Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy | Hacker News Reader

Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

texasmonthly.com

380 pointspseudolus544 comments

> But it wasn’t strictly an “everything is bigger in Texas” ethos that caused Houston to sprawl the way that it does. Rather, Cold War–era urban design philosophy in the U.S. prioritized sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre–World War II—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were seen as being susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities such as Los Angeles and Houston were less likely to be targeted for a nuclear attack. Sprawl was a deterrent against Soviet aggression.

That's the first time I've heard this theory.

Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.

Not to mention that fallout, breakdown of infrastructure, disease and hunger that followed a strike would affect the entire city in any case.

As a decidedly amateur historian with interest in this area, I think that claim is true on its own but also does not tell the entire story.

It is true that decentralization was viewed as a major component of nuclear survivability, particularly in the earlier part of the cold war. This was the time period during which the FEMA (today's name) crisis relocation program was being devised, for example, and the high cost and complexity of crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent that it's probably fair to say that it was the main motivation with materiel movement as a second) served to highlight the inherent vulnerability of dense cities and keep it very much in the minds of government planners. Decentralized cities had an inherent advantage to planners in that money could be saved on crisis relocation efforts. Of course the crisis relocation program was never fully implemented, but the way of thinking was fairly influential.

The federal government had an enormous role in suburbanization of US cities in many, many ways, which is actually part of what makes it hard to address this point. Support for suburbanization was not coming just (or even primarily) from FEMA, all kinds of federal agencies had a hand. Much of the urban renewal work of the 20th century took the effective form of relocating poor people to the suburbs and replacing their inner-city housing with industrial/commercial/transport, for example the Model Cities program of the late '60s. This was in part a result of the general feeling that the inner city was where poor people lived and so improving their economic situation required getting them out of it, part of it was merely the practical issue that substantially improving a dense area is a lot more expensive than razing it and build something new there. I don't know if these programs were strongly influenced by crisis planning, they probably were at least in part, but it seems unlikely that crisis planning was a much bigger influence in federal advocacy of suburbanization than the more organic trends of white flight and urban decay that came out of a set of race and class relations, in a potent combination with some simple budget and timeline considerations.

My point is that nuclear planning was a factor, but the massive suburbanization of the postwar decades originated from many factors out of which nuclear crisis planning was only one, and I'm not convinced that it was one of the bigger ones in the end. Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists very openly advocated for suburbanization of cities and that view was influential, but at the same time so much of suburbanization was motivated by a new vision of the American dream that came out of the peculiarities of post-war economics and demographics, racism, the radical popularity of the automobile (which not only enabled low-density areas but often required the destruction of high-density areas to provide freeway access to business districts), and probably at least a few other things.

Any claim that "urban sprawl is a result of x" where X isn't a list of things is probably pretty hard to defend. A complete change in not just urban planning but people's patterns of life tends to require a confluence of factors.

This is a really great response. I think there are a ton of both selfish and altruistic reasons for the urban sprawl that is Houston. I grew up here (Alief area) and that was the burbs when I was young. (It’s about 15-20 minutes drive from downtown) there was a 10 or so mile gap between where I lived and Sugarland. Now it all runs together. I now live due south of Katy in an unincorporated area about 40 miles away from downtown Houston. Land and housing is still relatively cheap here but it’s filling out every year.

I say that to say this- I didn’t move way out here to get away from some ethnic group or to some other insidious reason. I moved here because I have a large (blended) family and we wanted to own land. It’s a popular narrative to blame sprawl on racism or living above your means. I think the real reason is way more boring than that. Move away from a population center and things get cheaper. Gas is cheaper. Groceries are cheaper. Price per square foot is much cheaper. Those who are upper middle class can live well in the sprawl so of course they do. I have neighbors of every race religion and culture here. They all want the same thing- decent schools elbow room and some fresh air...

Right, and this is a big part of the post-war economics. After WWII a huge number of people were looking to buy homes in an unusually short span of time, and they pretty much all wanted a "typical American home" with lawn and fence. On top of this, there was a large workforce available that basically kickstarted the American homebuilding industry as we know it today, and made buying a brand-new home a very affordable and attractive option.

And what do you get when you have a huge number of people looking to buy brand-new houses? Urban sprawl, there's not really any way to avoid it.

Cheap land and big house is a huge draw for sprawl.

The problem is this is a fundamentally unsustainable proposition. The US is hitting those problems now and it's not pretty. It's not just gridlock but problem that once things stabilize, maintaining sprawl costs more than maintaining a compact city[1]. The roads and the schools in the suburbs are often good only when they're new - once they age, the problem become visible (California is harbinger for the rest of sprawl land, this state has the older sprawl, remember). Poor services can cause an area of sprawl to become undesirable and then it's hard to recover - public transit is hard to add when distances are large but you can still wind-up poor people lacking vehicles in the hinterlands.

[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

It seems like there would be solutions to most of those problems. Roads are long due for a replacement but something more efficient and cost effective. Utilities are already moving towards decentralization with electricity leading the way but sanitation is on the horizon (see Bill Gates efforts). Depending on the outcome of COVID schools are going to be radically transformed. I think there’s enough energy pushing away from city centres right now to fuel a renaissance of the suburbs.

Roads are long due for a replacement but something more efficient and cost effective.

What could that possibly be? I don't know of anything even on the horizon. Rails and steel wheels are more energy efficient but far more costly to build and maintain. Other nations use rail well by ... not having sprawl. Suburban sprawl essentially rests on the private automobile. As the gp essentially said, the draw of sprawl is a big house and a car, which can be nice 'till your whole planet is on fire and you're choking in rubble (I live in California, can you tell - But Texas will notce climate change too, if they haven't). A road is a just a flat piece of ground, it's pretty hard to find something simpler. Freeways are cheaper to build than railways. But the cost of rebuilding gets huge.

So basically, there are not solutions to these problems. We've basically hit Decline of the Roman Empire levels here. That empire took hundred of years to fall. I'm hoping things last past my lifetime.

I grew up in Alief too, back when you had to drive past miles of farm fields to get there. We moved there because my dad, a pilot, flew out of Andrau Airpark. (Also, seeing your post history, I am a friend of Roger Linn.)

Tell Roger hey for me and I would love to beta test the next linn drum!!!!

Houston is by far one of the most diverse areas I’ve ever visited in the US, up there with NYC.

And look at that- my cousin has joined the discussion.

What up, Craig!

The INTERESTING QUESTION is did the Federal Housing Administration prioritize white wealth and lives by moving them into an area less likely to get nuked by the USSR?

Also kudos for not being a racist...

But you might want to take a look at history. The US government actively encouraged urban sprawl with low-cost loans and redlining starting with Roosevelt and the New Deal.

"Beginning in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (HOLC) included in the FHA Underwriting Handbook “residential security maps” used to help the government decide which neighborhoods would make secure investments and which should be off-limits for issuing mortgages[...] Green areas were were explicitly homogenous, lacking “a single foreigner or Negro.”

SOURCES:

- https://www.thoughtco.com/redlining-definition-4157858

- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...

- https://www.businessinsider.com/how-redlining-kept-black-ame...

> crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent that it's probably fair to say that it was the main motivation with materiel movement as a second)

I've heard that before, but the DOT claims evacuation was a minor factor. From https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/interstatemyths.cfm#ques...

President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United States was attacked by an atomic bomb.

President Eisenhower’s support was based largely on civilian needs—support for economic development, improved highway safety, and congestion relief, as well as reduction of motor vehicle-related lawsuits. He understood the military value of the Interstate System, as well as its use in evacuations, but they were only part of the reason for his support.

Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System.

The primary justifications for the Interstate System were civilian in nature. In the midst of the Cold War, the Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and Congress added the words “and Defense” to its official name in 1956 (“National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”). However, the program was so popular for its civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even if defense had not been a factor.

Yeah, I'm really not sure about this - stories of the strange history of the Eisenhower freeway system are extremely common and there's just a surprising amount of myth around them, like the airplane landing thing that we've seen elsewhere in the thread. It's probably unnecessarily conspiratorial to think that the motivations were anything other than what was officially said (e.g. economic advantages), but I give a certain weight to evacuation as a motive because the vast majority of the efforts made towards survivability were remarkably secretive and it was common, at the time, for the government to use cover stories as justification for survivability efforts. Consider, for example, how FEMA used the FBI as a "front" for the crisis relocation program in order to deny their involvement. It's the kind of secret-keeping that seems really pointless and strange now (how much does it even matter to anyone if it's the FBI or FEMA inventorying relocation sites?), but is an artifact of the ultra-paranoid and minimally accountable atmosphere of the time. Most of these things remain pretty secretive today, not necessarily because there's some ongoing push to keep it a secret, but through the more boring mechanism of once secret, now obscure documents being hard to get declassified.

So I sort of suspect that evacuation was a bigger factor than the government admits, but that's purely speculative. Just like suburbanization there are definitely a lot of reasons the interstates happened.

It’s really common for decisions to be made for more than one reason, even if some of those reasons are just advantages brought up during the planning discussions. I can easily see the defense motives as being one of the many factors involved in the freeway development.

Right, and if my borderline conspiracy theory that evacuation was a bigger factor than we know today is at all true, I'm not saying that the federal DOT is lying to us today or anything. If there was a considerable FEMA influence in the motivation and design of the system, staff today probably just don't know about it. A lot of this stuff happened in face-to-face conversations, a lot of the documentation was classified and by the time it hit the DECL ON it was moldering in a bankers box somewhere... the same reasons that a lot of stuff about the relocation program isn't very well known today despite it being declassified. One of the consequences of secrecy is that the whole thing is more likely to just be forgotten as decades go by and the people who were in the know cycle out. And FEMA and its precursors seemed to have a particularly weird and insular inner culture that makes them hard to talk about from a historical perspective today.

I mean, you can just read the original text. Section 108(a):

>It is hereby declared to be essential to the national interest to provide for the early completion of the "National System of Interstate Highways", as authorized and designated in accordance with section 7 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. It is the intent of the Congress that the Interstate System be completed as nearly as practicable over a thirteen-year period and that the entire System in all the States be brought to simultaneous completion. Because of its primary importance to the national defense, the name of such system is hereby changed to the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways". Such National System of Interstate and Defense Highways is hereinafter in this Act referred to as the "Interstate System".

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-70/pdf/STATUTE-7...

> Support for suburbanization was not coming just (or even primarily) from FEMA, all kinds of federal agencies had a hand.

There were also non-government actors pushing this - banks redlining the suburbs in order to achieve soft segregation in areas without formal Jim Crow laws on the books, for example.

