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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

You're confusing design, planning, and central planning.

Traffic arteries are not the result of central economic planning. They are the result of the free market dumping the externalities of cars.

At that point you have two choices. Either you ban the car, and interfere in the free market and "pick winners and losers", something Hayek wouldn't like, or you adapt the infrastructure to what people are asking for in order to reduce traffic fatalities and other externalities of car ownership.

Central planning would be saying - no, cars aren't working at scale, we will limit the production of cars.

In this case the government didn't do central planning. It didn't pick winners and losers. It went with what the free market decided.

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Robert Moses, a planner, demolished and fractured thriving neighborhoods to build massive highways in New York City in his quest to see cars working at scale. Architects and planners of the time like Moses and Le Corbusier did not pay close attention to markets, they were focused on utopic designs and unrealistic beliefs of what humans would achieve in radically new spaces.

That is why we have legacy highways and sprawling public housing projects.

Sure, and places without those big projects still became car dependent. Cars still ended up scaling.

You found an unrelated problem.

TLDR: Roads were built despite the market's desire for mass transit.

The first automobile suburb was Long Island. Created by Robert Moses. Copied by all. Money was stolen from public transit and spent on roads, stolen from urbans to pay for suburbs.

In fact, cars did not scale. The road capacity did not, could not, ever, accommodate the demand. Physically, logically, economically impossible.

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

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

There is literally 0 market desire for mass transit. Mass transit is not viable on the free market functionally. It doesn't mean we should not build it.

Before the first automobile suburb, cars were already in sufficient concentrations to require infrastructure to be taken away from other modes of transport and onto cars - the first example was in the 1910s, MUCH before Robert Moses designed any suburb - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term

This is simply an a-historical take on reality. Cars got infrastructure by being enough of a nuisance to force the government to build around them. And it started in the city, not in the suburbs. Not that suburbs are good, but it's important to get these things right.

Things can scale without scaling enough. Cars did scale, they just did so unsustainably. Since we're being pedantic anyways.

I wouldn’t say 0 desire. I don’t own a car anymore and rely on good mass transit to get around. It’s far less expensive than owning a car.

There are also people who cannot drive who desire mass transit.

Desire != market desire.

At the price it would be to make and operate a transit system without taxes or eminent domain or enforced monopolies, or land value increase kickbacks, almost none of the people that need it would find it a compelling value proposition. And then as a result low ridership would lead to even higher per person price, which makes it even less feasible.

It's just not possible for the private sector to make a good transit system without most of the heavy lifting coming from the public sector. Public transit has to exist outside the market.

For example even in m city with a really efficient system, even with all of the infrastructure already built using government powers and mostly paid off, even if the price increase did not increase ridership, I would have to pay ~3x more for transit, which would make it unaffordable.

Ah, I see! Thanks for exposing that. TIL

Isn't Japan a counterexample? While government was essential for establishing the initial feasibility and cultural proof of concept, private competitors grew so much more successful than JNR rail that 30 years ago they decided to privatize the entire rail system. Since then, there has been unabated upgrades and additions of lines and regular train car improvements. The only major inefficiencies and decline has been in remote extremely low ridership areas.

The trains are still pretty affordable, and everyone uses them.

Even the JR group in Japan does not build the lines themselves. The actual infrastructure is built by the JRTT, which is a state agency. It's complicated because JRTT owns many companies of the JR Group and is a shareholder in others so one may get the impression the JR group is building the infrastructure, which it's not.

The JR group itself is only profitable because the Japanese government took on the vast majority of the debt from actually building the infrastructure.

So no, the JR Group is not a counterexample. It's still unable to actually build infrastructure without government power despite having inherited so much of it, and it's not able to profitably pay off that infrastructure which is instead paid by the government.

Methinks a pendant would have read the Pulitzer Prize winning book before commenting, rather than blythely dismissing one of the most influential books about city planning as "ahistorical".

But perhaps your dictionary has a different definition for "pendantic" than mine.

I don't really care about that. I have provided a source for the fact that cities attributed infrastructure to cars exclusively before the event you cited, and I have provided a source for the fact that this was done because cars would kill people otherwise.

Saying that the reason for cars dominating the urban landscape and replacing the "anarchy" that came before them as GP said it is something that happen 30 years after it becoming illegal to walk in the street and cars legally becoming the preffered denizen of the road is ahistorical. Unless you believe Robert Moses is the reason these laws were passed.

> I don't really care about that.

The enabling innovation begetting suburbs was the concept of highways, roads dedicated to cars to the exclusion of non-cars.

From this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

To this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway#History

In response to jaywalking? Sure, I guess, a bit. But mostly because of traffic, congestion.

> Unless you believe Robert Moses is the reason these laws were passed.

Exactly.

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

At the time, New York state was the center of the universe. Whatever happened in Albany became the template for federal policy. (Another example is the New Deal.)

Moses was the guy who figured out how to make it happen. His nickname was something like "Master of Albany". Laws are nothing without funding. Moses invented completely novel financial schemes, often bordering on fraud and theft. These innovations were then replicated nationwide. With little democratic oversight or even awareness.

Again, roads were allocated to cars at the ezclusion of pedestrians in the 1910s, and not in highways. Cars naturally exclude other modes of transportation by posing a deadly danger.

There's no amount of source dumping you can do to get around the concept of causality. Robert Moses is not the one who killed the pre-car street. Cars and their drivers did by posing a deadly threat to anyone there.

> In this case the government didn't do central planning. It didn't pick winners and losers. It went with what the free market decided.

Jaywalking -> Freedom Markets™ -> Highways

No central planning required.

The person I was replying to didn't talk about highways. They talked about car-dependence and the death of the pedestrian-first street. That happened with car drivers killing people and scaring the rest into yielding the street, and government then formalizing that to avoid literal deaths. That is to say, the market decided that cars went first and fuck everyone else.

Highways were not the first roads where cars drove out people. The first roads where that happens were just city roads when cars started proliferating.

It's almost like the private, selfish choices of people can lead to negative outcomes for all of society.

Government overstepped to create large roads for cars, which create a problem of induced demand. Private can not use eminent domain and sieze property for roads.

Before they did people just die crushed by cars. Yes there was induced demand but it was already too late before then

You're going to have to explain why it's a binary choose between banning cars or not.

Either you ban/limit the sale of cars, you build infrastructure to support it, or you deal with people dying. I never said it was a binary.

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