yet the 320,000 person city next door here has a TWO YEAR backlog of street fixes, I was told. Property taxes are as high as any place in the USA. There is no shortage of money, retirement 401k and medical care for city workers. Of course they also play the sub-contractor game a bit, not as bad as corporate on that one.
To step back, why do we have so many square feet of road space? Why do we keep expanding highways when it is proven that it does not help? The automobile and its inefficient infrastructure is bankrupting this country. We keep building more roads rather than investing in transportation infrastructure which is far cheaper in the long run.
That's a huge non-starter warranting much harsher language than is reasonable for HN.
I don't know what the most practical solution is while still being respectful of people's privacy. It could be a combination of GPS and an odometer or just one of these or something else. It doesn't have to leave the car and only the total number each year is important. You just need to somehow make sure the results weren't tampered with.
Expanding highways increases throughput almost everytime. Certainly, it rarely ends congestion. It often reduces congestion, but that depends on how far the capacity is behind the actual demand.
In most places I've lived, road expansion is a response to increased demand from increased population, either through density or sprawl (but usually both). If you let population increase without increasing tranport capacity, you get congestion. That's true for roads and mass transit. Ideally, as the population grows, you expand both. But, expanding roads is often simpler, as you can do it in parts, addressing bottlenecks one at a time, whereas mass transit isn't very effective with piece-wise solutions; I can't easily drive to a highway transit station, take that 10 miles, then drive to my final destination, I need at least one of the local trips to be on transit/walkable and have parking available or have favorable conditions for biking (weather, physical ability, room on transit, managable hills).
Though it's the road expansion itself that often leads to more sprawl.
It's worth noting that congestion in mass transit leads to better service. (Well, if you have a halfway competent transit agency, anyway.) More riders leads to more fares leads to more frequent service leads to getting you where you need to be more quickly.
Road congestion doesn't have the same effect. Maybe it's a toll road in which case you have some increased revenue, but often it isn't - so congestion is typically net negative for drivers.
Every trip taken is an economic activity that would not have otherwise occurred. Traffic is commerce. Sprawl allows the middle class to continue to exist. More people, more property taxes, more fuel taxes, more money for roads.
More money for roads? If the population increases but is pushed to the periphery, requiring new roads to support them, aren't we just digging ourselves in deeper? How does that pay for the existing roads?
I can't really speak to the existence of the middle class but I'll just leave this here: "An astonishing fact: 92 percent of Japanese [like many countries including the US] consider themselves middle-class, according to a labor ministry report published in 2019. That seems to clash with another fact: that nearly 40 percent of Japan’s work force is employed on a part-time or temporary basis, earning less and more vulnerable to layoffs than regular company employees."
Anyway, this is interesting: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/rent/what-is-the-average-... A 1K/1DK (1 bedroom) apartment in the Central Six wards of Tokyo averages 106,000Y per month. The other 17 wards average 72,000Y. A 1K/1DK apartment in Saitama (https://resources.realestate.co.jp/rent/what-is-the-average-...) is 49,000Y. That's ~30-45 min by car or 40 min to 1hr by train (according to Google); i.e. kinda sprawly.
I can't find a median wage for Japan, but the average seems to be about 300,000Y per month, meaning that apartment in the Central Six is out of reach, the other wards would be doable, and outside Tokyo proper would be very doable.
In the US, real estate is the dominant store of wealth for a plurality of Americans, which is why we see such fierce opposition to development. Dense accumulations of people affords great economic opportunities which attract more people, but people need somewhere to live, and if the supply of housing is held far below the demand, prices rise and push out people who can't afford said prices. So people who can't afford sufficient housing within commuting range of economic opportunities within their abilities can either A) forgo the benefits of metropolitan living, B) search the fringes of the metropolitan area for places they can afford/are allowed to build, or C) become homeless.
It would be great if we could just nationally eradicate the regulations, ordinances, zoning codes, etc that cities and towns use to prevent development, but I don't think the 10th amendment allows for that kind of law. And without more housing, there will be sprawl.
[0] https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/06/06/depreciate-limited-l...
[0] https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k [1] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/
In city A, I walk from my apartment to the corner store
In city B, there's no corner stores in my subdivision. There's a gas station 5 miles away, about half a mile within the subdivision, but mostly on a major road or highway.