The legacy of this is the most segregated city in the US, Milwaukee, is in the north, and a major cause was redlining.

Well, nowadays, designing a city around defense would seem ridiculous.

It’s funny that the innermost areas of many European cities have designs that go back to the days when everyone lived behind walls.

Also at least famous example in North America:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street#Early_years

different times, different threat models. I think we may as well see a city design emerging which would be taking into account aerial viral spread, remote work/study, etc. which would affect density, transportation, etc. Deepening stratification of society will naturally generate even higher social tension gradients which may present a potential threat to social stability, and thus it may require even more intentional measures in the future city designs to support social stability in the face of such gradients. I think we can see city designs addressing such emerging trends as autonomous delivery/transportation (which naturally plays well with the stratification), policing and public safety in general - i.e. more conductive to total surveillance, robot based policing (how about that one at Shoreline Cinema 16 or even those Starships crawling on Castro - today delivering pizza it'd politely wait for you to let him pass, yet i'm sure that while waiting it dreams about tomorrow when painted with police insignia it'd be forcing its way though the crowd by throwing tear gas and delivering taser jolts :) and making it easier for containment of protest and terrorist activity.

Part of this is brinkmanship. Even if there was no practical way this would improve even short-term survivability, if the Soviets believed that the US believed this would work, that would be enough to show the US would not be cowed by their nuclear arsenal. It was also a way to reassure US citizens that we were not completely vulnerable to nuclear annihilation. Same with backyard fallout shelters and teaching schoolchildren to hide from nuclear explosions under their school desks--the original school shooter drills.

Brinkmanship or security theatre?

Or option C: greed.

Any way you slice it, nuclear deterrence, missile defense, containment theory and more generally any initiative motivated by the fear of imminent nuclear holocaust and the Red Menace were huge windfalls for industrial corporations from the end of WWII onward.

It was an effective way to siphon huge amounts of money from the postwar federal coffers for corporations that had made bank during the war, but were now left to justify why the government should continue shoveling money at them.

Now, this may not be the case for Houston's interchanges in particular, but it was certainly the case for many such endeavors going forward for decades. See also: SDI ("Star Wars"). And of course, there were other factors like suburbanization/white flight and the ascendant automobile industry. But all of these potential motivators were (are?) very entangled and hard to fully extricate from one another.

Quite interestingly, the social aspects of urban sprawl was completely left out when designing post WW2 cities.

When people think about beautiful cities, they would mention Venice or Paris or Rome. All these cities were built for 'foot traffic' which still works perfectly fine nowadays. In those cities, the elderly and children do have an environment to move around by themselves and socialize freely.

When it comes to planning cities for people, it is worth checking out Prof. Jan Gehl: https://youtu.be/9_x5Hor2MP8

> still works perfectly fine nowadays.

Rome is all but working perfectly fine, with commuter traffic locked almost daily by the tiniest fender bender happening on the highway around it

Venice is likewise a mess, situation was so bas they built an highway to go around the existing highway that corrected it to the nearby areas, and the lack of easy mobility in the city center is fuelling a severe living cost inflation

That sounds like a car problem, not a problem with cities built for foot traffic.

and how are you supposed to go to work on foot? neither the job nor the house market is flexible enough, especially now that airbnb 'disrupted' traditional renting in touristic cities.

Yah, bcs all new structures built post WW2 were built for cars and not for people people move at 3mph, not 60mph.

Rome could have invested in public transport instead of building highways. No one would be stuck in traffic. Instead, they used public space for cars. The old parts of the city though which are walkable work perfectly fine.

Venice does have great ferry service and traffic in the city is almost non-existent due to lack of cars.

Many/most flats in those cute old European cities have windows directly over a street. You can have cars making noise and pollution literally within 5-10 meters of your window. This is bad for physical and mental health.

Soviet-style housing planning is a good middle ground. There, most flats can enjoy silence (you only hear cars that belong to your neighbors and no passer-bys) and still the districts are planned for walkability and public transport.

This is not a problem of houses built that way since the were built pre-car times to allow max light into apartments. The streets back then were also a social aspect of life where we met people and could interact with each other.

Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.

We should not build our apts for cars and align to them. If cars are loud and noisy and destroy our social life, we should focus on solving the car problem and not trying to build around cars.

> This is not a problem of houses built that way since the were built pre-car times to allow max light into apartments

Not the case in most of Europe IMO. The apartment buildings were built along very narrow streets to either fit inside perimeter of city walls or (later) because real estate was expensive. Due to narrowness of roads, these apartments are not very well lit and are depressing (you can't see the sky through the window, only the building across the street). Here in Poland, it basically wasn't until central urban planning by communists until we had cities which are livable, car or no car. This is reflected in real estate pries, where apartments in the old, historic buildings can be cheaper (despite often being right in the city centers) than in the (much denser) soviet conglomerates.

> Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.

Even cars at 30 km/h make plenty of noise (when accelerating to that speed). I'm not sure what you mean by "social aspects" of streets?

This sounds fairly dubious. There was a period between sub-megatonne pure fission warheads being standard and multi-megatonne 'hydrogen' ones, but it was under a decade. That seems like a very narrow window to change how cities were planned.

Urban sprawl happened because people were tired of living on top of each other, and cities that had the room to expand used it. There was also another name used for that sprawl, white flight. I think we're seeing some of the results of that today.

I've always thought it was funny how whites moving from the city to the suburbs is bad (white flight) and whites moving from the suburbs to the city is also bad (gentrification).

It makes logical sense. You cause problem A by leaving, and then in coming back you cause problem B. The same thing happened with the Iraq War -- we caused lots of problems with the unnecessary invasion, then caused more problems by leaving. It's lose/lose. The only winning move was never to play. In the white flight analogy, the only winning move was never to seek segregation from moving out of the cities in the first place.

When an area is ceded by one group, the vacuum will always be filled by another group. When the people that left try to reclaim that territory, friction will always happen. If the current occupants of that territory have no desire to relocate , or have no where else to relocate to, or have no means of relocating if it were possible then there will always be friction. It's repeated over and over through out history.

I think you have to detach the idea of _personal_ blame from it. They're both phenomena which cause problems.

That's a pretty generous interpretation of white flight. You leave out the redlining and segregation that were huge factors in white flight and subsequently reverse white flight and gentrification.

There's nothing stopping you from moving to Detroit or Baltimore or East St. Louis. Why wouldn't all the progressive people move there if the housing is such a bargain?

It's surprising that sudden drastic changes in demand have sudden drastic effects on supply?

Part of the problem is that Black people never had the opportunity to buy the properties they occupied, even at depressed prices when those properties were undesireable. So when gentrification occurs, rents go up and they're shut out. If there wasn't a massive wealth gap to begin with you'd see more Black homeowners in gentrifying areas making bank on their massively appreciated houses.

Well yes, it goes to show that you can find an abundance of systemic racism against black people in all kinds of housing policy.

I've also never heard this claim before despite quite a bit of work on nuclear weapons policy. I've asked a question about it on /r/AskHistorians to get more clarification: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ik1v9q/a_rec...

I remember Heinlein talking a lot about the decentralization of cities concept. A bit of googling leads me to Sumner Spaulding, who was apparently a large proponent of decentralization to avoid nuclear disaster.

http://otworld.weebly.com/robert-a-heinlein-the-last-days-of...

Also City by Clifford Simak.

That would be a lot of ICBMs. The city center is not residential. Most people that work in the city center for city's like houston or LA commute from one of many different cities. Just to wipe out half of houston you would need to simultaneously strike at least a dozen different locations. The idea was, if there is a missile on the way or if other cities are being attacked, the sprawl would allow evacuating a lot of people.

I do think it is an effective strategy. Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tokyo and kyoto were spared for different reasons but they were spared. No sense in wiping out every single city. For the US, a nuclear attack would probably be against symbolic populated cities like new york, san francisco or chicago, ideally the US would surrender after that point and if there is no surrender, military targets would make more sense (hawaii,san diego,san antonio,anapolis,etc...).

The idea is, if you have a small number of targets to defend you can defend them better. Just like with infosec, you want to reduce attack surface so you minimize exposed services or inputs.

Tokyo was not spared. On March 9-10th 1945 it endured the most destructive and deadly air attack in human history, killing somewhere between 90-100,000 people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...). Perhaps by August 6th when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the major targets in Tokyo had already been destroyed.

Every single city that was targeted had multiple rockets assigned to them. Each rocket was just a launch vehicle similar to SpaceX launching Falcon9s with multiple Starlink satellite, each nuclear rocket was equipped with MIRVs (multiple independent re-entry vehicles). So one rocket launched would result in multiple targets. You could target each MIRV at different parts of the suburban sprawl. Pretty damn effective.

MAD did not allow for "surrender". You either wipe out your enemies military completely before they manage to launch most of their rockets, or you both die. There is no targeting of symbolic locations and then calling it quits.

MAD is worse case scenario right? I think in reality if nukes are used both sides will be aware of MAD and it will be to compliment conventional warfare.

> That would be a lot of ICBMs

That's what MIRVs are for.

The strategy, if it existed at all and it isn't just a post-hoc explaination, was probably designed around the time the strategic bomber was the primary, and only, method of delivery of atomic bombs.

Good point, I think rockets that re-enter from space were not a thing prior to the 60's and even then I bet they didn't expect thousands of them owned by multiple nations.

I did not know about MIRVs, this comment thread has been educational.

Have you ever seen East Tokyo? The destruction from the firebombing in WW2 is still quite obvious even today even looking at a map.

I did not know the extent but I was aware they were bombed like berlin and london. I meant when they planned the nuke attack Tokyo and Kyoto were on the list but they were removed for different reasons.

> No sense in wiping out every single city.

This was pretty much the strategy towards the end of the war. More than 60 Japanese cities were firebombed, civilian casualties probably exceeded those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Sparing Tokyo worked because Japan didn’t have the capability to retaliate. Any launching during the mid-to-late Cold War would have been a massive first strike and possibly a retaliation at the same scale. In the early Cold War it may have been a reasonable strategy, but as another poster notes that’s a very narrow window for changing how a city grows.

Even if there was an effect, I’d be very surprised if the signal wasn’t wiped out first by railroads and then by cars.

Also Japan was hit by bombs in the low tens of kilotons. Modern bombs are in the megaton range.

Tsar Bomb has around 50 Megatons. Radius of total destruction 35km.

Tokyo and other Japanese cities were burned to the ground with mass firebombing, not spared.

The goal was to get Japan to surrender, and Emperor was considering it. His generals were fanatically opposed, and if the Emperor were to be killed by the bomb, they would fight to the last man, woman and child.

