants: You have a public transport network where all the schedules are synched up. Ideally you have a metro/streetcar/trolley station nearby that can pick you up (if it's a normal bus you may have congested road, so you can't plan exactly by the minute, just like with cars). You go there 2min in advance. Once on board, you work/read HN/read/play/whatever [1]. You arrive at a trainstation, swipe a card, walk ~50m and wait 3min for a train. Again, read. 15-60min and 1-2 changes later you have arrived at your destination without even thinking about it, without putting you or anyone else in significant danger, without already being stressed out. On your way home you spend 10-15m more at one of the train stations where you had to change anyway, get some fresh grocery, and be done with it. No need for your exhausting weekly trips to the mall. You don't even have to leave the station building. Got anything else to do? No problem, there's service offerings for pretty much anything you need within 200m of where you are, because the train station brings so much density of people that it's worth it to have all kinds of stores open.
You know, I like driving - I dream about fast cars and all that. I just wouldn't want to be forced to do it every day with unplannable traffic conditions and all that. When I drive, I want to have an flexible schedule, i.e. the weekends.
I 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.
Most 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.
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.
Meh, the Romans and Greeks are upstart striplings when it comes to city planning. Mohenjo-daro in present-day Pakistan was built as a planned city in c. 2600 BCE, and Chinese capitals like Luoyang's first incarnations aren't far behind.
I'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.
My 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."
Yup, 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.
I 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.
Brilliant 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.
Perhaps he meant dodgy in the sense of "dishonest". I.e. ignoring the spirit if not the letter of the Berne Convention?
I'm by no means a legal scholar, but this story was apparently published in 1981. Russia agreed[1] to Berne protection for 1973 and later work. So why is the full text of the story available at that link?
The "garden city" movement was a thing, but not quite what you're describing. "Towers in a park" was an organizational scheme for cities proposed by Modern architects, such as Le Cobusier in his Ville Radieuse proposal, and is maybe more like what you're thinking.
Brasilia is definitely the kind of alternate future garden city I'm thinking of. I mean, can you imagine walking between buildings at opposite ends of that area? In that heat?
Why not build taller buildings? Crammed together on a grid, provide underground walking areas?
Perhaps there is a different term for the type of city you are thinking of, generally cities such as Letchworth[1] are moreso what is known as a garden city.
Letchworth is a Garden City. Brasilia is a "towers in a park" type Modernist city. You're interested in "towers in a park."
Historically, cities like Brasilia were designed around the logic of the car. For example, most roadway intersections feature over and underpasses, cars are completely segregated from pedestrians. By most accounts, it doesn't work so well.
There's also Paulo Soleri. In his plan for the Newark Airport, he proposed to house the entire population of New Jersey. The runways would have been on the roof.
Chalking 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.
Exactly. 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.).
The 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)
> 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?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 50.6 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Close associates of Moses claimed that they could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold.
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.
That said, US on average seems to be doing a hell of a lot better in owning up to such injustices than many other place. For example, I was bored last night and reading about the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia circa 1700s, and somehow managed to find out about TWO distinct ethnic groups and languages that barely exist today, but were more or less thriving as late as early 1900s in the area I would have considered nothing but Russian. If you are interested, read up on the history of Vyborg and Ingria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria. Good luck getting the current residents to even knowledge this...
At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully, more progress is made to that end.
You are clearly in denial to the point where you need to look at other nations 500 years ago and conjure things that never happened, to make yourself feel better about the U.S., a country that has never been democratic nor free.
As for Ingria in Sweden, still exist, have their own language and the state/county is still named after them, Ångermanland.
As for Ingria, I think we are referring to different places. I'm referring to the area mostly in present day Leningradskaya Oblast in Russia. From the same wikipedia article:
"According to the Soviet census of 1989, there were 829 Izhorians, 449 of them in Russia (including other parts of the country) and 228 in Estonia."
Compared to:
"By 1897 (year of the Russian Empire Census) the number of Ingrian Finns had grown to 130,413, and by 1917 it had exceeded 140,000 (45,000 in Northern Ingria, 52,000 in Central (Eastern) Ingria and 30,000 in Western Ingria, the rest in Petrograd)."
So from 140k to maybe ~800? At least to me, that's pretty heinous...
