The Unfinished History of U.S. Freeway Revolts | Hacker News Reader

The Unfinished History of U.S. Freeway Revolts

citylab.com

45 pointsjseliger33 comments

> Most famously, in New York City the writer and urban visionary Jane Jacobs took on Robert Moses, rallying community opposition to his grand plan for the 10-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have destroyed parts of Little Italy and SoHo.

The biographer Robert Caro paints a maddening picture of how Robert Moses decimated communities in NYC with his highways with effects that live on today. Moses did so with a disregard and even callousness for freeway placement, even when it would have made more sense not to have it run through a vibrant community.

The Power Broker is the best book I read last year. It is enlightening, frustrating, and at times enraging. It is 1344 pages. I recommend the audioboook.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker

I've been wishing for years that this would become available on Kindle. My commute wouldn't allow me to easily lug around such a tome, so I have yet to read it despite its obvious quality. I don't understand why a book publisher would hold out on an ebook version yet have an audiobook available...

Interesting. I see that Amazon does not have an ebook of it yet there appears to be an epub on library Genesis so depending on your scruples...

Download it and mail a check to the author.

If I remember correctly, Caro himself didn't want an ebook version published.

I have family in Saint Louis and we visited the City Museum which has various artifacts and historical anecdotes about the city.

Over and over they would show something really cool, like the old baseball stadium, townhouses, trolleys, neighborhoods and it would end with, “they were all demolished to build highways”.

Saint Louis itself is now the definition of a suburb-city, lacking character with a very small walkable downtown, and everyone has to drive to get from strip mall A to strip mall B. Very sad what the car did to that city. Even my family who lives there recommends not moving there.

>The revolts did help usher in federal policy changes that prioritized local input, historical preservation, and the environment

Which seems to be leading to infrastructural stagnation as no city or state seems to be able to please the local stakeholders enough to build anything (not just highways).

no, that's mostly because infrastructure is grossly underfunded and we built so much unsustainable urban sprawl we can't afford to rebuild it

It seems crazy today that anyone thought neutering cities with freeways was a good idea in the first place.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/was-the-automo...

Did they see it as neutering cities? Transportation infrastructure is typically seen as a means of supporting growth by connecting regions. Freeways were likely seen as a natural extension of that approach. While many modes of transportation had a negative impact in the immediate vicinity, it is probable that they underestimated the impact of freeways both in terms of environmental factors and encouraging urban sprawl. In other words, they embarked upon a grand experiment without realizing that it was an experiment.

Right. I think they failed to imagine how big the local disruption would be.

Especially since they were busy demolishing & re-planning districts anyway, replacing slums with big block projects. They clearly had no idea how awful these new districts would be, and to me this seems like a very similar misunderstanding of how cities work.

I also wonder a bit if they learned the wrong lessons from rail. Some cities, like London, added a ring of terminal stations, which still today means you have to schlepp across town to continue. Other cities, like Berlin, re-built so that lines ran through, and in hindsight the disruption was worth it.

" and to me this seems like a very similar misunderstanding of how cities work."

This is an interesting rebuttal to those re-inventing cities. From 1965. Short summary: The new hierarchical designs are callously authoritarian and socially disruptive and pathological.

http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexan...

Thanks, that's an interesting take. Some were sane!

But the power was all on the other side then, I think. High modernism, central planning, creating the new man, etc.

Freeways were designed in part to help the US army traverse the county in times of war. Before freeways, the US did a transcontinental trip with all kinds of vehicles including a young Eisenhower who saw the importance of fast transit.

They were essential in the event on an invasion. I guess they could've been made federal and not usable by civilians.

That was the motivation for the interstate system at a national level, but not the reason access freeways were put directly through the center of a number of cities. There's not much military usefulness in something like the I-345 spur that cuts through downtown Dallas, or the now-demolished Cypress Street Viaduct through Oakland. If you just wanted a national road network, it would've been cheaper to bypass dense urban areas. Those kinds of urban freeways had more to do with postwar planners' ideas about the future of housing/working/commuting.

We're discussing the decision-making of people in the US in the 1950s, correct? If communists take control of a dense urban area and throw up barricades to block the more narrow streets, there is military usefulness in having a freeway passing through that urban area.

It is also theoretically useful in case of a railway strike.