US administration could then pick it's poison - leave Japan as is, suffer and inflict massive casualties from a ground invasion, or commit nuclear holocaust.

It wouldn't be a lot of ICBMs, actually. In reality, it wouldn't even take a single ICBM.

Playing around on Nukemap, 5-6 800kt warheads are enough to kill the majority of people in Houston and give third-degree burns to the rest. A Russian RS-28 Sarmat ICBM should be able to carry 10-15.

Or, with a single 20 megaton warhead, it would kill 1 300 000 people immediately and injure 2 000 000 people.

I would argue the bomb was only part of it though--the other hazard was area bombing. All of those planners had seen (or participated in) the aerial bombardment of Europe and Japan during the war, and one take-away was that areas with different uses should be separated (like in the sim game Cities Skylines), e.g. industrial zones should be separate from residential zones, and all of the above should be as sprawling and low-density as possible to minimise damage from the air, be it nuclear or conventional. And yes the US highway system started out as a civil defense project as well, modelled on the German 'Autobahnen'.

> That's the first time I've heard this theory.

More than just a theory. When we were clearing out my grandparents’ house we found a pamphlet (I think it was Civil Defence, but it could have been a different agency) which was basically the paper equivalent of a government-issued FAQ about nuclear war. From my own 2020 knowledge of what they knew then, it was remarkably good stuff, written for a general audience. I remember reading it and thinking that the mockery we have for ‘Duck & Cover’ really isn’t fair, at least with respect to this pamphlet: it didn’t claim that a desk would protect at ground zero, but did (correctly) note that the harmful effects of a bomb decrease over distance. I think it was from late-40s to early-50s.

I recall that one of its points was that tightly-packed cities had been susceptible to the conventional bombing campaigns of the Second World War and would be even more susceptible to nuclear bombs, and consequently it made sense to spread cities out.

> if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.

Well, it would be superlinear: if you imagine a hex grid of blast radii, the centre radius is one, the inner ring is six (cumulative seven); the next ring is is twelve (cumulative 19); the next ring is 24 (cumulative 43), and so on. 1:7, 7:19, 19:43 — it adds up!

9MT W53 (Titan II warhead): Fireball covers downtown Houston, moderate damage out to the borders of Houston proper, 50% chance of 3rd degree burns as far as Sugar Land or Humble.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=29.7500709&...

It wouldn't have. In case of an all out war each side would send dozens if not hundreds of rockets at each target. US in particular had the problem where each arm of the military(airforce, army, navy and missile command) had their own and completely independent launch plans. So each one would launch their own compliment of nukes at Russian cities. Destruction of your own missiles by the already exploding weapons was actually seen as a significant issue that would lead to loss of many if not majority of weapons. Eric Schlosser's Command and Control is, as always, a great read about this.

In the beginning stages of the Cold War and the start of urban sprawl the threat wasn't rockets but bombers. ICBMs weren't created till '57 and took over the strategic setup for killing everyone in the years after that, so there's a window there for sprawl to be a legit(ish) survival/mitigation strategy.

U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background,Developments, and Issues (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33640.pdf).

The US Army hasn't had strategic nuclear weapons in a very long time, if ever. On the other hand, theater-level weapons like the Pershing (10s (mostly) to 100s of kt) do a pretty fair approximation.

I'm not sure what you mean by "missile command"; Army Missile Command mostly has problems, not solutions. (They build things.) (Standard Missile 3! (https://images.wisegeek.com/billboard-ad-against-blue-sky.jp...)

I don't doubt someone thought of / would like that idea... but I have trouble believing sprawl really was influenced by some plan involving nuclear strikes.

Yeah you'd have a good chance of having more survivors due to the nature of nuclear weapons, but I don't see that influencing choices like wanting to have a suburban home and etc.

With all claims like this, it’s rarely the case that these decisions were made on the basis of a claim like that but it was used in a compendium or arguments for whatever policy. If you’re a pro-car lobbyist for example, you might as well throw something like that in as it strengthens your case.

There is also the risk of fire storms being started that destroy a wider area than the initial blast.

For what it's worth, the same thinking was behind the new capital of Myanmar, Naypyidaw. Paranoid military leadership who thought Yangon was too vulnerable to attack, so built a new capital way inland which is massively spread out to make it harder to bomb.

Such a weak argument as we (as humans) just got better at bombing things. More planes + more bombs = problem solved. "You build a bigger shield, we just build a bigger bomb" mentality has to be a core tenet of the military industrial complex.

Actually, modern warframe is all about completing missions while using less bombs and planes. Killing residents may cripple the economy of your enemy but finding the high value targets and only bombing those is cheaper and more effective.

A typical nuclear bomb has a wipe-out radius of 1-2 Km. At 10-15Km radius, you are looking at damages/injuries but not a complete wipe-out. Also residential houses are less susceptible to infrastructure breakdown vs. a high-res building.

I don’t believe it. They had MIRVs even back then. There’s no difference in density between .5 miles and 15 miles. You’re fucked either way with: direct impact, over pressure, and radiation/fallout.

This sounds like some armchair theory.

It's one of those hackneyed theories that has a grain of truth in it, but nothing more. Yes, perhaps fear of being nuked drove some people from the cities, but what actually drove a lot more people from the cities was racism, plain and simple. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight That, a lot more than fear of nuclear war, is what drove suburbanization, along with the rising spending power of the middle class that made a detached home in the suburbs and a car achievable on a single salary.

I do recall a population distribution map of the USSR vs. the US from a book I owned 30iah years ago and they were far more evenly distributed than the US.

With that advent of MIRVs it makes most of this moot. A single missile could have a dozen warheads and you can blanket target massive areas.

It was real enough that IBM moved their corporate HQ from Manhattan to Armonk, NY. HQ is still there.

I'm very doubtful it would have worked. The USSR had thousands of warheads, they could turn the entirety of every city into glass. I'm even quite doubtful this was a consideration.

I think it's more likely the combined factors of automotive industry lobbying and redlining/white flight that led to the level of urban sprawl you see in the US

>Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.

The USSRs guidance computers were quite bad, and reentry would have scattered multiple payloads without those.

Having talked to people in the programs from before the iron curtain fell they got around this problem by building larger bombs so the radius of destruction was larger than the radius of uncertainty around a target, to the point that dead-reckoning was viable.

The maximum bomb size the USSR designed on top of Huston: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=29.7589&l...

In short, were the USSR serious about dealing with urban sprawl it wouldn't have taken much effort to build weapons that could vaporize Huston sized cities.

Let's take a look at Houston on a Nuke Map:

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=29.7589&lng...

That's a modern bomb, in the 50s and early 60s, when Hobby Airport (the one in the southeast of downtown) was considered to be in the boonies, the nuclear threat looked like this: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=20&lat=29.7589&lng=-...

5 Mt is huge, and far bigger than the warheads of most modern nuclear weapons. The one you show is fairly representative of a single modern warhead. Nowadays, and for many decades if you want a large area of effect, you use a MIRV vehicle and pepper the target area. This gives you wide coverage for fewer total megatons and a more compact and flexible weapon system, and hedges your bets in case any of the warheads fails or is intercepted.

In fact big bombs were an early trend for two reasons. One was that the delivery system was expected to be bombers dropping one or a very few bombs with mediocre accuracy and so you wanted maximum destruction from each delivery. The other was that they were worried bombers wouldn't be able to get directly over some targets due to air defences, so you'd drop the bomb short of the target and use the massive area of effect to cover the remaining distance for you.

Nope. Sprawl happens in places where the oil industry runs city planning. Plus, if people cant survive in your city without a car, then that kills off the poor too and drives them away. So cities sprawl to serve oil companies and to exacerbate wealth inequality.

What, you people dont believe me? You seriously think we sprawl to protect ourselves from nukes? Like the enemy isnt just going to launch more nukes, or cluster nukes?

If anything, the sprawl would just make the nuclear strike worse, because there's a greater chance you'll survive and have to live through revelation. Here's how you protect yourself if a nuke is on the way: you duck your head down, and kiss your ass goodbye.

No it's just plain ole racist, classist, corrupt government trying to use fear of Russians to drive oblivious americans who dont pay attention, to buy more cars from their rich motor company friends.

That government is mostly in the past now, but the sprawl is a monument to their philosophy, which was racist, classist and corrupt.

It's interesting that protests generally happen in dense parts of cities. Now imagine a city without a dense part - protesting becomes more difficult. Myanmar's non-democratic military government actually moved their capital from a dense city to a new city so spread out and with no downtown area - potentially to prevent the ability to protest the government.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/inside-burma-s-ghost-to...

I don't think that's why Houston is the way it is, and while there is still a downtown there, imagining mass protests in Houston seems much different than Hong Kong - due to the density.

IMO this is part of why why protests started marching down freeways. In LA, if you protest by marching down basically any freeway, you snarl up that freeway (and likely more) for tens of miles, at least (AFAIK).

(the 101 between hollywood and DTLA is essentially a single thing, the 10 between DTLA and West Side, the 405 from culver city up to over the pass in sherman oaks...)

AKA, the "center" isn't geographic, but... transit-based? Arterial?

It also gives a great sense of your own power (which is very important to protest movements) in marching along and shutting down a freeway, which you could never in any other situation just calmly walk down the middle of. Critical Mass is invigorating for the same reasons.

As a commuter nothing would turn me against the protestors goals faster than clogging a freeway. I have a long and frustrating commute and the idea of that commute becoming a multi hour trapped parking adventure after a long day doing a job that is agonizingly depressing is quite souring.

The experience is so decidedly wonderful that if, for example, the protest were a Black Lives Matter movement I would change from a whole hearted support to complete opposition in every objective they promote.

If interrupting your commute is enough to turn you to "complete opposition in every objective they promote," I have a hard time believing you were ever a whole-hearted supporter.

Protests aren’t supposed to be convenient for the uninvolved. They’re literally designed to force you to pay attention.

For those curious about power and mass protests, John Berger's piece from 1968[0] provides an excellent overview on mass demonstrations.

[0]: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1968/no03...

(Deleted: not worth it)

What a horrid comparison to make between those crimes and a constitutionally-guaranteed right.

Would the moral status of rape, or, say, slavery be any greater if it was written into the Constitution? (Note that one of those was, extensively, written into the Constitution.)

If not, what is the point of your argument?

"a constitutionally-guaranteed right"

You absolutely don't have a right to suppress others with your ideology.

'Freedom of expression' has nothing to do with shutting down highways.

And people who need to get somewhere to save lives are suitably invigorated, I'm sure.