Both trips are "economic activity," but one is extremely inefficient. What should be a painless transaction is full of friction and is detrimental to other users of the major road.
> And you pay less per month than city A.
That's a consequence of us basically not building anything like city A for the last several decades.
How many years to we have to keep listening to the "stop living your ugly human lives" rhetoric before we realize that the "save the trees" activists caused insane amounts of pollution and death through uncontrolled wildfires, the "anti-nuke" activists directly caused global warming, and the idea of an individual carbon footprint was a creation of oil companies to distract from systemic solutions to systemic problems?
You solve problems of scale at scale. If people want something en masse, you figure out how to make that thing efficient. If people want something that is currently bad, figure out how to make it good. The more energy we can consume sustainably per capita, the better. Now make that energy carbon-free, at the system level.
If you want people to pack into cities like sardines, make it actually better, quieter, cleaner, and cheaper, even for people with kids and dogs and hobbies and kayaks. My years lived in various parts of supposedly good cities have been noisier, dirtier, tinier, slower (it takes up to two hours to go a few miles by any mode of transportation -- that's a lot of wasted fuel) and more expensive than elsewhere.
You don't tell people to lower their energy, you build desirable technologies that use less energy automatically, and most importantly, raise the energy consumption level that is sustainable by building more carbon-free power ASAP.
Yes. One good step would be to allow density everywhere so more people who want to live in dense environments can afford to do so. After all, there's more demand for walkable places than there are walkable places: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...
> make it actually better, quieter, cleaner, and cheaper
Trying over here. My local government is not very amenable to this, unfortunately.
> it takes up to two hours to go a few miles by any mode of transportation
In a city that actually cares about efficiently moving people seriously, that'd be absurdly slow. It takes far less time than that to bike a few miles. Yes, most American cities don't have the infrastructure for that. Again: trying.
But all that aside:
> You don't tell people to lower their energy, you build desirable technologies that use less energy automatically, and most importantly, raise the energy consumption level that is sustainable by building more carbon-free power ASAP.
This is an important part of the solution, yes, but time is not on our side here. I think it's foolish to think that we can reduce our emissions as much as we need to while maintaining our lifestyles exactly as they are. Maybe if we'd taken the problem seriously decades ago that would have been the case, but now it's going to involve at least some level of inconvenience.
An example: it takes a long time for all the cars on the road to turn over. Even if we assume that electric cars will become massively more popular and available in the next decade, and even if we assume that 100% of the electricity to power those comes from green energy, we still wouldn't be on track to halve emissions from passenger vehicles by 2030, because a significant percentage on the vehicles on the road would still be gas powered. Some element of this is going to have to involve less driving. And that's just one source of emissions.
I'm hoping the present climate disasters are at least beginning to change people's minds.
You're misguided. I appreciate what you're saying, but simply put, you're incorrect.
The video, and its channel, as well as its original source, are all fascinating and a highly recommended watch regardless. And they should put some of your fears at ease...
City B often has significantly higher infrastructure costs[0] than City A, while generating fewer tax receipts[1]. This is only possible because City A is picking up the bill for City B; after all if you’re consuming more and paying less, someone else has to be picking up the difference. Those extra trips are generating sales tax and gas tax, yes, but usually not enough to cover the cost of the road.
Sprawl and the suburbs aren’t the generators of wealth and prosperity as you imply, but rather the thing we’ve decided to spend our wealth and prosperity on. You in fact have cause and effect backwards: it’s not that sprawl created enough economic activity to happen for a middle class to form, but rather enough economic activity existed elsewhere in order for the middle class to be able to live in suburban sprawl.
0 - https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/11/11/poor-neighbor...
It never ends congestion.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
Want to reduce congestion? Improve transit, build higher density communities, and demolish highways.
Difference is that mass transit benefits substantially from scale, with cost per rider dropping with ridership increases. Road networks, not so much.
Kickstarting the process is a little tricky. But just about every other developed country has managed it, I’m sure the US can figure it out too.
That turns out not to be the case. Road widening almost always worsens congestion. http://plazaperspective.com/road-widening/
People never complain about throughput. People complain about trip times, and road widening never helps that.
http://boardarchives.metro.net/BoardBox/BB2015/2015_05_May/1...