This was the 1950s. If it was even slightly conceivable that Communists would take a city somehow, after an amphibious landing across a distance the world had never seen, and the city had not already been reduced to rubble by incoming ICBMs or strategic bombing, it would have been destroyed by a stay-behind nuclear mine.

The Communists were big on revolution. As in, from the inside, done by the workers of the target country themselves, usually with a lot of foreign help but no full-blown foreign invasion. It may seem implausible now, but many countries had already fallen to revolutions, and it was not unreasonable at the time to think it might happen in the U.S.

The communists would have been internal- beatniks and what not.

Eisenhower was vehemently against freeways going through urban areas. Freeways are supposed to bypass cities. He was overruled by the bureaucracy.

How’d that work out for the Romans?

It helped make them one of the largest, most-efficient empires the world had ever seen. All empires come to an end. The duration is what makes one special. Rome didn't completely collapse until the 1500s when Constantinople was lost. Ceasar was around 0AD and there was roman history before way before him too.

Not sure what your comment was getting at lol. Roads were fantastic for Rome.

The US projects power all over the globe, with 11 aircraft carriers, over 300 more ships, Hawaii, Guam, bases in Okinawa, Kuwait, Germany, etc.

Yet, the interstate system was designed to make the 48 states easier to defend in an invasion? If we're ever humbled to to point of a North American invasion, the parallels to Rome will be rich.

It was only when Rome's empire faded, and they could not maintain control of their colonies, that the Germanic tribes finally sacked the Eternal City, and they were aided greatly in their invasion by an extensive road system stretching from the frontier straight back to Rome.

If a humbled and bankrupt nation wants to make an invasion difficult, then it needs all the mountains and swamps it can get.

I agree with you on that. Roads help the enemy too. I grew up in rural northern Georgia and hope I can make it home to live in the woods if shit ever goes down.

Freeways are the arteries and veins of the country. Almost everything in most people's houses and offices was on a freeway inside an 18 wheeler at some point.

I would even say they are so relied upon that arial bombing or terrorist attacks at major freeway intersections would cripple the economy for months and create a ripple effect lasting much longer.

The argument being made isn't that freeways shouldn't exist at all, but should be rammed through already established neighborhoods. Plenty of the world's greatest cities (London, Paris, Rome, arguably NYC) have no to minimal freeways running through them, yet they all thrive.

If you look at where Robert Moses wanted to build freeways in Manhattan, you'd no longer have some of its best neighborhoods, like Greenwich Village. If you look at where the highways were built, particularly Queens and the Bronx, the neighborhoods declined. The same things happened in most cities that had highways rammed through already established communities.

The seemingly eternal problem in the NYC metro area is the timing of the highway revolt.

There's a bunch of giant pieces of infrastructure that were built to serve those intended highways.

That's not to say I wish the highways were built, only that it's made cutting down on cars significantly in Manhattan nearly untenable from a regional transportation perspective, because the outlying "rings" to avoid going through the core are lacking.

I wish it came 10 or 20 years earlier and that said pieces of infrastructure were instaed better "outer rings" (ex: Things like A Long Island Sound road crossing) to be able to avoid going anywhere near the core for many trips.

When I lived in California, the town I lived in was surrounded by freeways to the extent that there was only one way out of town that didn’t require traveling over or under a bridge, and that required you to drive the wrong way on the freeway to find the one spot where there’s a gap in the concrete barrier.

If there had been a sizable earthquake, it would have been effectively cut off despite being right in the middle of a wider urban area.

Let’s keep that in mind when we propose the next sweeping utopian change to the country.

Keep what in mind exactly?

Keep in mind that many ideas that sounded very good turned out to be very bad.

Total stagnation is not the answer either, but we need to strike a balance. Testing things on a smaller scale first is a good best practice, even if it means most of us will miss out on the "obvious" perceived benefits for a while.

Testing out not ramming highways through cities? Or testing out ramming highways through cities? The thing is that there were and have always been many voices screaming that the destruction of their communities was a bad thing, but in many (not all) the highways got rammed through anyway.

There's little parallel with what is happening today unless you can point to something specific. This feels kind of like a "beware government" post, but I'm unclear on how that is actionable policy. Resist all government isn't a viable option either.

Good stuff. Led me to a couple of surprisingly detailed Wiki articles. In many cities the interstate project was greeted like an invasion. Often because of elimination of ethnic neighborhoods in the guise of 'urban renewal'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_... (US scope)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt (worldwide scope)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com