Urban highways destroy wealth
urbankchoze.blogspot.com
urbankchoze.blogspot.com
- Urban highways cost more money than urban transit
- They divide cities logistically.
- Introduce pollution
- Are very unsightly to neighborhoods
- Steal traffic from roads in commercial zones and undermine regional commercial activity.
- Put emphasis on car-first neighborhoods and businesses (which give little ROI).
- Encourage urban sprawl and community inefficiency.
My take: These points are understood and expected from urban highways, but then again urban highways were meant to solve a different problem. The points are simply what the solution costs.
(That's a serious question. I'm interesting in hearing how other people view the purpose of an urban highway.)
I'm a fan of ring roads, Rochester for instance had a small inner loop and a much wider outer loop of freeways (with freeway segments and decent arterials connecting the inner to the outer, it looked kind of like a wagon wheel) that meant you could get almost anywhere pretty quickly.
It was much more of a real city up through about 1950. This comparison shot is striking: http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/
At least they’re trying now though, http://www.cityofrochester.gov/InnerLoopEast/
Travel in the city gets slower because there's more traffic, it becomes harder to move into and out of the city due to increases in commuter activity, and rush-hour traffic on local streets gets worse as more people try and funnel into these highways.
[Begin Rant]
This brings up the biggest problem I have with Bay Area public trasnportation. I live 11 miles from work, but it's impossible to get there via any reasonable public transportation-based route in less than 1 hour. On flat land, I can bike at least 50% faster than that, in normal clothes, without breaking a sweat.
The BART portion of my trip takes around 25 minutes. Once I get off BART, my choices are basically to take Muni or walk. Walking gets me there reliably in around 25-30 minutes. Muni theoretically gets me there in around 15 minutes, but that's in an ideal world where there are no delays on the line and I don't have to wait to transfer. I'd rather end the day $2.25 richer and get the little bit of exercise than save a whole 15 minutes. And, of course, the same goes for the trip home.
People who live in, say, the Outer Sunset and commute to SOMA or the Financial District have even worse options. Your Muni trip involves taking 2 or 3 buses, and there's no other reasonable way to make the commute than drive (and we know how miserable and expensive driving in SF is).
[End Rant]
Since the highway will only reduce traffic congestion for a short time it's something you can sell to the voters again at the next election.
That's disingenuous. I commute by car exactly because public transport takes longer to most of my clients, even when including structural and incidental traffic jams.
It's happened exactly three times in the last five years that my car commute took longer than public transport would have taken. And on one of those occasions (excessive snowfall), most trains were canceled too.
There's nothing that can be done to stop this without extremely draconian laws or turning public roads into very expensive toll roads, without ripping the roads out as Portland did.
The principle you refer to here is Marchetti's constant. It's the idea that people will make decisions about where to live and work to achieve an average commute time of 30 to 45 minutes in general. So the faster transport options are, the farther from their workplace people will live.
And yes, IF you already have a complete network of urban freeways in a metropolitan region, THEN using fast transit options like commuter rail or commuter buses can help take people off of the highways, freeing up space for more people living even farther away. A good example of this "transit as highway capacity extension" approach is the commuter rails in North American cities that only go downtown during peak AM and go to the suburbs in peak PM, and not running the rest of the day. These forms of transit clearly exist to take pressure off of the highways at their most congested time, to free up the space for even more cars and perpetuate highway-oriented development.
Good transit options in the absence of highways have a different impact. And as you mentioned, transforming highways into expensive toll roads also can serve to deter sprawl built along them.
Your "reverse" commute to exburbs/rural areas is likely not impacted much by congestion. You actually have a good reason to use a car.
That unending column of cars you see always headed in the opposite direction on your commutes is the actual subject at hand here.
Today, the need for highways hasn't gone away, but more enlightened urban planning and urban gentrification means that cities are finding ways to either relocate or ameliorate the effects of those roads -- though the expense is significant.
Urban highways in the US are a facet of the American Dream vision of the suburbs as "a safe place to raise your kids," which is basically a euphemism for "far away from the scary minorities who live in cities."