Edit: Note that events I'm talking about are less than 100 years old and, as a resident of the country doing it, I had no idea it even happened...
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...
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.
I've seen them work reasonably well in Pittsburgh, along with the Bus lane going opposite traffic on the one-way streets (as opposed to say, Philadelphia, where everyone drives in the bus lane).
That depends on how you engineer the system. With reasonably frequent crossings, you can route around stalled vehicles. If you've got dedicated rights-of-way (rather than mixed-mode auto-and-LRV routes) then wrong-side operations isn't so critical.
With sidings or triple-tracking, you can offer only modestly degraded service, though at markedly higher initial cost and land use. Still far better than highway / surface-street designs.
Or you can "bounce" vehicles to either side of an outage, running service to the problem location and running truncated shuttle service on either side.
It's largely a matter of political will, costs, and frequency of outages. Which, generally, even on less-reliable system aren't exceptionally prevalent.
The other issue is that busses tend to fail (for various reasons) more frequently than rail.
Check out this map of the old system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric#/media/File:Lo...
With enough patience, one could have travelled from Woodland Hills to Redlands or Corona. Unfortunately, I do not know the time it would have taken, but the current bus system makes it nearly impossible.
If the freeway system was built in the same way that I see BART being incorporated into say the 580 in the Bay Area (right down the middle of the highway), it would have been a great setup. Want to drive the car? No problem! Want to avoid driving a car? We have you covered as well!
The routes 101, 405, 5, 10, 110, etc. cover are great. There are many intersections allowing for "hubs" and so on. Unfortunately, only choices are either cars or buses that have little advantage because they sit in traffic all the same.
Busways may be a middle ground, but I have not seen them work out very well in San Fernando Valley. I'm guessing because there is still insufficient density and poor bus coverage of perpendicular routes to the busway itself. Just a guess though...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562430
It was easy, cheap and just worked. I understand some of the system is still active in the city. It's kind of mindblowing to me that there's only 5 such systems in all of the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Dayton
Businesses can count on their presence into the future, as can riders who try to plan their car-less lives in their community.
The US and Canada once had almost 100 municipalities with streetcar lines in the first half of the 20th century, there may be a dozen or so left now. One could blame GM [1] but many municipalities abandoned their systems without much pressure.
Toronto --which I believe has the largest streetcar system in North America-- has had to employ a blacksmith for the last 3 decades to forge parts for the aging streetcars [2], though they apparently expect to retire him as the fleet is modernized.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi...
[2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/meet-pat-maietta-the-t...
Prior to the early 60s, one of the Penninsula Commute rail routes actually split off in Palo Alto (right where Groupon is now, and where a Y existed until 30 some years ago), went down across El Camino and through where the VA is, and down Foothill to Los Altos, ultimately connecting up with the extant Permanente Branch. That was an alternate commute route from San Jose to San Francisco, hitting the west valley and south of San Jose.
Outside of the Key System, that was I think the biggest loss of rail transit in the Bay Area.
I maintain that a pre-requisite to "good" public transportation is bad infrastructure for cars. If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed.
Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you.
Self-driving cars are obviously the future. Well, part of the future at least. I'm very curious what the "ideal" city would look like with self-driving cars at the center. What would a city look like if built from the ground up with them in mind?
New Yorkers have long commutes because of how phenomenally efficient their public transportation system is. During rush hour, it takes up to two hours to drive the 15-17 miles from my parents house in the Virginia suburbs to the middle of DC. An hour and a half is typical, most of it parked on I-66 or GW Parkway. The Metro North from Greenwich to Manhattan makes that 30-mile trip in an hour flat, like clockwork, in a far denser metro area.
No amount of car infrastructure will serve the need of having the city core fill up with workers driving in their own cars during the day, either.
In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again.
To be honest, since I suspect that world won't be fictional, I think this whole debate is really a waste of time now. It wouldn't even matter if an alien brain ray struck the entire world and suddenly everybody agreed that public transportation was totally the only way to do anything ever, and all public transport spending was 100% rerouted into public transport... self-driving cars would still obviate all the plans before we could possibly fully enact them.
In a world where that level of consensus isn't going to happen, it's even moreso a waste of time.
Building for a mixed-used future, with public transit serving a lot of people's needs for the next 30-40 years, and self-driving cars potentially starting to fill in the gaps in our lifetimes, seems like a far more realistic solution than "do nothing and wait for self-driving cars".