Yeah, actually. I saw a huge fucking grin on the face of the guy riding shotgun in the ambulance as the crowd of cyclists parted like magic in front of them and they had a personal escort of two vested corkers. Guy was even filming. They got where they were going faster than if the usual stop and go car traffic had been there.

The great thing about people on foot or on bike is that they can easily get out of the way of emergency vehicles, vs cars and trucks which often can't.

The transit system in Los Angeles is always so close to the edge, it doesn’t take a huge push for rush hour to turn into total gridlock.

Assuming that’s their goal, which seems probable, it’s not clear if that strategy would be reproducible in say, Ohio.

AFAIK, the goal is "now things are different", and the tactic at play is "be unignorable".

The impression I've always gotten is that what you're permitted to do when you're doing a legal protest is to minimize the disruption it has, which is (IMO) within epsilon of "make it as ignorable as possible".

Ohio might have a more centralized city center, where LA doesn't, or have other forms of "center" the way the transit system in LA is "central" to the metropolis.

"Some of Haussmann's critics said that the real purpose of Haussmann's boulevards was to make it easier for the army to maneuver and suppress armed uprisings; Paris had experienced six such uprisings between 1830 and 1848, all in the narrow, crowded streets in the center and east of Paris and on the left bank around the Pantheon. These critics argued that a small number of large, open intersections allowed easy control by a small force."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

This is pretty widely thrown around, but it should be noted that the central purpose of Haussmannization was public health and beautification: tearing down the slums, building proper infrastructure like sewers and aqueducts, and pretty parks and streets. The article you link to emphasizes this.

The wide boulevards did very little to prevent the Paris Commune, for instance. Napoleon III just wanted to build a second Rome, not some martial panopticon.

The wide boulevards certainly helped the French Army in drowning the Commune in blood soon afterwards, though.

The Commune was also fairly unique among French revolts as it did not begin in Paris, rather it was Paris reacting to their emperor getting captured in battle.

There was a bit more than just Napoleon III getting captured. Paris was subsequently sieged and captured by the Prussians. Afterwards, the Prussian troops were kept nearby and occasionally paraded through the streets. The Commune arose also due to power disagreements with the new Third Republic and an attempted seizure of cannons in Paris.

The Paris commune was tripped off by a political failure, a war lost in a single battle, and the siege of Paris by the Germans followed by mass starvation. I doubt that any city design could possibly have stopped the commune from happening.

Not directly related, but the US Interstate Highway system was at least partially designed with military concerns in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Hist... . I'm reminded of it every time I see military vehicles on the highway.

Obviously not the same thing that you're talking about here - but just interesting to me, and vaguely related!

There's a reason why the Eisenhower Interstate System signs have the 5 stars of a general.

If I'm not mistaken, the 5-star logo only applies to sections of interstate highway that have at least one mile of level and straight road in any given 5-mile stretch. The idea was that an "Eisenhower Freeway" could be used as an impromptu landing spot for Air Force planes. While I'm sure this ability was tested at the beginning I don't know if there are regular drills and exercises making use of this feature.

This is an urban legend debunked in the linked Wikipedia article: "According to urban legend, early regulations required that one out of every five miles of the Interstate Highway System must be built straight and flat, so as to be usable by aircraft during times of war. There is no evidence of this rule being included in any Interstate legislation."

The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System is designed for military purposes only in the sense that it's very important to be able to quickly move your troops and materiel around to where they're needed (i.e. logistical reasons). In other words, it's important to the military for the exact same reasons that it's important to anyone else.

I would love to see a plane try to decelerate from 200+ mph with the surface quality changing every 200 yards and with 18-inch-deep potholes every so often. I wonder what sort of maintenance budget the original interstate plan envisioned

Thanks for the link, very interesting! I love the US

is there any further explanation of this? it strikes me that narrow chokepoints would be more advantageous to the numerically inferior but better-equipped/trained force.

more advantageous to the numerically inferior who know the lay of the land, because it's much easier to conduct urban guerilla warfare in such instances.

Armies during this period were all still about marching in formation, which doesn't work well in confined spaces where you can't really keep a formation.

It was also in the context of a long history of barricades being put up by popular uprisings and stymying and trapping troop formations.

Now that we have the ability to decouple most administrative work from location thanks to remote working, I wonder how long it will take for the first fully decentralised authoritarian government to appear.

Can't have protests in the capital if you don't have a capital.

I guess authoritarians have risen to power over the internet but it's hard to imagine someone exerting that much influence over zoom

The police force would still be centralized. The population would be forced to decentralize.

We'll just have an executive order banning the use of Zoom. If you don't like something, make it illegal. Problem solved!!

Decentralized authoritarianism is an inherently weird concept. Sounds more like a vicious type of mob rule to me.

I meant physically decentralized - as in, no grand palaces or other government buildings that can be stormed, because the whole administration is working from home.

Imagine a 100% remote company, except, it's not a company.

The power structures are of course not decentralized at all.

... that being said, an authoritarian state with decentralized power structure is also an interesting concept. The episodes about social scoring from Black Mirror [1] and The Orville [2] might go into that direction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

[2] https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule

This article is specifically about the specific tactics BLM protest used in the suburbs and small towns. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-19/protests-...

That's one of the reasons I chose not to live in a city center.

People can drive to the location of the protest. Less dense means more transportation, protests could also mean blocking off major freeways.

Where would you find parking for a hundred thousand cars? You can't really get protests like this without a dense city:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/March_fo...

You'd be surprised. Most of cities like this is parking lots. But yeah, in a protest situation they may not be available. Big marathons and marches happen just fine.

Reminds me of Brasilia.

Where people have no problem protesting in front of government buildings.

That "people always protest at the densest areas of the city" is just that, correlation. The targets of their protests happen to be in those areas.

yeah I live in New York and I definitely went to more protests this summer because they were happening literally right outside my apartment than I would have if I had to deal with driving and finding parking (probably hard if it's a big protest).

I think generally American style suburban sprawl decreases social capital just because you're more isolated, and that includes protests. I think mask wearing is another example.

The elephant in the room is the assumption that _everyone wants to be stacked on top of each other_.

I do agree that designing cities around cars has ruined a lot of nice places though.

  >  assumption that _everyone wants to be stacked on top of each other_

It's also an assumption that everyone wants to begin and end every trip, no matter how trivial, with a parking spot. It's an assumption that people will want to drive in traffic for 20 minutes minimum to get to a supermarket, do anything with their kids, or anything outside their property line.

The notion of "stacked on top of each other" has unpleasant connotations, but there are many different ways to live in a dense city. Would you feel "stacked on top of each other" in a Parisian townhouse with a magnificent shared courtyard, 12 foot ceilings, and everything you could possibly want a short walk or subway ride away?

> It's also an assumption that everyone wants to begin and end every trip, no matter how trivial, with a parking spot. It's an assumption that people will want to drive in traffic for 20 minutes minimum to get to a supermarket, do anything with their kids, or anything outside their property line.

I wouldn't be surprised to find some suburbs with some of the traits you mention, but it hasn't been my experience with them. I've lived in about 5 different suburbs in my life and a supermarket has never been more than 2 miles away - certainly not a 20 minute drive and it's even within biking distance. Parks are by schools and there's usually an elementary school fairly close if you're looking to do something with your kid. Depending upon the suburb you can also play in the street, which I regularly did growing up.

The traits you are talking about sounds more like a rural area than a suburban one.

> Would you feel "stacked on top of each other" in a Parisian townhouse with a magnificent shared courtyard, 12 foot ceilings, and everything you could possibly want a short walk or subway ride away?

No, I wouldn't feel "stacked on top of each other" if I were a multi-millionaire in Paris.

But, in the real world, your talking about putting families into 600sqft (at very best) boxes, with audible neighbors on every side of the unit, and no way to go anywhere (no parking, no meaningful transport, because 'everything we'd let you have is a short walk away')

If you actually do what you've described, and give everyone their own townhouse, you've just reinvented the modern suburb. Because that's what modern suburbs look like, everyone in a townhouse, or a townhouse with some small strips of yard around it.

> but there are many different ways to live in a dense city

Sure, but only if you are fantastically wealthy.

I assume you have never lived in Houston. Right now at 5:30pm (17:30) it's 95F (35C). I don't wanna walk 20 mins anywhere in this heat, I don't wanna stand and wait on the bus in the heat, I can't go pick up ice cream from the store and walk it home in this heat.

Surely you think, summer isn't that long, just tough it out a few months. Well I regularly run the A/C in the "winter months". Several years ago during the week of chistmas, I went to a late night movie, as I was walking back to my car to go home I noticed the following: at 11:30pm it was 80F (26C), the humidity was around 80-90%, and I was wearing shorts.

> in a Parisian...

Having occupied a 120 square foot chambre de bonne, I agree with your sentiment but I'd say it depends on a few qualifications. Like for instance not having basically plumbed closets as a large percentage of available living spaces. Building height restrictions in the city lead to a large number of tiny (aforementioned) inaccessible (few and tiny elevators) apartments.

There's the catch: is everything you could possibly want really a short walk/transit away? or is the proliferation of top-end (for you) options in a sprawling city way beyond what can be crammed within walking distance of _your_ home?

Are you satisfied with a few arbitrary restaurants within walking distance? or, car enabled, would you rather go 30 miles for that REALLY good place that would never be so close in a compact city?

To safely "do anything with their kids" a car is very useful. Depending on the ages of the kids...

Kids need to bring stuff. That could be hockey equipment, a drum set, or a clean playpen.

Kids wander off if not contained. A kid may get off a subway at the wrong stop, lost in the crowd, along as the rest of the family continues on down the line. A kid may fall onto the tracks.

Kids should be kept from licking public spaces. Kids should be kept from eating food found on the ground. Kids should not be able to play with hypodermic needles.

Assumptions aside, I think this raises a valid question of how we balance high density urban housing and suburban housing in american cities. Can a city have both options as workable solutions?

Is there more demand for high density urban housing that cities are not meeting? If so, why?

Is there a demand for more access from suburban commuters? If so, why isn't the access available?

Are these solutions mutually exclusive?

As a European, I don't like living in the same house as 5 other families, whose sleep schedule doesn't necessarily align with mine. The acoustic isolation is probably a lot better than in typical US houses, but not perfect either.

However I do like living 3 minutes from the next supermarket, and 20 minutes from the city center with all the shop, and 25 minutes from my work (all distances by foot).

I would love to have all the advantages without any of the disadvantages, but at least around here most people prefer living closer together over commuting longer distances.

