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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

I hear you but it is weird to see America falling behind in these things while the rest of the world catches up. Americans built a World Class Highway System in the 50s and I am sure we had the same argument back then on how it is so expensive or democratized that we cannot take away people's land etc etc. Yes it is tougher in democratized countries and there are good reasons for it but do we really give up ? I cannot imagine that.

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Some of the current US backlash on eminent domain is a direct result of neighborhoods destroyed by the Eisenhower highway system... often poor black neighborhoods which nobody cared about in the 50s. The Voting Rights Act was passed 9 years later.

I know this is going to come across as an apologia for building highways through poor neighborhoods, but I see that as a natural consequence of the land simply being cheaper to acquire. I'm not denying that there was possibly some racial malice in the planning. It just seems obvious to me a government with limited funding is going to put the infrastructure through the cheapest path it can find. It was still a terrible thing to do to those neighborhoods, however.

The key argument against this is that many of the planned highways were also supposed to go through richer neighborhoods, but never got constructed because the residents of those neighborhoods were able to successfully fight against them.

(For one example, check out the incomplete stub at the eastern terminus of I-70 -- I don't believe the cost of the land was a major factor in that case)

I did not know that. I will have to look up more about I-70.

Exactly -- you can't build big projects without stepping on someone's toes. What we really need is equal-opportunity toe-stepping.

The discussions on you can't take away land didn't start until the 1960s, and costs went way up as a result.

US built first a large railway network, then a highway system, then stagnated. While there is room for debate on why this happened, the reasons are fairly obvious but writing about it here would bomb the writer to oblivion.

The difference is that the interstate highway system was not simply built for mass civilian transit, but as part of a post-WW2 initiative, functioning as emergency landing strips and providing easier access between airports, seaports, rail terminals, and military bases (which tend to reside near interstate highways).

the whole “emergency landing-strip” thing is a myth btw

In the US that’s true (according to Wikipedia), but in a lot of places around the world, landing strips on the highway used to be (or still are) a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_strip

yeah, i would think that, generally (maybe even universally), the interstate roads in the us are neither wide nor thick enough to support aircraft. i didn’t realise that there are countries that actually did this though; that’s pretty neat.

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