Have a look around page 18. Time with congestion was reduced by about 2 hours daily from before the project to after the project. There's also several charts of trip times in there, although some of them are comparing different times of the year which is less apples to apples IMHO. If exhibit 4-133 from the report after the slides is a good comparison, the congestion was effectively eliminated; however the before is during construction, and it's a single day, so that's a bit hard to take at face value; I'm guessing they didn't have any/enough saturday data from the 2009 before construction data set to compare with.
Because that's what voters want. If true self-driving cars ever become a reality, there's going to be a big demand spike for more and bigger roads.
Why would there be a need for more roads? It seems like the opposite would be true: self-driving cars don't need safe following distance to each other. They could form a massive train (the more you look at self driving cars, the more they look like trains), with 1 inch of space between each vehicle. Highway lanes are so wide, that small self-driving vehicles could sit 2-across, with an inch of space between them. On-demand self-driving-cars could cut the total number of cars on the road by a big factor. Self-driving cars might never crash, so they won't need all those tons of safety equipment that each car lugs about, saving a pile of net energy.
Okay, now a deer or a moose runs onto that road during a short gap in traffic. What happens next?
> the more you look at self driving cars, the more they look like trains
Sure, really big trains, with a tiny fraction of the carrying capacity.
When the cost of a trip drops, more trips will be made. If self-driving succeeds to the point where I can send my car to pick up my dry cleaning or food without needing to be in the car, then expect the number of vehicles on the road to go up a lot.
We might be able to pack two times as many cars on the road and make intersections way more efficient, but that won't be enough.
(And I'm just half joking, that would be insanely cool!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_narrow-gauge_railways#...
Not enough milk in the estate kitchen ? Send a maid with a train to the village to restock!
Also on north Germany they have a 60 cm railway connecting an island at low tide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BCttmoorsiel-Nordstrandis...
Or the famous Kurobe Gorge Railway in Japan at 762 mm that goes via hard moutain terrain and 40+ (!) tunnels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurobe_Gorge_Railway
(We travelled it once, can recommend, superb experience!)
Still apparently even if you switch to electric cars and/or trolley buses tire and road surface abrasion is still apparently a significant pollution hazard.
I guess metal wheels on metal rails are less of an issues, so it might make sense to use rail based wehicles more heavily, especially with modern technology improvements (automatic routing/switching, battery powered trains, etc.).
They are not. They are less than 10% of budget of most municipalities. We can easily afford the road, even at today’s highly inflated construction costs.
And not a place that only has relatively new roads, mind you: somewhere that's already had to go through the process of repaving them as they deteriorate at least once or twice.
As it happens, most places that are not having some unrelated problems, like eg. being depopulated after industrial collapse, can easily cover the road maintenance, considering how little they spend on it, compared to other items in the budget. If you don’t believe me, now it’s your turn to look at the data: pick a municipality with terribly maintained road, and tell me what percentage of their budget is spent on road maintenance.
So the same thing happens as when you sell bread for $0. Supply runs out, you have long lines, and everyone is unhappy.
Road pricing would make driving enormously much better, but it's counterintuitive and radical, so I doubt we'll see it in my lifetime.
This argument is only applied to road consumption for some reason.
Note that is road pricing makes traffic flow at the speed limit rather than crawling during rush hour, people can commute from much further away.
Everybody is already paying for it in their taxes. Furthermore everybody is also paying per use for the energy used, time and cost of vehicle ownership.
How would you like it if the city started charging per use at the park beside your house? Maybe then you'd see how comically asinine it is to repressively tax public infrastructure that we have already decided is a net positive.
And I'll preempt the obvious low effort retort by saying that city public transit should also be free at the point of use.
>Note that is road pricing makes traffic flow at the speed limit rather than crawling during rush hour, people can commute from much further away.
Yeah, if you're a doctor or lawyer or techie and can justify the cost relative to your increased earnings from commuting. The drywaller and the janitor have just as much right to sit in a traffic jam as you do.
Increasing the cost per use for public good when not coupled to an increased cost to provide that good (last I checked bitumen prices didn't skyrocket) ALWAYS boils down to kicking the poors out so that whosoever left can have a better experience. This approach is completely antithetical to the reasoning behind spending money on these public goods in the first place.