I feel like this is more an issue with cheap construction (and what people will pay for) than anything else. I've stayed in people's apartments in the UK where the light fittings rattle if upstairs is running a wash. These flats aren't cheap either, in the South East they're eye-wateringly expensive for the build quality (eg 250k for an "entry" two bed flat in a commuter town). Having lived up north for a few years in a detached house with a garden, it would be extremely difficult to go back to a flat (especially one in London that costs double the price for half the space). There is a massive supermarket five minutes down the road from our house and town is 15 mins drive. These places absolutely exist for reasonable prices.

When/if we finally buy, we're looking at a rural, passive self-build where we can work remotely. The cost is about the same as a town house these days.

There isn't any technical reason why you couldn't put in proper isolation between floors or walls, aside from the fact it would slow down construction and be expensive. Proper insulation (both acoustic and thermal) also makes rooms smaller in a given footprint which is an issue for marketing.

>25 minutes from my work

This is definitely ideal, but is it achievable (in average, not for any individual) in larger cities even if they are built for walk/public transit?

I don't have much experience in Europe, but I knew in Tokyo, which probably has the best public transit in the world, the average commute time is one hour. This is obviously an extreme example as Tokyo is a megacity, but I think majority of people cannot live 25 minutes from their work for any cities that have 1M+ populations, regardless how the city is built.

For a reasonable price one can have _either_ a single-family house, _or_ an apartment close to the city centre in most European towns. Having both usually is possible for an exorbitant price.

They don't want to be stacked, but they do want jobs, they want Chinese/Indian/French/... restaurants, they want daycares, they want schools, they want high-schools, they want notaries, and hospitals and clinics, they want shopping malls and delis, they want pharmacies and pawn shops, ...

It's almost like wanting 50000 people with different professions nearby means you have to live next to 50000 people. Until we discover teleportation.

I'm confused as to whether you're describing urban living or suburban living. Both have everything mentioned, the latter without being stacked on top of your neighbors.

I think the bigger elephant in all of our rooms is climate change. Density is by far more climate-sustainable (as well as more environmentally sustainable in other ways) than sprawl. In addition, global economic forces are creating a mass move to cities around the world anyway. So no matter what we think we want right now, we will at some point in the present or future be forced to reckon with density either pleasantly or unpleasantly.

Now with that said, there are many intelligent ways to design density so that it is not unpleasant. Paying attention to green space and the natural world, space and light in general, and careful design for both function and form can make urban density a thing that is not only sustainable but emotionally/esthetically appealing. (Unfortunately this is not necessarily how density develops in cities, current incentives often instead favoring development that prioritizes flash, affluence appeal, and short-term private economic gain.)

"Density is by far more climate-sustainable (as well as more environmentally sustainable in other ways) than sprawl."

Care to back that up?

> The elephant in the room is the assumption that _everyone wants to be stacked on top of each other_.

You can have density that supports public transit and walkable retail without having to build like HK or Manhattan. This is in the middle of a Toronto neighbourhood that was build in the 1910s (use street view to poke around):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

Currently these houses/land are very expensive because living 'downtown' is fashionable again, but up until the 1990s they were reasonably priced because... who would want to live downtown when you could live in the suburbs?

Some smaller sized houses on the next street over:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

Most have lane way garages. They're generally 3-4 bedrooms.

Everyone can have a front yard, everyone can have a backyard (with an accessible garage), and no one is really "stacked" on each other.

I wouldn't mind being stacked on top of my workplace which is stacked on top of my local organic grocery store. I don't need to spend more time getting around.

I'm not sure if you mean this literally as in huge apartment towers, literally as in something like a duplex/garden style apartment, or figuratively as in row homes. These are all very different housing situations.

Also, you'll be hard pressed to find anything that everyone wants. It's almost a tautology, so it's not really useful to make such statements without more context/clarification about...

The old city was built when everyone walked everywhere. Stacked meant you didn't have to go far to get to anywhere in the city.

Automobile mobility results in sprawl: many/most people don't want to be stacked if they don't have to. What many here may not realize is how incredibly wide and flat Texas is; driving another mile takes less than a minute, and there's a whole lotta miles to get you some space from neighbors.

It’s not an assumption at all. We measure desire in dollars per square foot. People are willing to pay - to bid - more dollars per square foot to live in higher density.

You can still buy seclusion and low density in Europe! But in the USA it’s your only option in new cities.

I agree with you, and I expressed the same point four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11908567

>Siena’s history dates back millennia. Houston, meanwhile, was founded in 1836.

Every time I am made aware of just how young the US is, it blows me away. I've never been to Europe, I would really love to go some day, but I can only imagine the feeling of actually seeing these really old places/structures in person.

What really strikes me is just how many ordinary buildings are older than our country. The monuments and palaces are one thing, but it's very common to eat in a restaurant or pub that dates to the 17th century. Not as a tourist trap or destination, but just as a perfectly ordinary building that has been retrofitted (sometimes awkwardly) with bathrooms and lights and such.

I've been in 500 year old cottages that weren't anything special. It's just that they were made out of stone, and so it just doesn't fall down. (Lots did fall down, but they did so centuries ago, and the ones that made it this far will do continue to.) People live there, and it's just their house. They've often put up modern interior walls so that they can have insulation and hide the wires that power their TVs -- connected to satellite dishes outside.

I've even seen a few castles with satellite dishes. Small castles dot the landscape and can be had cheap (because they require expensive maintenance). People just live in them, too.

There's a joke that in the US they think a hundred years is a long time, and in Europe they think a hundred miles is a long way. It really rings true. If the crisis ever subsides, I do recommend it.

Anecdotes like this abound in the UK.

The oldest part of the closest church to my childhood home was built in the “early 13th century”, according to its website. The cottages next to it (now a pub) seem to date to about the same time as the first British colonies in America.

Then there’s Cambridge university, which celebrated 800 years since its foundation in 2009: https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/history/800th-ann...

One thing I wonder is, how frequently are new European buildings made of stone? I occasionally encounter comments from people confused by American home renovation shows where people literally burst through walls Kool-Aid Man style[1] when demolishing them, but most of our walls (even exterior) are wood-framed and mostly hollow, and once you take out the framing there’s just drywall.

[1] Not from an actual renovation show, but: https://youtu.be/B3C2TN-Vp4c

Like the 1,100 year-old Sean's Bar which is often given as a good example of old buildings.

https://www.seansbar.ie/home

As a European, it's not the age that matters so much as the uniformity of American cities. A lot of places between the coasts seem to be the same simcity arranged slightly differently.

Come to Europe and see very different styles within a short distance.

It's the result of a lot of growth and development by a common culture with high degrees of communication and trade in a very short amount of time.

So much so, that I didn’t really understand SimCity until I visited the USA.

I don’t think I’ve even seen a water tower outside the states, and if I have they are disguised as other things. (Unless you count the tanks on top of literally every Cypriot building, but even those are nothing like the American/SimCity type).

I'm reminded of this joke:

Europeans find it strange that Americans think 100 years is a long time. Americans find it strange that Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance.

There really is dichotomy here: Americans are used to a vast geography but don't really have any internalization of just how vast history can be, while Europeans understand their long history but don't have the internalization of just how vast a country can be.

To put a finer point on the latter bit: the distance between Chicago and New York is roughly the same as between Copenhagen, Denmark and Bern, Switzerland (i.e., longer than any two points in Germany). The distance between LA and Boston is longer than the distance between Gibraltar and Moscow or between Edinburgh, UK to Jerusalem, Israel.

Moving further afield, Senegal is closer to Canada than it is to Somalia. I had to look that one up on a map when I first heard it.

Just so you aren't in for a shock, "millennia" is including all sorts of neolithic stuff in the ground that could probably well be said of places in the US too. In terms of street layout, little is per-roman, and in terms of buildings, little is > 1000 years old.

The most common thing would be more 17th 18th 19th century buildings (in increasing frequency), and if you go to parts of Massachusetts (and maybe Virginia) you can get at least some 18th and 19th century stuff. Go to Havana, San Juan, Salvador (in Brazil) or other old colonial capitals and get more old buildings in sturdier materials than in Massechusetts.

Don't get me wrong, there are more old building in Europe, but colonial US is quite old, and there's more continuity than you might think. The real issue is that the US replaced more old stuff, being in growth mode, which was alright until cars came along and now most thing we build are absolutely terrible.

It’s not uncommon to have city walls from the Middle Ages, and Roman buildings and monuments around here (not all of them still in use, true). Plus a whole bunch of castles and churches from the 11th century onwards.

Boston and Santa Fe are very nice, but it really feels quite a bit different.

Colonial architecture is still pretty recent in the grand scheme of things. Native construction is far older and some of it is still standing. Oraibi, Taos, and Acoma are all close to a millennia old and there are structures in the US going back another couple thousand years like las capas or poverty point. If you head south into Mexico, you can find structures even older than that. There's nothing like gobekli tepe, but that's okay.

My local cafe/bookshop was 300 years old when Houston was founded (probably not a cafe then mind). I've lived in houses older than Houston. The nearest church, where my kids do carol services and nativities, has parts of its structure dating back 250 years before Columbus set out on his voyage.

There are cities in the US that are older than the US, by a large margin. Come to New Mexico and you'll see.

Obligatory edit: After COVID, please.

I actually took a trip to New Mexico when I was younger, the parts that we visited were awesome. All the people were amazingly friendly. I grew up in the Northeast so it was a pretty big culture shock. I believe it was in Albuquerque. We visited the Nuclear Museum and a couple little local shops and even a local reptile zoo. I would love to go back for the hot air balloon festival someday.

I always found it to be a fun coincidence that San Jose, CA, now the heart of Silicon Valley, was founded in 1777--a year after the US Declaration of Independence. And that was right at the beginning of the colonization of "Upper" California by parties from New Spain (Mexico).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_San_Jose,_Californi...

For a fun excursion, check out

https://www.homegate.ch/buy/real-estate/country-switzerland/... for real estate currently to buy in Switzerland built before 1801 (according to the seller).

(You can change "buy" to "rent" and 1801 for any other integer in the URL).

Founded, and floundered, as it was merely a swampy step in between the port of Galveston and places further inland.

Houston didn’t really grow with much rapidity until the mid 20th century.

When I was a kid we used to play football using the wall of a s.XI church as goal. That might be an extreme case but gives some perspective about european cities.

In Europe 100 km is far away.

In America 100 years is a long time ago.

> I've never been to Europe, I would really love to go some day, but I can only imagine the feeling of actually seeing these really old places/structures in person.

European cities are also relatively young. If you want to see old cities, you should visit the Middle East or China.