Quite a lot of people don't live in the big cities, after all.
On the other hand, when you can either own a car for all the money the public transport people are generally complaining about, or you can use a self-driving car service that still takes you anywhere you want, anytime you want, for less than you could own a car for, you've got a much easier sell.
If self-driving cars don't happen, well, frankly, give up your public transportation dreams. Self-driving car transport networks the only realistic path forward. Perhaps there are alternate universes where everything worked out peachy, but that doesn't provide you any help moving forward here.
Nearly every city already has public transportation, mostly buses, though more light rail/streetcar lines are built year by year. I know that very, very small towns (e.g. of the size you can walk across in 20 minutes) often have no bus system, but of course one isn't needed when the town is small enough.
No one's restricting your freedom by building public transportation, either. I have no idea where you're getting any of this stuff.
I know of no US city that's looking at an auto ban in the city core, not like some European cities have done. If you do, I'd love to hear more.
I can't even make sense of the the last paragraph you wrote, "if self-driving cars don't happen, give up your public transportation dreams"? Public transportation already exists, and self-driving cars are decades off from being available to the general public.
Oh, well, then, problem solved.
Why are we even having this conversation, then?
Obviously, because you want more than we currently have, in a rather staggering quantity. You can't both have enough and want much, much more whenever it suits you in the argument.
You were the one who brought up freedom??
(a) is an overhead of a factor of ~40 compared to people standing and a factor or ~20 compared to people sitting for the transport alone (I'm assuming here people driving alone, which from experience is how this mostly works out).
(b) is an additional constant overhead of 12m2 for every participant that's not moving.
In computer science terms, your network protocol sucks, and leads to inefficient cities.
Would you like an example? L.A. metro area has about the same size as Greater Tokyo, produces about the same amount of carbon emissions total (!) [5], yet provides space for 2.5x less people and produces ~2.4x less GDP at purchase power parity [1],[2],[3],[4].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP
[5] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223399559_Twelve_met...
I'm not sure how much I want to comment on your math equation. It's obviously much more complicated. It can't be reduced to an equation.
The population density and distribution of that density is massively different in Europe and Japan than in the US.
For effective shared or public transit, you need transportation hubs that are a convenient distance from where people are and where they want to go. If people and population centers are very spread out, then the transit becomes both more expensive and less useful. Even if you can take rail between two population centers, odds are good that you'll still have to drive a long way to the train station then drive another long way to get where you're actually trying to go. Because there's not a lot of population, transit can't run frequently without being a massive waste of energy, so schedules become less convenient.
Check out this density map:
https://dhs.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/popdensi...
Note how Europe is consistently dense over a very large area, with a core of highly dense areas all fairly close to each other like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Munich, and Bern, while the adjacent regions like Italy, the Balkans, and even Poland have fairly consistent population density. In Japan, the density is highly concentrated on Honshu, and even then it's concentrated into certain cities and prefectures.
The US, meanwhile, has only a few dense regions, mostly in the Northeast, with the rest of population centers spread out very large areas. Not coincidentally, those more densely populated cities tend to have more public transit than the average American city. There are notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles, but LA is not representative of most of the country.
If you consider that public transit makes areas walkable, creates street-level shops, restaurants, and cafes, and densifies areas as a result, then creating public transit is an argument for creating density.
Only if you ignore the fact that most of the US population centers developed long before the automobile.
The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant.
Suburbs are largely a 20th century phenomenon and rail was very important in the history of the US. US population spread itself out for primarily for economic reasons (and also likely socio-political reasons).
Population of the US in 1900 was roughly 76 million. It's 316 million today.
Auto ownership took off in the 1950s (after WWII and the post-war boom began). At that time, total population was 151 million, less than half that today.
Both of the two most populous states in the U.S. (California and Texas) assumed that position well after the dominance of the Automobile. California in 1960, Texas in the 1990s. California's population has increased 3.6x since 1950, Texas has by 3.4x. The third-ranked state, New York, by 1.3x.
Florida, set to surpass New York in the near future, has grown 7x in the same period.
That's all post-auto era growth.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004986.html
For the post-1950 period, I disagree. The car was established. Development followed auto-driven growth dynamics.
For the post-1950 period, I disagree. The car was established. Development followed auto-driven growth dynamics.