Generally speaking, in cities you are more likely to be the victim of homicide and crime. In suburban and rural environments you are substantially more likely to be killed/injured in general.
http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
Take gun homicides for example. The vast majority of people who push for gun control that I've had discussions with (totally anecdotal, I realize) will cite mass shootings as a reason rather than gang violence even though the latter accounts for an astronomically higher percentage than the former.
The difference is that, if you're not in a gang you generally don't have to be concerned about dying in a gang shootout. A mass shooting on the other hand, could happen to anybody in a public place regardless of whether or not you've removed yourself from other likely causes. In other words, you have no control over the latter so it creates a higher level of fear even though it's rare.
Similarly, flying in an airplane exacts more fear than driving a car because when you're in a car you feel in control.
Lastly though, it is about more than just safety. I have 2 kids. I moved to the suburbs.
In the suburbs I can have more yard space and house space and room space and quiet for the kids to play than if I were in the city. Safety wasn't really a factor as much as just having space (for me at least).
But I'm white and make pretty decent money, so that's a big reason why.
For one thing, inner city murders are dispute resolution for people who don't believe in the courts far more often then they're random. If you're not involved in gang feuds, you can write off a good chunk of the murder rate. You also have to look at those stats adjusted for density. Chicago has a lot of murders because it is large, for example. Per capita it is unexceptional.
Cities are made less safe when only the desperate remain. Funding for services that contribute to safety (schools, mental health, homeless shelters, even police) crumbles with the tax base. A middle class re-immigration to the cities in theory brings with it the money and political will to rebuild those services. What we see now in decaying cities is not an essential property of cities, but an effect of their abandonment. New York is a great case study about how a city can clean up and bounce back from this, though it's tactics were sometimes flawed.
In places without the density to support transit, you are less likely to be the victim of a street robbery but also far more likely to die in an auto accident, particularly a DUI. I have insurance for my phone and a backup debit card at home. I only have one life.
So no, probably not. Particularly the further away ones. As "average daily hours in a car" grows, your safety does not.
...it has long been the prevailing opinion that American suburbs developed as a result of the increased use of the car, GI Bill funded home construction, and white flight from desegregated schools after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. But in reality the trend had started several years before Brown.
In 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began advocating for "dispersal," or "defense through decentralization" as the only realistic defense against nuclear weapons, and the federal government realized this was an important strategic move. Most city planners agreed, and America adopted a completely new way of life, one that was different from anything that had come before, by directing all new construction "away from congested central areas to their outer fringes and suburbs in low-density continuous development," and "the prevention of the metropolitan core's further spread by directing new construction into small, widely spaced satellite towns."
Nuclear safety measures drove the beginning of the abandonment of our cities. After being told that "there is no doubt about it: if you live within a few miles of where one of these bombs strike, you'll die" and "We can always hope that man will never use such a weapon but we should also adopt the Boy Scout slogan: Be prepared," getting far enough out of the "target" city so that the blast might be survivable seemed wise. Those who could afford to left. Those who remained were generally less affluent, and minorities made up a disproportionate share of the poor.
A far worse development for minorities in America came in 1954, when the federal Atomic Energy Commission realized that with the advent of the vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb, "the present national dispersion policy is inadequate in view of existing thermonuclear weapons effects." But by then it was too late; the suburbs were growing, but offices were still by and large downtown. A new strategy was needed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower instead promoted a program of rapid evacuation to rural regions. As a civil defense official who served from 1953 to 1957 explained, the focus changed "from 'Duck and Cover' to 'Run Like Hell.'"
Cities across America ran nuclear attack drills, each involving tens of thousands of residents, practicing clearing hundreds of city blocks in the shortest possible time.^° It became clear that this would require massive new transportation arteries in and out of cities. The resulting National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 was the largest public works project in history. It created a system that provided easier access from the suburbs into cities as well as a way to more rapidly evacuate cities in case of nuclear war. The new freeways had to be built in a hurry and were naturally routed through the cheapest real estate, which usually meant plowing through richly tapestried and vibrant minority communities, displacing millions. Although poverty had been concentrated in these very neighborhoods, their destruction ripped apart the social fabric of America's uprooted minority communities for years, destroying social support networks and leading to a generation of urban refugee.