The city I live in here in France is about 2000 years old. That might not be as old as some of the cities in the Middle East but relative to most cities it is doing pretty well, non?

China doesn't have a lot of old intact structures though since they used worse building materials than Romans. Age of the city doesn't matter much if all structures are new.

And no, the great wall of China isn't ancient. The parts we see today were built in the 14th century, the parts that are millennia old are no longer there so you can only see traces of it in the ground.

Europe on the other hand has impressive structures 2 millenia old like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduct_of_Segovia

How much old stuff is in Chinese cities vs countryside though? My understanding is since the capitals moved many times (often with city destruction at dynasty end) that there's less old stuff in the cities (and a lot of 19th century less historical stuff has been raised.)

At least a lot of the famous stuff around Xi'an and Luoyang seems to be monumental works outside city. Maybe various parts of the grand canal and stuff surrounding is a better example than that?

I think they mean the actual buildings and layouts, rather than the fact that people lived there 500 years ago. It's quite normal in Italy or Southern France for example to walk past churches that are 500-1000 years old

Most Chinese cities are younger than Rome or Istanbul or Athens.

Athens dates back before cities like Damascus and Jehrico, and probably even before Luxor. Not aware of any cities in China older than about 2000BC.

A lot of people seem to be reading the headline, getting upset and immediately heading here to complain and getting on the defensive. The article is actually pretty interesting and isn't just trying to attack Houston, Texas, the USA or you personally.

"Rather, Cold War–era urban design philosophy in the U.S. prioritized sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre–World War II—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were seen as being susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities such as Los Angeles and Houston were less likely to be targeted for a nuclear attack. Sprawl was a deterrent against Soviet aggression."

That's the first time I've heard that. Interesting, if true.

I'm not sure I buy it; it sounds like a 'just-so' story. Sprawl is popular because it allows for larger properties at lower prices relative to dense urban development. The vast majority of real estate developers have likely never seriously considered factors like probability of a nuclear strike as a criteria for selecting land for development.

I don't buy it at all. Population centers are secondary targets after military targets.

Besides, the USSR and USA had (have) enough nukes that a spread out city is irrelevant.

The timing doesn’t really work out either. Automobile suburbs, the beginning of what we’d call sprawl, started in the early 1920s, and really picked up speed in the 1940s and 1950s in Detroit. Detroit really hurts the narrative of nuclear strike resistance, as it’s buried pretty deep inside US air space; it wouldn’t be until the proliferation of ICBMs that Detroit would face significant nuclear strike risk. If sprawl provides any protection against nuclear weapons (which I doubt), then that is clearly a post-hoc rationalization.

I'm not sure whether the story is true, but it's worth noticing that developers are not the only drivers here—changes zoning laws and federal funding both played a major role, and it seems plausible for the government to take nuclear strikes into account when charting a high-level policy for the country as a whole.

I'm sure someone discussed it once, but Pentagon war planners don't set urban planning policy. People like single family homes, people like yards, people want racist neighbourhood segregation, people really hated urban centers for a long time in the US. All much better explanations.

They considered transportation infrastructure. See National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

They also considered jobs availability. I wasn’t able to find good enough sources on the policies of the era, but many articles on the Internets say the sprawl of industries was caused in part by federal policies: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44250919

I’ve also read that it was the byproduct of post war migration of whites who wanted access to the city but were afraid of the concentration of black people who resided in the city interior.

(Stamped from the Beginning by Ibrim X Kendi)

No discussion of sprawl is complete without talking about Robert Moses. American highways, and highways around the world sprawl as they do because of Robert Moses.

Throughout Robert Cairo's 1344 page biography of Moses, the reader sees how Moses' racism and clasism impacted the massive influence he had on transportation and sprawl in America.

+1 for Stamped.

In addition, Redlining is a well researched and documented practice in America [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#History

Suburbs had been expanding quickly prior to this, but city centers actually start truly declining around the '60s and '70s after Brown vs. Board of Ed resulted in unpopular busing programs to desegregate schools, as well as the riots that proceeded MLK's death.

That sounds like a new "lost cause" myth to explain white flight.

One factor that hasn't been mentioned here is climate.

Siena seems to have a very mild climate. Its average high temperature[1] in August is 28.3°C (82.9°F).

Compare that to Houston's monthly high for August, which is 35°C (95°F). Houston is also very humid[3].

Most people don't want to take a 10-minute walk when it's 95°F and humid. You arrive at your destination panting and very sweaty. It's more comfortable to take a 10-minute drive in an air conditioned car. To some people, it's preferable even if the drive takes 30 minutes due to traffic.

---

[1] https://en.climate-data.org/europe/italy/tuscany/siena-1089/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Houston

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/america-most-humid-cities-090...

You say that as if there are no dense cities in places that have a similar climate as Houston. What about Taipei, for instance?

Houston has a July average high temperature of 34,7 degrees C with an average relative humidity of 74,4. The same data for Taipei is 34,3 degrees C with a humidity of 73.

Yet Houston has a population density of 1398,76/km2 whereas Taipei 9700/km2, almost 7 times as high.

Data from Wikipedia.

Actually, perhaps this map says it best: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tkoekp0or12ppjc/Screenshot%202020-...

(If anything, building densely can create a lot of shade, which can be quite beneficial.)

Arguably Taipei could have the motive, but not the opportunity, not like Houston does.

The population of Taiwan[1] is 23.78 million, and its land area is 35,808 km^2. The population of Texas[2] is 29 million, and its land area is 676,587 km^2.

So Taiwan has nearly (82%) as many people but 1/20th the land.

Also, Taipei is boxed in by large mountains and the ocean, so there are lots of natural barriers discouraging sprawl.

Houston is near the ocean, but aside from that there are no natural barriers. The land around it is super flat in every direction. The closest hill of any size is probably 150 miles away.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas

I don't think temperature has anything yo do with it. There are still plenty of cities in southern Italy were temperature goes above 40° in the summer and still do not sprawl.

These highways suck to drive on and have as much delay as Illinois highways half the surface area. Its one of my least favorite parts about tx.

The reason is largely that they just scaled up traffic patterns which are fine for 2 lanes to 6-7 lanes. It's absurd. The local legend in Austin is that the highway designer later committed suicide. I bike to work.

Surely the traffic can’t be worse than the humidity.

Kind sir I call your attention to the condensation on the outside of your car windows.

Austin is usually dry. Did you drive to Florida?

I heard the same suicide tale about The Stack when I lived in Phoenix. I wonder if this is a common urban legend?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stack

I'm almost certain it is. There's a housing project in Rome that has the same tale, apparently the architect killed himself after seeing it completed.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corviale

As someone who lives in Houston, the simple reason there is sprawl is because its flat and land is cheap. This makes it easy to live on large lots or on small average. It's also hot, so people spend more time indoors and drive everywhere.

Don't forget lack of zoning and state commitment to building highway/freeway infrastructure.

It's partially a collective action problem. Since everyone has pretty much committed to doing nearly everything via car the marginal cost at either the individual or system level of adding one more car (side) trip is very low.

I'm glad someone said this. The size of the interchange vs a small town in Italy is an odd comparison. Land and gas are cheap in one place and they're not in another. That's basically the end of the story.

(still working to articulate this all precisely)

I think a lot of these country to country comparisons bank off the fact that people presume they're dealing with an oranges to oranges comparison like two sporting teams or something equally sized. Evaluating two comparands on some single concept they both happen share in common without looking to the specifics is grossly inadequate.

Concepts like city, country, state, hospital system, etc, can indeed both be shared between two countries at a conceptual level. However those concepts can take drastically different forms with their reality on the ground. The two comparands' actualizations of these concepts can be huge simply looking at scale alone. As far as I can tell the US dwarfs pretty much any EU country in terms of population, land mass/area, and a bunch of other stuff too I'd imagine.

I'm awakening more to the fact that without highlighting from the outset any known differences in scale one can be lead to strange conclusions in the results of comparison. There's that common software architecture analogy regarding the techniques to build a single family detached house being woefully inadequate at building a skyscraper.

It would be nice to have some normalized terminology of city and country etc that speaks more directly to the population scale at hand.

I’d say more to do with technology available at onset of growth. Modern versus ancient in terms of cities. I found the marketing brochure in my mid-century house in Dallas, they really thought that the Jetsons was going to happen. Same house was built north of downtown Dallas from some horse farms and pitched country life with modern conveniences. The exurbs that reach damn near Oklahoma now are still pitching the same thing while my house is very much considered in the city.

Italy is pretty hot too

The comparison is entirely pointless. There are interchanges in Italy that are of comparable size; just outside my home town, there are medium-sized factory buildings that are larger than its entire historical center, complete with its 13th century frescoed palaces. The area of the Sistine Chapel - 560 m^2- is easily dwarfed by that of most small supermarkets.

The fact is that- unless scarce- space is valued- no, wait, it's defined- by what it contains and by your relation to it, not by its size. When traveling on a motorway you cross multiple times per second the entire length of your living room, a space where a centimetre-sized stain can give you nightmares. This beauty in the Netherlands ( https://www.spoorpro.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/maasvlakt... ) is more or less the size of Manhattan. The Mona Lisa painting is smaller than the patch in your backyard where you keep your garbage cans. And so?

Thanks for taking the obnoxious "Yes, this" off the title.

Yes, it's one of the weirdest pet-peeve trends over the past 5-10 years. No, I do not like it, thanks for asking.

Wait, you didn't ask me? You mean nobody was asking me, it's just something I decided to couch in a response to a conversation that wasn't going on?

But seriously, I wonder what's going on when we do this. My theory is that it originally caught on to lend credence to what we're saying when we pretend our statement is actually a response to an open question, though now it's just subconscious rhetorical device to emphasize a point, I would imagine.

As for the article, growing up 45min outside of Houston, that interchange is all I think about when I entertain the idea of moving to Houston or DFW. There's something grotesque about it and the feeling it gives me. Cars, traffic, and this need to slave away in a commute.

Austin keeps voting down highway extension proposals. I'm sure anyone who has to sit in Austin traffic daily hates that, but we can't have every damn city in Texas becoming a concrete metropolis.

I mean, "Yes, this" isn't as bad as starting with, "I mean".