Land use is a regional issue at the scale of metro areas (or CMSAs). Not nationwide.
Average annual mileage for the typical American is 15,000 miles/year. That's 40 miles/day, or 20 miles one-way radius. Even assuming no weekend travel (all commutes are work related) you're still at 75 miles, or 37.5 miles one-way.
That is: transportation use is a local phenomenon. Distribution of population centers across the country doesn't matter, land use within those centers does. And those patterns have developed and overwhelmingly been driven by auto use for the past 65 - 75 years, with very few exceptions (e.g., NYC).
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/onh2p4.htm
The passenger vehicle fleet is also about 250 million (estimates arriving at that figure are including pickups that are used as cars).
I guess the typical American might be a modal driver, but it seems odd to use a definition of typical that discards ~1/3 of the population in question.
You can corroborate this with other sources, e.g., US Census commute patterns. Insurance and US DOT should also have driving stats.
I'm not going so far as to argue about whatever point it is you are making, I'm pointing out that somewhere in either your characterization of the numbers you are using or the numbers themselves, there is an inaccuracy.
That the monthly miles driven should be 12k rather than 15k? A 20% delta doesn't change my fundamental argument at all. 15k vs. 1.5k vs. 150k would.
That I'm incorrect in my description of regional growth dynamics 1950-2015? You've not argued that at all, and it's the information I'm principally interested in.
Here's the fucking FHWA US DoT stats: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
Range: low of 4,785 (females 65+), high of 18.9 (males 35-54), total combined average: 13,476. That appears to be from a 2000 study, and alternate data shows growth since then:
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/DOT-Miles-...
Oh, here's the most recent report year, for 2011.
3 trillion vehicle miles, 246 million registered vehicles, 210 million licenced drivers, 68.5% of the total population.
Maths gives us 12,195 miles/vehicle, 14.285 miles/driver.
I think we've litigated that point to fucking death, and shown my initial round-number estimate was reasonably accurate.
I was loose in saying "per American" rather than "per vehicle" or "per driver", but again, it doesn't materially change my main point concerning urban-area growth (the vehicle / passenger miles data are used to illustrate it).
If you are in fact making a minor / pedantic point, it helps to call that out. I'll preface my own such comments with an "NB:", "ObPedant", or similar comment.
Otherwise, I actually do appreciate corrections and clarifications. But prefer they're clearly given as such (though I'll accept them even when they're not).
If you had said "I think people tend to commute a medium distance on a daily basis and community development has followed along that dynamic" I wouldn't have anything to object to, the problem is that you took a coarse estimate (the 15,000 miles) and then eventually stated it as a possible "37.5 miles one-way". That should be an "about 30 or 40", not a 37.5. Given the wide variance, it's also not a great place to use the mean as a representation of the typical.
So my point, if you are going to present your conclusions as being based on/supported by numerical analyses (which you do all the time...), please do be careful to not to exaggerate the precision with which they are done.
For someone grousing about numeric precision your own lack of verbal precision (or accuracy) in noting issues is richly ironic.
I agree that I raised a concrete objection in my initial post and did not mention the abstract motivation for raising the objection, so no need to pursue that aspect of it.
Development was also driven by things people wanted: Their own land. Their own house. Escape from the noise, pollution, and general harshess of industrial zones. Land was more affordable in the US than in Europe and Japan. Building probably was as well. Cars enabled the kind of development that people wanted.
Think again[1].
[1] http://persquaremile.com/2011/05/27/u-s-not-dense-enough-for...
Most importantly, I was not addressing whether it can work or cannot work. That is not the question. The question is whether shared transit is and has been more convenient and cost-effective than roads, highways and automobiles.
I am explaining why a simplistic comparison between the US and Europe is misguided. I am countering the point "I lived in Europe and their public transit was so great why can't we have that in the US?" Which everyone upvotes because they're starry-eyed idealists who haven't thought through the economics and messy details.
Furthermore, I went beyond describing density as simply a number, but also referenced distribution of the density. The shape matters.
Your article compares Spain to California. But their situations are far different. Spain is a less-dense adjacent to a dense region. A couple connections into France and a ferry to Italy and you've got bandwidth into the heart of the existing network in central Europe. California, on the other hand, is a denser region on the opposite side of deserts and mountain ranges. They could build a rail system for themselves, but unlike spain they wouldn't have the huge advantage of a cheap and easy connection into a large existing network. This all helps to explain why the US and Europe did not evolve the same manner of public transit systems.
