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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

The problem boils down to this: we've vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We've paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt/gravel, but they got paved because it's a sign your neighborhood has "made it." It's a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50's, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that.

Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes?

If we hadn't allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we'd have neighborhoods with dirt/gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc.

Instead we have a country where we're slaves to cars.

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The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like condos have something of a “hasn’t made it” stigma for a lot of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of inefficient land use.

Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.

Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state.

I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only exacerbates the problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surfac...

> Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state.

Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that I did not restrict it to commuting — designing around car-only transportation means that almost every common activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people famously underestimate the amount of time they spend driving, looking for parking, etc. — usually “a 20 minute drive” means “25 minutes if you exceed the speed limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and parking right in front”. If you start measuring that, you realize how much time people spend on things like unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single purpose errands in addition to commuting.

> So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built

Definitely — and one big factor for this is that single-occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to “defeat” traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage so conditions usually only improve for a few months after opening.

Commuting to Davenport is pretty common, isn't it?

Perhaps, but stacking houses into condos in Galesburg isn't going to change that. It seems like OP is suggesting that traffic is a problem (causing 2 hours in a car) that can be remedied by building up instead of out. The point I am making is that traffic is not a problem in Galesburg.

Yeah, you aren't going to take 2 hours to get to downtown Galesburg unless you're riding a tricycle.

"Brown" people love single family detached houses with large lawns. My Bangladeshi family members who immigrated to Queens moved to Long Island as soon as they were able to afford to do so. One of the major demographic shifts in this country is upwardly mobile Black people leaving cities to move to the suburbs: https://calmatters.org/projects/california-black-population-...; https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/07/chicago-bl...

I like "walkable, high-density environments" myself, but most people who care about that are highly educated white people and white-adjacent minorities. Which is fine! Urbanism is compelling on its own merits. You don't have to "brown wash" it.

I interpreted the parent's comment as a reference to post-war deurbanization and "white flight," further fueled by openly discriminatory lending and occupation policies (redlining, etc.) at all levels of government and business.

Reurbanization by wealthy whites (and deurbanization by some minority groups) are part and parcel with the earlier trend, and don't entirely subvert it.

You’ll note that I was talking about how things are popularly portrayed, especially in the past — think about how “urban” became a popular euphemism when its literal meaning says nothing about about race. It’s not a coincidence that those images shifted notably after desegregation became the law of the land and that was enshrined as the way to know you’d made it for decades, and it’s certainly not a coincidence that almost everyone picked it up given how pervasive it was in mainstream discourse.

Once that became established, a lot of inefficiency was baked in: single-family rather than shared housing, driving yourself in a car rather than sharing a bus with strangers, not building things like sidewalks or favoring cul de sac designs to discourage non-residents traveling through a neighborhood, etc. You don’t need to know or care about the history half a century ago to think of those as the default when they’re what a lot of us were raised in and saw on TV/movies.

I still don’t understand the point of the race angle. Insofar as “urban” is undesirable because it’s a euphemism for “brown,” why would “brown” people be striving to move out of urban areas themselves? Bangladeshi immigrants don’t mind that Queens is full of other Bangladeshis. They mind that it’s crowded, you don’t have a big back yard, you have to walk everywhere, etc. The things you mention—shared housing, non-residents traveling though, aren’t things that “brown” people like any more than white people.

I think you’ve got the causality reversed. Most people, regardless of race, find suburban living more pleasant and more convenient. Urban areas tend to be more “brown” because that’s often where immigrants start out, because “brown” people tend to be younger and lower income, etc. Thus, whites are more able to attain the goal of suburban living. But it’s misleading to make it sound like the suburban preference arises out of white dislike for “brown” people, because the preference seems pretty uniform between races. (If anything, affluent people who prefer urban living are more likely to be white, judging from the demographics of gentrification.)

Urbanists have a good point that the suburban preference might be different if people in the suburbs were forced to bear the externalities of their lifestyle. But that has nothing to do with race.

The point is why there’s resistance to dense urban living. You seem intent on having a different argument entirely. It’s ok, no one’s saying people of color are supposed to inherently dislike the suburbs.

That some hipsters have found renewed value in density (mainly access to “culture”) is a separate, parallel development.

> The point is why there’s resistance to dense urban living.

Right—and OP theorized it was driven by associating “urban” living with “brown people.” My point is that this isn’t the reason, because “brown people” resist dense urban living as well and avoid it when they can afford suburban living.

(Mostly white) hipsters finding renewed value in density is fine. My objection is them working the “brown people” angle to make their cause more politically sympathetic.

To follow-up in that: as affluent urban professionals have become more progressive, “brown washing” of political issues has become a real problem. I think they realize that mostly white upper middle class professionals aren’t politically sympathetic blocs. So they project issues they disproportionately care about (urbanism, student loan debt relief, climate change) onto “brown people.”

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign did this extensively. Her voters on Super Tuesday were almost 80% white, out of an electorate (mostly southern and southwestern) that’s majority minority. But Warren tried to insert a racial angle into every issue.

Of course it’s the reason. It doesn’t matter if brown people do or don’t want to be in urban areas, the fact is they are there in greater numbers, and that keeps white folks away.