This is the intersection of East Freeway and East Loop. It occupies about 1.58 km^2. It is an older interchange reflective of relatively modest traffic volume that set a wide space to ensure room for future growth (which didn't happen on the eastern side of the city). Many newer interchanges operate at higher volume and density.

https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7748476,-95.2664193,17.32z

So Houstonians have to live every single day (probability of occurrence of "a day": 100%) with an infrastructure optimized for a nuclear attack that happens effectively never. Well, it was somebody's best guess at the right thing to do 65 years ago. But that's the sticky issue with large-scale infrastructure like this. If you get it wrong, or if you get it right but conditions later change, the costs associated with it start to balloon & become astronomical. But the short-term costs of changing it are even greater, so nobody wants to tear the band-aid off, and you're stuck bleeding money and productivity forever. (contrary mixture of metaphors there... heh)

If they are right and there are a nuclear attack they survive, will your city? You fall for the same falicy as those who are saying covid isn't dangerous. (not that I disagree with you, but you haven't made a good argument)

As far as I know, I haven't made any argument.

Regardless, the odds of COVID-19 transmission between two people standing together without masks must be at least 1000X higher than the odds that a nuclear attack will happen while they're standing there. That's enough for me to consider the two risks "different" shall we say, and guess which one I'm more likely to prepare for.

Nobody prepares for every contingency. Most people look for some value of risk reduction divided by cost. If I decide to protect my house from school-bus-sized meteorites, the chance I will bankrupt myself trying to construct an adequate shield is near 100%, whereas the chance of such a meteorite hitting the house is pretty small. Given how much more likely plain old thievery is, and how cheap locks are, I should probably prioritize just buying a lock for the front door and remembering to lock it. Just like people prone to die from heart disease or just slowly waste their lives away in traffic should probably prioritize a simpler lifestyle above nuclear war prep.

However and nonetheless, note that even with the small purchase of a door lock, I've already agreed to take on a (more than zero) costly and (to some degree) onerous preparation for something that may never happen. Who knows what the chance of a burglary is; you could estimate based on crime rates. But with 100% certainty, locking the door will be a small chore every day and will ruin some number of minutes of my life. Whether it was ultimately worth it would largely be determined by the value I place on certainty.

Speaking of values, they're subjective. Let's say the school-bus-sized meteorite is confirmed to be coming right for my house, with 100% probability. But let's also say that I don't care whatsoever about the house. So I will still not do anything to mitigate. That's how I feel about a nuclear attack. The chance of a nuclear attack is (some number), but the chance of a nuclear attack happening, and my giving a shit about anything whatsoever afterward, is near zero. "Will I survive?" My answer is somewhere between "Who cares" and "I hope not." So obviously I'm not willing to undertake mitigations or live in Houston. But I will wear a mask during the pandemic for example because it's cheap and easy, temporary, and it works to reduce a risk that is pretty high.

The assertion that Houston’s layout is the result of Cold War nuke risk mitigation is a new one on me. The beltway opened in 1988.

I grew up here and I’ve read many articles trying to explain why Houston is the way that it is. The truth is incredibly human and boring and wouldn’t sell display ads. Thus, the logical arguments that follow articles like this are complete nonsense.

If you want to know why Houston is the way that it is, fly down here and I’ll drive you around and show you. You’ll be completely underwhelmed, but the tacos will more than make up for the trip.

May come by soon looking for jobs; any taco leads?

Tacos A Go Go, Original Ninfas location, El Rey, Velvet Taco, Torchy’s, Balderas, any food truck, hell just google “great tacos in Houston”.

So a city of 30k people requires less infrastructure than a city of 6M people? Where are the examples of major metropolitan areas without big freeway intersections?

Just looking around Tokio on satellite view: there are a few highways, but nothing compared to the many-layered intersections you see in US cities like Los Angeles or San Diego.

Tokyo is amazing in many ways, but especially infrastructure. I was embarrassed when I went there for I felt like the countries I grew up in were lazy by comparison. The most popular type of vehicle on the road there (in my observation) was a concrete truck.

The subway system is unbelievable. They don't try to build huge line extensions every few years or decades the way we do, they are constantly expanding and improving it all the time. It's absolutely amazing what they have built there, and at the same time remained incredibly polite and gracious.

Ahmedabad, India appears to have about 6M people and 1 highway interchange. The interchange isn't even a full cloverleaf, but instead only allows 4 of the standard 8 cloverleaf options. In 2012 it was listed as India's best city to live in.

Do you mean this interchange: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/22.9676/72.6599

> Where are the examples of major metropolitan areas without big freeway intersections?

Many European cities keep them largely outside (in a ring).

The source. Plenty of other pictures and examples.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Images and content about the interchange and the city center on pages 14 and 15

I live in Texas. This assertion is true of most cities in Texas also. Houston is the largest population center in Texas with 6M+ in the city. Also Houston is a busy center for interstate and international commerce especially for trucking.

The Dallas-Ft Worth metro area is more populous than the Houston metro area by about 500k people.

Yes that is true when you combine those 2 cities. Also known for their large interstate highway interchanges. In fact one of the newest is in North Dallas aptly named the "High Five" interchange.

There are almost 7M in the Houston metro area. The city of Houston itself has a population of around 2.3M.

I'm sure I'll get down voted, but I don't find the Bay Area all that different. In the Bay Area it's just different towns all interconnected, while in Houston, all those towns were consolidated into one massive city (like LA).

SF is only 1 million people and the dense, downtown core is not that big. Outside of the downtown cores of SF and Oakland, it's all just suburbs wrapped around the bay. And plenty of people have absolutely brutal commutes due to the sprawl.

The only difference is they commute from "another city".

Did anyone notice how little green space Siena has? The Houston interchange appears to have 100x the amount of green space as the entire city of Siena! Quite ironic!

How was a city allowed to develop with almost no green space?

> How was a city allowed to develop with almost no green space?

Siena, like other Tuscan hill towns, was first settled in the time of the Etruscans (c. 900–400 BC)

Siena was built on a hill surrounded by some of the greenest valleys in Tuscany, the most notable one being the Chianti valley, home of the popular wine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chianti

Trivia: the movie "The Gladiator" was shot in Pienza, in Val D'orcia, in Siena province.

This is a shot of the famous Cypress trees road.

http://www.clickalps.com/stock/blocks/image.php?id=81499

Expand your view: https://goo.gl/maps/dnKTT771b5mVcLzo8

Ex houstonian here, university of houston and everything.

Decently fun city, interesting history, cool people.

The road and traffic situation is nightmarish. I slowly came to this realization in college when I went abroad a couple of times. I found out that didn't have to be How Things Are.

The university of houston has a problem where students aren't attending classes because parking isn't available. Stories of trying to find a parking space for 40 minutes abound. There's lines of cars offering an air conditioned ride to parking spaces outside of classrooms, in return for their parking spot.

If you miss an exit near the i45/i10 merge, you've added 20 minutes to your drive, minimum, as the next local exit will be a good five miles away, and then after that the next on ramp for your give freeway could well be on the other side of downtown.

For some reason they built a light rail that criss crosses main street. For a great form of entertainment, search youtube for "Houston light rail accident." They're rarely really bad, more just stupid looking, some giant pick-up truck failing to see the train and getting booped.

There's no zoning (kinda) so the industrial zones are mixed right in with residential, budding up against UH. So about 1/10 of the time I bicycled to school, I would be blocked by a mile long train that decided to simply park and block every road crossing I could take to the university. I made a habit of throwing my bike between the nonmoving cars and clambering over until my dad sent me a video of someone getting cut in half doing that.

Growing up in the suburbs you'd have balls of steel to bicycle to a friend's house. Pickup trucks make a sport of fucking with bicyclists. Better to just wait for your parents to get home from work so they can drive you.

Lord forbid you have a friend in the woodlands or something. Thought it was obnoxious to visit your friends in San Jose when you live in the bay area? The woodlands is like a trip to Sacramento, but only because of traffic and a 610 loop as wide as a continent.

Public transit, lol. That's for poor people. I remember hosting a luncheon for our engineers (was a recruiter) and this old fart was talking about his 50 minute one way commute. It was a point of pride for these o&g engineers for some reason to measure their commutes. Then this engineer we brought in from mexico was like "oh, I live in that same neighborhood, why not take the bus? It gets on the HOV and gets me here in 30m." Old fart was flabbergasted. He didn't even know there was a bus. I don't blame him, they pick up at these huge ride share parking lots and it's not easy to figure out their schedule, or even how to pay.

Anyway Houston traffic sucks and my conspiracy theory is it's because Shell and Chevron have downtown offices and the CEOs sit at the top of the tower where they can see a clogged i45, i10, 610, and 59, and cackle maniacally at the hordes of people trying to justify their 1 hour one way commutes to eachother and the choking fog of smog clouding around the city.

Current resident here! I can relate to some of your experiences. I will say though that Houston, like a lot of the sunbelt cities has multiple urban cores, the sprawl kind of connects them.

Going from one urban core to another can take some time, indeed an hour in some cases from one close-in area to another. (Close in meaning ~20 - 40 miles). It's very much like the East Bay in that regard.

Living in an urban area like Med Center / West U, or Galleria, energy corridor on the west side, most folks don't suffer, everything is nearby in those communities.

Houston does have a good park and ride bus system for the outer burbs, and it's been successful. They've added a light rail in town connecting downtown entertainment with the medical center and convention areas, and just launched BRT services that connect hubs in the Galleria to some of the park-n-ride depots in the city.

Lots of problems, lots of opportunities to improve, but for the price, the great airports (which I miss thee days with COVID), and these massive freeways to move us over great distance quickly, I'm still a fan.

How did you manage to ride a bicycle in Houston without getting sweaty and gross?

I didn't, lol. I was just always sweaty and gross.

You can find as big highway interchanges in Italy too, e.g.:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8177773,12.3911127,17z

And you can most likely find small cities with 30K people in the US too (though I had trouble finding one of this size near Houston when scrolling through Google maps because the cities there look less dense and don't appear to have a discernible center at least from the look of the grid pattern of the streets).

Your link only shows a simple cloverleaf design, typically used at the intersection of only two highways or as an exit from a highway. Those are everywhere in U.S. cities, in certain regions as not everyone uses the cloverleaf. They are not super common in Texas though, which uses different designs. But either way, it is not close to the same size and complexity as the exchange, of which Houston has many, in the original post.

Out of curiosity, how much traffic does the SS674 and SS223 see per day? That interchange appears to be the eastern connection between I10 and the 610 loop around central Houston. I10 is one of the major arteries between the east and west coasts.

https://goo.gl/maps/CyoAESVtEQFRa4zb7

Which interchange?

And this city (Houston) has so many problems I don't know where to start... Highways are one of them because nothing is dense, but its a brutally self reinforcing problem in a city that refuses to invest in any other kind of infrastructure.

> is the same size

What size, exactly? Is it a really big interchange, or a really small city?