I see that China is looking to build a high-speed rail between Moscow and Beijing. [1] The relevant points: it does not exist yet; and China is booming.
[1] http://rt.com/business/225131-russia-china-speed-railway/
In some cases it can be, but that's where the issues of density and context/surroundings really come into play. In order for a transit line to be viable, you have to a critical mass of people willing to use it. It's inefficient to run trains and busses with no passengers, so schedules are reduced, which makes things less convenient for users.
In my experience, there actually ARE local public transit systems in the US. Most of them use busses, but they exist. Most people don't use the public transit unless they have to, though, because cars are so much easier and more convenient. And while more investment into transit could make it more attractive, there are still issues and limits on how much it would actually be used due to the generally fewer number of people with access to any one transit line, as well as the destinations available from the pickup spot.
And btw. I wasn't even talking about HSR across country - this issue is debatable. What's IMO not debatable is the necessity of efficient local public transport within population centers, be it on (underground) rails, designated road lanes or street rails, I don't really care, as long as it's mass transport.
Even if it did sort of work, I'm not lugging two to four carts of groceries home that way, nor am I willing to make multiple trips per day.
Besides more free parking, what we really need is land reform. People don't live where they work because property taxes are grandfathered, real estate agents gobble up 6% of the home value, and so many other stupid expenses.
Most of your other points about mass transit are quite valid. E.g. "lugging" groceries. But why not "think different"? Can't you purchase in small quantities from neighborhood stores?
When I grew up in NYC it wasn't uncommon to shop just a block or two from home. You bought 1 loaf of bread, 1 quart of milk, a few pounds of potatoes, etc. It was easily possible to carry that stuff back to the apartment. It wasn't only possible, it was what you had to do. Hardly anyone owned cars.
I wonder what percent of residents of San Francisco own a car? How many use a car daily?
Here's how this works out in any Japanese or Swiss town/city above ~80k inhabitants: You have a public transport network where all the schedules are synched up. Ideally you have a metro/streetcar/trolley station nearby that can pick you up (if it's a normal bus you may have congested road, so you can't plan exactly by the minute, just like with cars). You go there 2min in advance. Once on board, you work/read HN/read/play/whatever [1]. You arrive at a trainstation, swipe a card, walk ~50m and wait 3min for a train. Again, read. 15-60min and 1-2 changes later you have arrived at your destination without even thinking about it, without putting you or anyone else in significant danger, without already being stressed out. On your way home you spend 10-15m more at one of the train stations where you had to change anyway, get some fresh grocery, and be done with it. No need for your exhausting weekly trips to the mall. You don't even have to leave the station building. Got anything else to do? No problem, there's service offerings for pretty much anything you need within 200m of where you are, because the train station brings so much density of people that it's worth it to have all kinds of stores open.
You know, I like driving - I dream about fast cars and all that. I just wouldn't want to be forced to do it every day with unplannable traffic conditions and all that. When I drive, I want to have an flexible schedule, i.e. the weekends.
Huh? Wouldn't it have been even more curious to include people who didn't exist?
> 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
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luoyang#History
"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
1 - http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...
2 - http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg
3 - https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379
4 - http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-crazy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum
A dodgy Russian site has the text http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt
I'm going to give the TV adaptation a quick watch also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BmRiDxrnPQ
I'm by no means a legal scholar, but this story was apparently published in 1981. Russia agreed[1] to Berne protection for 1973 and later work. So why is the full text of the story available at that link?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Russian_F...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse
Why not build taller buildings? Crammed together on a grid, provide underground walking areas?
There's certainly no shortage of cars there https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bras%C3%ADlia+-+Federal+Di...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letchworth
Historically, cities like Brasilia were designed around the logic of the car. For example, most roadway intersections feature over and underpasses, cars are completely segregated from pedestrians. By most accounts, it doesn't work so well.
But yeah, this kind of design doesn't seem to work well no matter the density of the buildings. Cities really need to work around pedestrians.
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.
(FWITW, I'm highly in favor of green cities and efficient public transportation. And highly against politically charged exaggerated one sided articles.).
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)
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?