These accommodations for defense brought about an immense change in the fabric of America, altering everything from transportation to land development to race relations to modern energy use and the extraordinary public sums that are spent on building and maintaining roads— creating challenges and burdens that are with us today, all because of science and the bomb.
Otto's Book:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Fool_Me_Twice.html?id=6...
More quotes from the book:
Most northern states (where a majority of major cities in the 1950s existed) didn't have legal segregation. They already had and still have defacto segregation.
>Someone asks what problem urban highways are meant to solve.
>Someone answers the question, and the answer happens to involve race.
Would you have preferred if the question wasn't answered, so as to avoid a discussion on race? This isn't trolling, and it isn't off-topic. Very rarely do comments on the third level stay 100% relevant to the article being discussed. It sounds like you just don't like talking about race, and I bet it's easy to figure out why.
Thank goodness. Some of the best, most interesting and informative comments come from discussions that digress into tangents. HN would be much less interesting without these.
It's not like people are bringing race into opinions about the primary colors here: this is relevant to the topic.
If you really want to stop this phenomenon, the problem is with government and zoning AFAIC. You need to build a lot more housing (and good-sized housing too, not less than 500sf) to greatly increase the housing supply, which will then lower prices and get people to stay in the city. Lower housing prices would also keep poorer people from having to commute so much since they certainly can't afford inner-city prices either. With modern building technology, it really shouldn't be that hard to build bigger/taller buildings and make more space for everyone, but no one really wants to do that for some reason.
All island are plagued with the "points of entries and congestions". Montréal is 30x40km island. With limited bridges.
So by making a large artery that almost lead people from bridge to bridge (N/S) you may think you can create a traffic that will not interfere with the inter urban traffic... (laminarizing) thus getting rid of intra congestion. (Since it is in a trench and has bridges on top).
But it also creates opportunities (like with real estates part) that have adverse consequences. And vortex around the entry points.
It also create ruptures in the city that artificially recreates partitions. Thus recreating "islands" in the island. Maybe not for cars, I admit. It also generates more pressure on the outside bridge thus congestion at the edge of the city that are way more expensive to solve. Which make montréal famous for its traffic jam when commuters leave/come.
Regarding the inside near décarie : not all inhabitants have cars some are not rich enough. And it is destroying local area business (thus jobs for the guy already plagued). Thus parts maybe gradually abandoned (unused infra decay faster) in the blocks near Decarie, and ... well, it does not attract neither business, nor wealthy inhabitants. So it is like a decaying scorch in the city, infra that still require maintaining with less income ... slowly draining money by fiscal pressure (no perequation between districts) ... making people leave ... (vicious circle)
I am really puzzled by the way engineers model flux in the city. I would really like to understand the bug in their brain. Probably education + "a one best way and no need to measure"
Why don't all city/stated paid engineers paid with public money don't work like and open knowledge community?
A medieval based city (Europe) is often with bridges on a river.
US squared big cities are often on rivers.
And probably the same everywhere. Flux congestion due to bi partition of graphs is such a common pattern out there.
The rivers are here because they were normal way of communications transport. But if it is not a river, it can be highways, mountains...
I may be an idiot but google does not show papers, or stackoverflow, or public conference when I search for "how to solve traffic congestion in city with a bridge". Every single city fight the problem on their own.
Why isn't this problem on the public place?
My answer is engineers don't have the right culture. They believe in canonical ways of doing and do not accept to be scrutinized or share.
Engineers nowadays are for me like a medieval corporation stuck to defend their own privileges at the expand of the community. Maybe it is time to question the education system that build experts.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.
As well, in any profession with large public impact, there is a gap between what the professionals know and what the public accepts. A planner can tell you how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge, but it might not be so simple for a politician to convince people to pay millions, or worse, alter their lifestyle to make it happen.
To give an example: do you think economists and policy professionals don't have a lot of ideas to simplify and improve the tax code? Then why aren't they implemented? Because lobbying and special interests, because talk radio, because social equality, because families, because people think of themselves as impoverished millionaires, because messy real-life stuff.
I do not trust any kind of expert or "wise people" that want me to trust them without having access to their so called wisdom.