Most of these threads tend to devolve into attacking assumptions about how people want to live (high density vs low density, parking vs no parking, cars for every trip vs walking/transit most trips)

I'll list out what I view as the two dominant views towards the development of a metropolitan region (I loosely define metropolitan region as a city and all the places around that city which can plausibly commute to a job inside the city. Or in other words, all land housing the people you may see every day). Let me know if you think I've got the two sides nailed down correctly.

The urban mindset to developing a metropolitan region:

* Cars are a luxury (and often a nuisance) and should not be required for essential, everyday travel.

* The region expands both outwards (by adding high speed transit to surrounding neighborhoods), and upwards (replacing existing development with higher density development)

* Key transportation infrastructure: public transit (bus, tram, train, subway), in addition to feet and bikes

* (some amount of) Density is a key pattern: Having enough people per square mile to bring workers and customers, sustaining local businesses, as well as maintainable a taxable base large enough to pay for transit and other infrastructure

* Multi use zoning is king: local storefronts and restaurants are considered beneficial for quality of life. Sufficiently dense streets thrive off the mixture of people and business.

* "porous" neighborhoods (e.g. grid street layout) are a pattern: porous neighborhoods are more efficient on a mile-per-mile basis, helping to enable low-speed travel (read: foot & bike). This increases the amount of business-capable space within a neighborhood, which is beneficial to the local economy and quality of life of residents

* Suburban mindset seen as harmful: suburban mindset seeks to expand outwards. This adds people who consume local infrastructure (e.g. driving on local roads, creating noise and pollution) but who might not live in city jurisdiction (i.e. can't be taxes in a straightforward manner), and aren't interested in contributing to the well-being of the city. Suburban mindset seeks to limit legal expansion of density, mandate parking minimums, cut urban spending for necessary infrastructure like transit, reduce quality of life by widening roads, building highways, and increasing speed limits, and continue an outward suburban expansion that will just accentuate existing problems with traffic and with car noises

The suburban mindset to developing a metropolitan region:

* Cars are the key mode of travel for the vast majority of destinations, and as such are a necessity

* The region expands outwards by purchasing and developing surrounding farmland, and connecting this land to the city with high speed roads. This keeps land absurdly cheap.

* Key transportation infrastructure: roads (with sufficiently high speeds and capacity), parking lots

* Density is a key antipattern: More people per square mile brings congestion and noise, consume available parking, but offer little communal benefits as residents generally don't need to work or shop locally (no need to sustain local businesses)

* Single use zoning is king: businesses want to locate on large roads with lots of traffic, people want to locate on small subdivisions with little traffic. Zoning enforces this to maintain everybody's quality of life.

* "porous" neighborhoods are an antipattern: stores are not on local streets, so any porous neighborhoods mostly bring in through-traffic (which gives noise and pollution but no economic benefit). Thus a tiered freeway/highway/boulevard -> neighborhood -> subdivision pattern to residential space, in place of a city grid

* Mandatory parking minimums useful, as parking is a valuable public good

* Urban mindset seen as harmful: urban mindset seeks to build higher density housing in centralized places that already have bad traffic during rush hour, which will just make it worse. Urban mindset seeks to make more use of urban space with less parking, which offers a worse quality of life to suburbanites who wish to drive into the city. Urban mindset seeks to limit legal restrictions on density, which threatens to see multifamilies or apartment buildings in quiet neighborhoods that currently have low traffic and low noise (but won't when population density goes up). Urban mindset looks to spend on public transit, which is not useful at all to all the many people who live in the suburbs (but suburbanites may face state taxes or consumption taxes to fund transit, as well as increases in traffic due to construction)

Thank you for this comment. Your comment is the only one on this page that gives a fair look at both sides and is a breath of fresh air compared to all the negativity in the rest of the comments. I wish that everyone could live in an area that matches their preferences without someone else trying to destroy everything they love about their home because it doesn't fit a preconceived notion about what a proper city should be.

Now compare Manhattan.

DFW Airport alone has 80% of the total land area that Manhattan does, which is always an interesting little bit of trivia.

Well, no one was using the land at the time[0]. Everything has grown to touch DFW airport - I lived literally across the street from it in Euless.

Also, a lot of the land there is used by businesses like UPS, Fed-Ex, etc.

0. I'm sure someone was, but not very many people.

Ok? And?

It’s interesting trivia but it doesn’t mean much. A well packed slum could fit 10x that amount in that land. Or you could have a vineyard or you could have a train station.

It’s an arbitrary comparison.

Land gets used in many different ways that make sense for the local people. Some seem “better” but that requires certain “assumptions “. Is arid desert “wasted”?

The article goes on to discuss the issue of sprawl and how cities like Houston are building themselves into a corner by constantly expanding infrastructure like this. The ironic part of this comparison is that Siena is a much older community than Houston, which, like most of America, embraced a sprawl mentality in the 50’s as a Cold War risk mitigation strategy.

Climate change is arguably a more pressing threat to Houston than thermonuclear war, but the city doesn’t have many other options than to continue sprawling.

There are lots of options for Houston to evolve. The city is mostly how the electorate wants it.

Kowloon Walled City was 50k population in a surface area of only 6.4 acres (2.6 hectare).

I'll never get the US fascination with highways and ugly interchanges.

fair, but try driving 85mph through the italian city in a giant cadillac with cow horns on the front bumper while blaring your favorite tunes and drinking something from a drive-through liquor store. ;)

You mean swangas aren't well-suited to european streets?

I disagree with the notion that space is better used if it exhibits greater density of population.

I don't believe it is very easy to drive in Siena, Italy. I also don't believe it is very easy to live under a highway interchange. To each space its own.

I bet it's also not necessary to drive in Siena, Italy

And yet it's necessary to drive in Houston.

Imagine judging Siena based on the ease of driving. That would be equally as arbitrary as judging Houston by its space allocation to roadway interchanges.

I also disagree but let's assume it is true. Houston would overall be a better user of space than Siena. The population density of the entire city of Siena is around 1200 per square mile. For Houston it is over 3600 per square mile.

I think the argument is that space is better used by designing for people, not for cars. Sometimes that means population density, but sometimes it means open plazas, pedestrian only streets, parks, etc.

This is the part that got a few nanometers underneath my skin:

Hendrix pulled this eye-opening comparison from a report compiled by the U.K.’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which sternly suggests that housing 30,000 Italians is less wasteful and more sustainable than using the same amount of acreage to simply move cars around. There’s truth to that, of course [...]

There's no truth to that, of course. Houston is a gigantic port city and population center, in a region of the USA where automobiles are almost essential to life because everything is spread out and public transportation is sparse. Even if you only focus on designing for people, there are people commuting in those automobiles and their quality of life goes up when their daily commute doesn't include a series of congested off-ramps and on-ramps in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

In Houston, the user drives. Just because Tuscany is nice doesn't mean there is any reason why space in places where the use case is different should be judged with Tuscany in mind as an ideal.

To take it to the extreme, this article is akin to a comparison between the ISS and a soccer field. The author decided that the soccer field is a better use of space because it accommodates multiple times as many participants as the ISS.

In Siena, you walk.

In Houston, you drive.

There is no reason to judge space in one place by the use patterns of a totally different place.

In Siena it's just a pleasure to walk. And if you have the luck to live in the city center you just walk to the main square and spend your time there sipping a glass of Montepulciano at a local bar.

I think that 30,000 is an exaggeration, and if so, I just don't like when people sensationalize figures and bend facts to their liking.

The problem would lie in this report [0], which is cited by the article and by the person tweeting about it.

Happy to be proven wrong; but I know the area quite well (I grew up in Italy), and I immediately thought that the satellite picture of Siena depicted in the article, and in the tweet, does not contain 30,000 people.

The entire "Comune" of Siena (roughly equivalent to a "County" in the UK or US) is ~53,000 people [1].

However, I would be surprised if the part of Siena depicted in the article, the city center, houses 30,000 people.

See for yourself. Here's Assisi, roughly with a similar density as Siena, which has ~4,500 people living in the city center [2].

Here's Siena [3]. Just by approximation, I'd say that Siena's city center is in the range of maybe 15k? Not more than that.

Also, it would be unfair to consider the fact that Siena's city center is also house for students, which live in different conditions than normal people. In that sense, even Harvard's dormitories have a high density, compared to any road structure in Texas.

Anyway, just trying to make you reflect on the numbers - I hope my calculations are correct; or at least, the reasoning behind it should be good enough. As said, happy to be proven wrong.

[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[1]: https://www.comune.siena.it/Il-Comune/Servizi/Statistica/Pop...

[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/53100+Siena,+Province+of+S...

[3]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/53100+Siena,+Province+of+S...

Siena pop 30k

Huston pop 2.3mil

Now let's compare the GDP each supports.

What an incredible waste of space, fuel, and human time. Driving is the bane of American prosperity.

And yet not only is Houston quite rich (on average anyway), but it consistently ranks #2 for happiness among major metro areas in Harris Happiness polls. http://www.city-data.com/blog/646-satisfaction-life-happines...

And? Can't aspire to a better future where we don't sit in traffic for hours to get across the city, choking our skies with car smog and carbon dioxide that'll ruin the environment for future generations? Our design philosophy around cities are the biggest mistake made of 20th century American politics, and I'll die on that hill.

GDP:

Houston, Texas = ~$500B/yr

Siena, Tuscany = ~$11B/yr

Is that the GDP of this highway interchange?

While I don't think this direct comparison is valid (at least let's also have the per capita numbers, which I believe is around 60% higher in Houston if Google snippets are to be believed) one could argue that a portion of that GDP is enabled by road infrastructure such as this interchange.

Possibly, as the interchange allows a sizable fraction to more quickly get to work.

I think the point being made here is that manufacturing and distribution require roads. People can live in sardine cans however manufacturing / industrial sectors cannot. Zooming in on a engineering marvel for traffic handling and comparing it to high density mixed use housing is a tad non sequitur. Albeit an interesting photo and thought exercise.

The manufacturing and industrial sectors existed before automobiles, as did cities.

Population:

Houston: 2.3 million

Siena: 50k

What's the use of these pointless comparisons?

Exactly - Houston probably needs that interchange with their big population.

And not so for a city of 50K like Siena, right?

The whole thing is pointless, that's my point.

... and that's for Siena, the province, not Siena the city (which is the regional capital of the province). Siena the province has a population of 268k.

197k per capita in siena vs 83k per capita in houston, pathetic

(looking at better data, these numbers are wrong)

Houston homicide rate: 12.1 murders per 100,000 population

Nigeria homicide rate: 4.5 murders per 100,000 population

Siena homicide rate: < 0.5 murders per 100,000 population

It all depends on how you spend that money...

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