Making everyone endure the same crap equally ensures that the people who can most effectively load balance to something else or a different commute time do.
Sure, but they're not paying for using up the finite resource of road usage at high demand times. If too many people use the road at the same time, it ceases to function as a transportation route, and no one gets good use of it.
You can think of it as "equality" when a common resource is destroyed equally for rich and for poor, but it's not good for anyone, and there are better ways.
> The drywaller and the janitor have just as much right to sit in a traffic jam as you do.
I'll spell out my point more clearly: If roads that today creep along at 30mph at rush hour start going 70mph, the drywaller can choose to live in a cheaper area further away, pay a bit extra for commuting, and still come out ahead.
Final point: It's common misunderstanding, but roads are NOT public goods: https://fee.org/articles/are-roads-really-public-goods/
>Sure, but they're not paying for using up the finite resource of road usage at high demand times. If too many people use the road at the same time, it ceases to function as a transportation route, and no one gets good use of it.
Time and money can be converted.
If you don't wanna share the road with everyone else then commute at different times or use a different mode.
The people who's time is most valuable also tend to have the most money and options for other commute options.
>: If roads that today creep along at 30mph at rush hour start going 70mph, the drywaller can choose to live in a cheaper area further away, pay a bit extra for commuting, and still come out ahead.
You have to price out the bottom to get things flowing at peak speeds all the time.
Furthermore, expecting any transit system, rail, road, anything, to not be saturated at peak hours is unrealistic. Increasing supply or decreasing demand just reduce the time the network is saturated. Rush hour is like like dumping a bucket into a sink, you're gonna get a little standing water while the drain does its thing.
>Final point: It's common misunderstanding, but roads are NOT public goods: https://fee.org/articles/are-roads-really-public-goods/
What a BS article. His requirement of "nonrivalrous consumption" exudes damn near every other example of something that is generally considered a public good.
The "nonrivalrous consumption" part is genuinely how the term is defined in Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
The term has since been morphed/co-opted into meaning something like "good for the public" in political discourse, deeply frustrating economists, and making these kinds of discussions difficult to have.
Although, with electronic toll devices, you could at least potentially give toll credits to low-income folks.
We're stuck inside of a ponzi scheme
Process for fixing a pothole so that it stays fixed until the next time the road is resurfaced: 1) Identify the size and depth of the pothole; if it's more than just replacing asphalt (i.e., the subsurface is damaged) than it's a significantly more involved job, otherwise... 2) Identify the appropriate asphalt mixture for the road's wear and tear, since a busy road will need a different type of asphalt from a less-traveled road. 3) Get the crew out to the pothole. 4) Clean the pothole and surrounding road so that the new asphalt patch can stick to the existing asphalt. 5a) Apply the tack coat, which will help the asphalt stick to the existing asphalt and to the subsurface. 5) Lay in and roll the asphalt. To create a seamless patch with the existing road, it will be necessary to "creep up" on the proper amount of asphalt, so this step will be repeated a number of times. 7) Block out the patch for at least 24 hours so that the asphalt can properly cure. (More expensive asphalt mixtures can be driven on within a day) 8) Send a work crew back the next day to take down the traffic cones blocking out the patch.
Because this is a common anti-labor narrative which often turns out to be false, I should ask: Do you have any good sources or that?
> Property taxes are as high as any place in the USA. There is no shortage of money
Property taxes are just one form of revenue, and may not be nearly sufficient.
construction coordinator: starting $76k per year, grades $80k to $98k per year
construction & maintenance supervisor II: starting $98k per year, grades $100k to $120k per year
construction field inspector: starting $81k per year, grades $81k to $100k per year
pavement management supervisor: starting $77k per year, grades $80k to $94k per year
every listed position has 401k retirement and health care benefits. why waste time proving this when urban decay is a constant, documented situation? certainly some cities have failed budgets from the 2008 era, thats true, but not in this case.
this is the same city that was voted "worst unfixed potholes in the continental US" recently in some media outlet
> why waste time proving this when urban decay is a constant, documented situation?
