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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

From September, 1996.

Can the momentum of sprawl be halted?

It's already started. That McMansion 40 miles from town has already lost half its value since 2006. What will it be worth when gas hits $10/gallon?

Cheap energy built the sprawl; expensive energy will kill it.

But things still may not play out like OP would like. In my hometown, mom and pop businesses are still being replaced by big box chains, even in town. I never thought I'd see Home Depot, Target, & Costco 3 miles from downtown. If it's too expensive to drive to the sprawl, we'll just bring the sprawl to them.

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Oil is going to get expensive; there's no particular guarantee that energy is going to get expensive, though. (It will if we mindlessly continue our current policies, but expensive energy will have a way of clearing our minds about certain priorities.) And given that we're talking decadal time scales, how will "sprawl" be affected when we're using time-shared automatic-driving electric cars (and generalized transport network)?

I think there's a lot of fervent hope from a lot of people that sprawl is doomed by expensive energy, but personally I rather expect that technology will end up "saving" it in the end, a further testament to the trend towards decentralization, not erasing it.

What feels so strange is that the price of gas matters so much,

Sure a commute 40 miles each way will increase in cost from $5.33 to $13.33. But $8 seems hardly a concern when you are wasting 1.5 hours a day driving.

Cheap energy is certainly necessary to create sprawl, but it isn't the only thing. Rather urban areas are often downtrodden in the US. Take a look at San Francisco, a pretty nice place by big city standards; compared to its suburbs, it has worse transportation infrastructure, worse schools, more congestion, more noise, more expensive, more danger, more pollution. The benefits win out in my 20s, but I sure wouldn't want to raise a family there.

Transportation infrastructure and schools reflect poor governance more than anything, and for that matter so do many of SF's other flaws. Unfortunately we have political systems where population density counts against your political power.

"Cheap energy built the sprawl; expensive energy will kill it."

Everyone always says this, but nobody ever seems to consider the fact that the US is also a very very big country with tons of cheap land. Our population density is 83 people / sq. mi. Germany and the UK, on the other hand, are 593 and 660, respectively. Slightly more dense.

That's the biggest factor as to why we have sprawl IMO. As expensive as energy might get, it's still going to have to compete with the lure of cheap land...

Upvoted you for the cheap land observation. As late as the mid-1990's, you could still purchase 50 acres of ranchland in eastern Wyoming for about 28-29K.

Free highways built the sprawl too. If you had to actually pay for the costs of the highway that lets you sprawl, perhaps one would think twice.

A lot of roads are done by private developers.

Freeways in rural areas aren't that pricey. The interstate highway system cost about $500B inflation adjusted. Only about $1700/person amortized over 35 years. Or about $13M per mile.

To see how this isn't that pricey, consider the Central subway project in San Francisco which will cost $1.6B for 1.7 miles - $1900/resident

The roads in new developments are built by the developers. I'm not sure these roads have much to do with deciding to drive to work or take the train.

Yes, its true that most interstates are rural. Of course that is true. I'm sure that its 95% rural. That's the nature of a network that connects all of the major cities in the country. And this 95% is probably a lot less relevant to whether you decide to live in the suburbs than the much more expensive part. Of course, your edit about the cost of the SF road acknowledges this very fact.

Its also true that in dense urban areas, interstate highways make up a fraction of the roads used for commuting.

Highways that must be put through existing neighborhoods are very expensive. And that's where highways to the suburbs had to be built. Usually by forcing other people from their homes. A lot of the true costs of building roads is hidden in pollution too.

The cost to build something is not the only cost. Roads have to be maintained, snow removed and potholes filled.

All I'm saying is that growth would be much more organic and justified if those getting the benefits of sprawl paid its costs as they went, instead of receiving a subsidy that distorts things.

Don't we pay taxes?

you probably do. I have no way of knowing though.

where do you think that building goes when people move out? talk about legacy hardware..

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