So I get it now, your angle here is the unfair presumption that POC are politically liberal. Which is fine, but the issue is tangential to the conversation about suburban density and urban renewal.

> Most people, regardless of race, find suburban living more pleasant and more convenient.

This is very easy to disprove: houses and apartments in urban areas cost more than in the suburbs.

Most people are not able to afford a large enough apartment downtown because there is not enough supply, and so they prefer to pay the same for a larger place in the suburbs, but this is not the same as preferring the suburbs.

It’s simply easier to manage problems in suburbia because smaller cities are more efficient and have lower overhead.

You can create semi private public schools through high property prices and zoning.

You can kick homeless people out.

You can mostly manage a 5-10 person police force

And really you can create zones where people are mostly like you what ever that likeness may be.

Some would say that shouldn’t be allowed but you can see the appeal.

> This is very easy to disprove: houses and apartments in urban areas cost more than in the suburbs.

No. Prices are a function of both supply and demand. Demand for housing in cities is high relative to the supply of housing in cities. That doesn’t mean that the demand for urban housing is more than the demand for suburban housing—because the supply of the latter is vastly larger.

Do you really think it’s a just a random coincidence that suburbanization dramatically accelerated after the key civil rights era cases prevented cities from segregating city services? A ton of the suburbs had racial covenants, there was explicit imagery around who your kids would be going to school with, realtors and mortgages tried hard to steer people into certain areas, police departments were famous for following black or Latino drivers around if they entered a white suburb, etc. That lasted for decades — Palm Beach police did ID checks on black motorists to learn which resident hired them into the 1980s! — and one of the big things keeping it alive was this constant narrative that there were lawless hordes ready to leave the inner city and rampage through your neighborhood.

I don’t think it’s the only factor but I find it very hard to believe that decades of that imagery, often openly embraced by the political candidates those neighborhoods voted for, was coming from nowhere. Absent that, I think there would have been a very different arc for American cities between WWII and the turn of the century.

Suburbanization happened all over the world around that time. E.g. Amsterdam: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic.... It happened more in the US than Europe because we had big swaths of empty land while Europe was much more developed already. And it happened as well in American cities that had no segregation to begin with, or non-whites to flee from.

“White flight” happened, but I think urbanists misunderstand the causality. The 1960s economic and technological revolution allowed people to enjoy comfortable suburban lives. Black people were prevented from doing so by economic circumstances and discrimination. But the impulse to leave to city wasn’t caused by that.

Over here in Sweden there was a massive investment in public transport and I think it's called transportation driviven development. So we did not get the same amount of dettached housing. The view of suburbs as comfortable has always been away to exploit the commons of cities like Galesburg. It's not only Galesburg that pays for this, it's the surrounding towns. People live in the suburbs of Galesburg travel to another town making it impossible to use public transport unless everyone works in a star network topology.

We are seeing that develooment in Stockholm now work is much more organic so and the rays of the star are over burdened by suburb transportation (public true, but mostly private).

Black folks, too, as you can see from the phenomenon of the South Side of Chicago hemorrhaging residents to south suburbs like Olympia Fields. It's also, as I understand it, the story of the ringed suburbs of St. Louis.

The highest rates of population decline in the City of St. Louis are indeed on the mostly-black Northside, as those residents move to the North St. Louis County suburbs. See here:

https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/planning/r...

It's been like this for almost two decades now (north is to the right on this map):

https://nextcity.org/images/made/5529440117_600_350_80.jpeg

Do you mean there is some conspiracy that made people believe that not sharing walls and ceilings with others is somehow better than being always up to date on your neighbors business including their music preferences and substances they like to consume?

I find this very implausible. I grew up in Soviet block and all my friends and relatives grew in very dense small apartments yet all of them who could afford moved to houses as soon as they could.

Millions of people make that work and there are many advantages: it’s cheaper, more energy efficient, and if you drive less it’s healthier and safer for you and your neighbors. If you want to be social, like music, want a variety of healthy local businesses, etc. having considerably more people makes that work better.

My point was that when one style of living was picked as the goal and heavily promoted by policy it locked in a lot of negative outcomes like traffic jams and challenging local government finances.

This style existed since antiquity. Even Roman patricians lived in villas, which were standalone houses.

I’m aware. Note how I specifically highlighted the imbalance caused by pretending it was the best option which most of the country was told to aspire to.

So who told Roman nobility to pretend they liked to live in their own houses and forced them out of lovely insulae with all the people living nearby and music and social life? I am guessing the "corporate media" is telling this to the people now, but who had been doing this all through the history before the printing press had been invented?

Sure, lots of people want to live like nobility but that doesn’t make it practical. Consider that when I wrote “the ideal” I was referring to the practicality of having a single style pushed as the goal for everyone. I don’t think suburbs should be banned but I do think they should be sustainably self-funding and that cities should reverse course and favor their own residents over car commuters.

I am not arguing practicality, I was just curious about the whole idea that people don't actually like to live separately and had been tricked into liking that by some unnamed forces. Obviously many people cannot afford the lifestyle they desire, I dare say nobody can. Even Elon Musk probably wants to live in a flying castle on Mars yet he has to make do with various mansions on Earth, such is life.