I do not hear the "necessity is evil but we have to live with it". If people are not willing to prove their worth to the community and being scrutinized they should gracefully resign and admit they are not fit for the mission. This coward attitude is disgusting from people having a corporation that protect the security of their job based on ethic.
And last but not least, they should not spend money of others resulting in the slavery of public debts if they cannot give tokens that -at least- they did their bests in terms of means to achieve their goals.
People with powers should accept to be liable for their actions : it is called responsibility.
Great, so now they've all resigned and we're back to the start with no idea how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge.
Best ask StackOverflow.
> Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed.
You have a long day ahead of you if you want to rant about non-open licensed academic papers
And they are the best tool for that job. The problem is that they alone are not enough, but any other option alone won't be nearly as good.
So what's a politician to do? Easy: extend the highways to cities. In the 1950s the thought was that cars were going to lead us to a glorious future, free from congestion on public transit, so urban leaders gladly paved over their downtowns. There were (and still are) huge subsidies for suburban areas, and other fears were that without these highways cities would be irrelevant as everyone moved to the suburbs and jobs eventually moved with them.
In the wake of the planning failures of the 50s and 60s with regards to highways cities moved huge amounts of planning powers to hyperlocal areas and requiring environmental reviews, stopping all the highway nonsense. Unfortunately, it created a new villain in the form of the newly empowered NIMBY.
Wealthier residents categorically avoid urban transit in many major municipalities because they are generally unsightly (dirty, littered with ads) at worst and generally unreliable (complete and total lack of consistency in travel times and distances from homes) at best.
$ person transported/km for highways >> subway
For all the cons you quoted.
Living in montréal, biking all year.
The problem is much more the diffusion of the flux (aggravated by graph partition and an asymmetry of rules making turning left strongly discouraged). They don't seem to have any engineers studying hydrodynamics, percolation, diffusion or geometry or physics in their offices. They reason in terms of big arteries and making car go consistently fast there (50) and construction costs and rely on magic for congestion and diffusion.
Riding a bike feels like you are gonna die every morning. Especially in winter.
They weirdly enough make expensive dangerous bike paths to solve the problem that are more likely to cause accidents than none. And they evaluate that a fall from a bike make cyclists safe with a 50 cm security distance (I am quite taller and when I fall, it is much more 1m20 margin).
Let's say that even if some jerks found it funny to scare cyclists and sometimes bump them, on the 99.99% distribution they are nice people but a tad forgetting to watch there mirrors when opening their 50 cm doors in my 80 cm "safe" space on the streets.
Had some bruises, fears, strong words and went to the hospital get my wife after some accidents.
Still alive, though. Still alive. Pretty proud of us and faster/cheaper than most transportations (car and subways included).
When I need to get anywhere in New York, most of the time I am better off grabbing the west side highway or the FDR rather than going through the grid and hitting traffic lights and gridlock constantly. So that's two highways, one on either side of a 2.3 mile wide (at most) island and then 95 crosses it at the top.
San Francisco similarly has elevated 280 and 80, and 101 mostly on the ground with some lights slowing it. At least SF is much bigger than Manahattan for similar amount of highways to help his point.
I get the feeling he just isn't from the US and doesn't know anything about our cities, though, so that paragraph is just way off.
For the ones he's mentioned DC's got big sections that aren't well served by highways, but there is still the beltway, the BW parkway/I295, I395, the southeast freeway. I don't know Hartford that well, but it's got two major interstates going thru.
I wonder what "relatively few" means, and what some examples of cities with "relatively many" highways would be.
I-83 ends downtown. There's also 695 (the beltway), 395 (from 95 to the stadiums/downtown), 895 (Harbor tunnel), and 195 (BWI airport connector).
It's never felt underserved highway-wise to me, but I've never actually lived there, just visited a lot.
This article, like many on the topic, also take a one-dimensional view of highways -- as people movers. The flow of goods and services (especially emergency services) is at least as important. Throughout the Bay Area, highways are critical infrastructure just to move goods and supplies, if nothing else. 880/17 in Oakland became a chokepoint after the 1989 earthquake took down the Cypress structure, for example, and that would have been even worse had 980 not been completed not long before.
880 wasn't even originally an Interstate, but it was absorbed into the system because so much freight moves on it.
if... hospitals are well distributed
The East Bay situation is worse. Eight large hospitals are located within one mile of the Hayward Fault.