Urban decay is a meme, like urban crime. Crime is, generally speaking, at generational lows (shootings and murders are up, but that's nationwide, not urban, and those are only a fraction of crimes), but some people imagine cities infested with it.
There are certainly urban problems with infrastructure, but using memes doesn't tell me what we're talking about.
IME the common narrative is that lots of people, especially these days, want to cut taxes and then complain about reduced services.
wages for labor in the US have stayed flat or decreased overall, since the late 1980s.. these figures are competitive for high-tech or other specialized work. The roads are not only not well-maintained, this is a top-10 worst city in the US roads place.. so wages+benefits go up and yet the work result is worse than comparable other cities
They are about what I'd expect. Should they be underpaid like much of labor? Is it the worker's fault that the roads are in bad shape? I doubt it.
local taxes such as sales and property tax, state income tax, plus federal tax, make this city objectively to be some of the highest total tax in the USA for working people (probably related to the high city wages for ordinary positions)
But I'm told over and over again: "you get what you pay for."
I just don't believe it anymore.
Per your bit about roads, many have tried to decipher why the US has such expensive road construction and its not at all clear. We're a very bizarre outlier. It's more than just being affluent. [3,4]
I'm venting a bit but its tragic that such a rich nation can't properly build anything anymore. Heck, Flint Michigan got hundreds of millions of dollars _and still doesn't have clean water_. [5] Most bizarre to me is that nobody seems that interested in where the money goes. NYC spent $1.25 billion on a mental health outreach program that has had no publicly visible effects or milestones. [6] It was made permanent this year. [7]
I'm told over and over again that the problem is "not enough money" but where the hell is it going to in the first place? Why does nobody care to answer this question?
[0]: https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/...
[1]: https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbrunswick/high-pfoa-levels-m...
[2]: https://www.amny.com/transit/nyc-subway-stations-garbage-dum...
[3]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/wh...
[4]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-o...
[5]: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/717104335/5-years-after-flint...
[6]: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/too-much-money-chir...
[7]: https://nypost.com/2021/05/06/de-blasio-rebrands-wifes-1b-th...
At a very broad I recall some of the items identified were:
- Illegal collusion between contractors capable of expensive jobs
- Illegal collusion between contractors and consultants hired by cities to help pick winning bids
- No expertise in government due to cutbacks, so no ability to vet a proposal or understand the progress made (see above)
- No accountability in government
- No accountability for contractors in in contracts
- Poorly thought out legislated process on choosing bidders
- Inefficiencies in mandated working conditions (think multiple people sitting around watching a hole)
- Government/private enterprise corruption
These are all over simplified high level points. The dynamics here get quite complex. For example, local government often signs a contract with a local contractor wherein they are able to put in stop work orders as desired without owing payment for the time. This is very expensive for the contractors, they must pay to move heavy machinery to another job or wait while paying their workers. Delays can add millions in cost/lost revenue for the contractor. The contractor thus has to drastically increase prices to hedge against these delays.
These issue touch every level of government: city, county, state, and federal. Sadly we no longer have a functional body politic capable of addressing issues of that scale.
Money laundering through road construction is apparently _very popular_ but I can't see what changed and why its not as popular abroad. Shouldn't the same conditions for this exist elsewhere?
Somebody direct me to a few papers on the subject but I frankly don't have the time to read them.
Generally no one employed by the city knows how to look at an expense report from a construction job and check it for plausibility; this allows some outrageous pricing for things like a few tons of bricks. Sometimes they'll hire a consultant to check the books, but often that consultant is chummy with the contractor.
In other countries where government is trusted a bit more, it's much more normal to have an engineer and a construction project manager on staff to look at a report and tell you you're getting bilked.
Notably, after the CPUC threatened fines, the supply-related blackouts didn't happen again.
Fixing roads (the proper way, but also slapping a bucket of asphalt in the hole and flattening it) is a physically demanding job. You need to go out there and work no matter if it's cold, raining or snowing, so the applicant pool for such a job is extremely small to begin with.
The ever-growing "academization" of society (aka Boomer parents and media telling their children that only having a college degree will lead to a good life) eliminates even more of the applicant pool for all trade jobs... and the result of that is that even with some trades offering high five to sometimes six figures worth of wages, many openings go unfilled for years.