Yes, patricians. That's a hint this kind of thing isn't sustainable when everyone is doing it.

This is also a hint that people were not told to pretend they like it, is not it? Rich and powerful all through the history do not shun low density living and personal transport yet the message that I've replied to asserts that people only want these things because they are told to pretend they are desirable but without external influence people would rather live in apartments and have no personal transport.

At this point even out "patricians" shouldn't really be living in low density housing either.

So you are not even arguing practicality, it's just straight up class conflict for you? Color me unsurprised.

WTF are you even talking about?

You were contrasting a world that had about 150,000,000 people living it with today where we have about 7,800,000,000.

It's nothing to do with "class conflict", and all to do with load bearing. As things stand, we only just have the resources to support a fraction of those at Western living standards, and we damned well can't support the billions who haven't achieved them yet as things stand.

So yes, it's all about practicality.

And you and I are amongst the "patricians" already.

Also, don't pretend you know me at all.

If it had nothing to do with the class conflict then you would not care how rich people live because rich accommodations do not create any noticeable load. And as for practicality - somebody living in a big house would not make your apartment any less practical yet you think everybody has to live like you.

I don't know if you are fooling yourself into thinking you are being rational and caring for environment and practicality but you are not fooling me.

It sure seems like you're trying to force a perspective without taking some fundamental human nature factors into account. Or deliberately ignoring them. But I'll go with just not realizing one thing... there's a lot of things about close quarters residency that a great many people ACTIVELY F'ING DESPISE. Noise, smells, and just... well, meet enough people and you may develop slightly less positive opinions of them as a whole and choose to live with some degree of space/separation that's not "ideal" from an efficiency standpoint.

Sure, the numbers say living like a meat popsicle is absolutely more 'cost effective' but that's a hard-pass from me.

Great - if you read my comment more carefully, note that I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to live in suburb, but that that lifestyle choice should not be subsidized by everyone else.

Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.

The Roman roads that last a long time are outliers. Most Roman roads are long gone.

Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it dangerous? There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.

Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature.

It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot faster!

Indeed, that's the core of the argument made in this article here (from 2009) which is arguing for a return to cobbles / bricks for Georgetown: https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-...

The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones. Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.

I'm with you on the speed reduction. An urban planner friend talks about how you're best motivating a speed limit by the environment (tighter road, bends, etc) rather than a literal limit and threat of fine.

But how would cyclists fare on cobblestones, especially if you were talking about suburban streets with kids playing, bikes going around, etc?

It's not great, but if it gets cars to go slower I think it's still worth it.

Really painful and annoying to ride on with a kick scooter though.

I'm assuming you're speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn't.

I don't know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven't) and they were not affected as much by freeze/thaw cycles as North American roads are.

My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I've seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there's physically less roads.

Yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's an interesting thought exercise. For the high traffic streets where there is high speed and also lots of heavy traffic, for sure, asphalt dominates for many good reasons.

But for the problems this article discusses for smaller cities where their population has moved to suburbs and exurbs and where the commercial centers have similarly moved out of city core, perhaps the more durable approach to cobbles (or brick) might be an interesting way to address ongoing maintenance challenges. It's mostly a thought exercise, but an interesting one.

The roman roads didn't have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.

Roman roads were built with extremely robust foundations below which required very large amounts of labor to put in place.

We have excavators, bulldozers, graders, etc, we don't need to use slaves to hand-dig road foundations.

To be fair, the "SUVs" that are being sold are effectively the same as station wagons of the past (but smaller and with better gas mileage).

Hopefully self-driving cars will get us out of this pit of car-centric infrastructure, but that's a solution that's been a few years out for the past decade.

Can you outline how this is supposed to free us from car-centric infrastructure? Unless it's coupled with style kind of Uber-subscription dystopia we would still need room to park all of these vehicles. While downtown parking can be a problem, garages aren't, and neither of these problems is on there scale of the larger infrastructure problems.

The biggest problems with car-centric infrastructure are that they require a huge amount of ever-larger roads to funnel people (in cars) often tens of miles to do anything. Even in the rent-a-taxi scenario you would still need these roads, which would probably need more maintenance, not less. And all of that sprawl has knock-on effects as roads create divisions in communities, and low-density housing, enabled by car infrastructure, means you have and know fewer neighbors.

At least the Uber-style infrastructure doesn't require oversizing everything. Even if my car is used 90% of the time for commuting by myself, it has to be big enough for the other 10% of the time when I'm taking the family and our luggage.

I think it's fine roads are paved. It's just that said roads are wider and effectively longer to service the same number of people, and this is due to zoning and the way property tax is handled.

This might be ideal for side roads leading to a few houses but if it's major parts of a town aren't you just move the cost of roads somewhere else?

i.e. "I hope you can afford a truck, SUV, or constant repairs to your suspensions/tires"

I'm pretty sure that if a bridge collapses underneath you, you're just as likely to die in a SUV as in a sedan.

For anyone who thinks I might be being facetious, I live in Minneapolis where there was an actual bridge collapse that killed people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...

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