FWIW, the sentence quoted above says that cities with fewer urban motorways are overrepresented in that list of the richesty urban centres, it doesn't say every city listed meets that criteria.
The article also discusses goods and services in the case study it's looking at - comparison between the Montreal subway and highway built for the Expo. i.e. about how moving passengers onto underground subways leaves more space for movements of goods or services on the surface. A similar argument applies to any shift towards more space-efficient modes of transport for passengers.
Also, I don't quite see the argument on emergency services. Inner city highways/motorways are mostly for moving from the centre into and out of the suburbs. Emergency services need to go from any random point to the nearest hospital, which is a different thing. Sending hundreds of thousands of highly space inefficient cars into city centres (which have a fundamental limit on street space, and their capacity to handle traffic) is highly likely to increase congestion and make it more difficult, not less difficult, to move around on the surface streets from one point to another in the centre. You'd have to introduce some congestion charging system, or perhaps bus lanes, otherwise building the road is likely to make the situation worse.
Where highways really shine is in moving goods into and out of cities. If you have high-volume industry in the centre of a city, or for instance a port, you clearly need some way of getting the inputs and outputs into and out of the city. But there does seem to be a continuous, long standing trend of moving this kind of infrastructure out of city centres. Modern container ports and factories need greater economies of scale, and tend to be situated on the outskirts of, or outside, cities where land is cheaper. And Western economies are moving more towards services rather than manufacturing. A big part of this debate is about what a city is for, and how to reconcile that with changes in transport and industry.
But it does list San Jose first, implying that it is (most?) representative.
...
"Also, I don't quite see the argument on emergency services... Emergency services need to go from any random point to the nearest hospital"
Exactly! And what is the fastest way to the nearest hospital with an open emergency room (let alone a real trauma center) in such areas? I don't know, but I assume that most cities lack real hospitals within fast access of downtown by surface streets (due to traffic, if not also distance). In the San Jose case, you're talking VMC, which would be 20+ minutes away by surface streets but maybe 8 minutes using 280.
In San Francisco, the only hospital South of Market is SF General. (Technically South or East of Market, but SOMA is a well-known term).
And that's just Manhattan. There's also the BQE in Brooklyn and Queens, which doubly undermines the original point.
Getting to the airport: there is no way to get to the airport easily. There is a dedicated bus line that might get stuck in traffic for 10$, or you pay 35$ for Uber, or 50$ for a normal cab (which also might both get stuck in traffic). You need to plan at least 2 hours from your house to get there, often 3 hours in advance for your flight. I've taken the bus dozens of time, and you can see the faces of the poor passengers, realizing they thought 1h to get 20KM away would be enough.
I go back and forth to Amsterdam and the difference is embarrassing. I get to Schiphol, hop on a train (every 5 mins), it costs 5 euros and I'm at Central Station in 15 minutes.
Light train? metro extension? How hard can it be?
Here is my version: Urban highways create unparalleled amounts of wealth. By enabling people, businessman, police, firefighters to get from point A to point B faster; they boost the economy. They also reduce pollution, since you are not stuck in traffic.
But hey, I have no data to back this up.
As to your claim, throwaway as it may have been, here is why I think it to be wrong.
First of all, police, firefighters and other public services rarely use highways in urban areas. The reason for that is that urban highways are few in number due to their monumental construction costs, so each highway tends to be a few miles away from the nearest parallel highway. As a result, going from A to B in the same city is often faster on arterials than on highways for trips that are 6 miles or less, because the detour to access the highway is longer than the time gain from using it.
Second, highways do speed up longer distance travel, but how much of a benefit is it really? That depends on the kind of travel. As I wrote in the article, rural highways that connect regions together serve an important economic role by helping to speed up the transport of goods and people between them. However, commuting is quite a different beast, because with regards to commuting, there is a phenomenon called "Marchetti's constant", people tend to make choices of location for their residence and their workplace to maintain a commute time of roughly 30 minutes on average, because people understand distance as travel time, not as actual distance. So when you speed up travel inside a metropolitan area (from suburb to city/other suburb), what you do is that you incite people to live further and further away from their workplace and from the stores they patronize.
Therefore, urban highways do not really lead to a reduction of commute times overall (some may have that benefit, but rarely is it generalized) but rather to an increase in distance driven. Which leads to more pollution (though often less concentrated), higher transport costs and a development pattern that makes transit non-viable, therefore forcing people to buy cars to access jobs and services.
An example of this is that in 1972, a study of commuting time and distance revealed that the average commuting time for people commuting 20-24 miles to work was 36 minutes, just 6 minutes more than for people commuting 11-14 miles. In other words, an increase of commute distance of 100% was associated by an increase in commute time of just 20%. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c8824.pdf (table 6.7, page 19 of pdf)
So higher speed was correlated with longer commute distances AND with longer commute times. Correlation is not causation, but that should give people pause when they claim to want faster roads to reduce commute times.
So higher mode share for cars and greater distance traveled means more pollution, more wealth expanded just to provide transport (which consumption, like electricity, has no good in and of itself). That's a drain on the economy.
Now, because I'm nice, I'll give you one thing: highways allow cities farther away to become economically integrated, resulting in much bigger metro areas. Since much of the modern economy gains from concentrating people and resources in an economically integrated area, this may be seen as a positive. However, what we've seen in Asia and Europe is that in the absence of highways, metro areas can still be just as populous, concentrating as many people and resources in one economically-integrated region... that region just happens to be much more compact, often concentrated around train stations, with highways going around inhabited areas, connecting industrial areas, serving essentially for trips to and from other regions.
I don't understand this point. Living further away doesn't mean they stop patronizing stores entirely, they just patronize different stores. If a store sees their clientele move, they can either move themselves, or if both regions now have enough customers to support it expand to another location.
The problem is the increased money and land spent on transportation, the increased pollution, the unfriendliness of the system for pedestrians / anyone who can’t drive, and the inability to build mass transit to cover the same areas.
also in the world of automated cars we're about to enter i would think the amount of people you can transport via freeway would far outstrip rail, not to mention that there are obvious consumer preferences.
I love rail, but i feel like we're about to see rail become far less pervasive with automated cars / busses etc coming online. it will just be that much more convenient to get to where you're going.
If you come from inside the city, the city could (and should) have the transportation necessary.
If you come from outside the city, the article is only about intra-urban highways, not about circular roads to go around the city if you just need to go through to the other side.
> also in the world of automated cars we're about to enter i would think the amount of people you can transport via freeway would far outstrip rail
That makes very little sense.
> I love rail, but i feel like we're about to see rail become far less pervasive with automated cars / busses etc coming online. it will just be that much more convenient to get to where you're going.
I'd expect the opposite. With full car automation you remove the necessity for car ownership and parking, this means you can easily get automated transport to a hub, then use public transport from there. That's especially the case for intra-urban transport, even in cities with good intra-urban public transport there is very limited capacity and convenience to leave your car on the outskirt and jump on light rail or metro if you come from the suburbs or from a neighbouring city. Automated cars fix this, you just leave the car and it goes do something else, the other way around you can notify the system that you'll need a car when your traincar reaches whichever station, and it can wait you there.
SO imagine you drive on your local streets until you get to this "highway". Then via some mechanism (something like the drive-through car wash but more heavy duty obviously), you merge onto the highway and get pulled by electric motors (perhaps even motors within your own car) along with all the other cars. You can then relax in your car, read, nap or watch videos until you are taken out at your exit ramp.
No pollution, no grid-lock, no accidents. Just a smooth ride all the way to within 2-5km from your destination.
When the first train is built in a metro area, it's not going to be useful to very many people. As more lines are built, however, that first train line becomes useful to more people because they can transfer to another line, or a bus line. As the third and fourth lines are built, the marginal utility of that each new mile of tracks goes up as the train becomes feasible for more people.
Of course there are examples of both highways and trains that probably shouldn't have been built where they were built (http://streets.mn/2014/07/07/strangulation-on-the-green-line...). My point is that cost comparisons of building a new highway versus building a new train are skewed by the fact that most metro areas have a mature (even crumbling...but that's another point) highway system, but few is the US have a large network of public transit yet, other than buses that are often slow, late and dirty.