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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

There's no winning.

You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods.

You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse.

My pet favorite solution is more park & ride transition points on the outskirts and light rail in the dense areas but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting.

As much as I hate the NIMBYs for insisting on violating other people's property rights you at least have to give them +1 for consistency.

Looking back with hindsight we'd probably be better off if we had just built all the urban highways and rail lines (and other transit infrastructure projects) that have been seriously considered over the years.

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but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting

Here’s a thought experiment for you. You are on foot, perhaps with a kid in a stroller, perhaps with a dog on a leash, perhaps an armful of groceries. It is a gorgeous day for a walk. You have multiple destinations on the other side of several transit arteries:

* a subway that passes under city streets with sidewalks, if you’re lucky maybe it goes under a park that’s between you and your destination

* a light rail line with trains passing every few minutes, clearly visible, with lots of time in between to cross the tracks, if you’re lucky maybe the area around the line has some pretty plants and trees

* an elevated highway with cars zooming along the feeder roads in its shadow, if you’re lucky there’s a crosswalk with pedestrian lights

* a ground-level highway, 8-14 lanes of constant high speed traffic in both directions, if you are very lucky there is a pedestrian overpass no more than 2-3 blocks out of your way and you’ll only be inhaling exhaust for a little while

Which one of these would you rather cross? Which one of these feels like an integrated part of the neighborhood, which ones feel like a raw open wound in the city when you try to cross them on foot?

> You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse.

Highways create urban sprawl, they don't prevent it.

> the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting.

But a subway/tram line is completely different from a highway. Trains can move an order of magnitude more people/stuff, don't result in local air pollution, don't create a lot of noise, don't result in road accidents that kill people and destroy property. And that's even before you realise that a subway is underground so you don't need to tear apart neighborhoods to build them and you basically wouldn't know it's there.

Rail lines have more than 10x the throughput though, so you need vastly less of them to do vastly more work.

A city with enough roads for 100% car usage is approaching not being a city anymore, just an unending suburban hellscape, but a city with barely any roads and more rail than it really needs can still be a beautiful city.

To add to that, underground railways exist in many cities, but underground road networks effectively don't. The throughput by volume dug out the ground is viable for a rail service, its totally non-viable to bury an equivalent throughput 20 lane highway underground.

> You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse.

Huh? Don't highways enable sprawl? The brand new neighborhood built way out "in the country" (not for long...) next to the brand new highway in Yates' Revolutionary Road comes to mind.

> You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse.

The green belt policy around London where you were prevented from developing was quite good at preventing sprawl for decades.

Similar policies in Oregon now, which force increased density in existing (orm as an option, brand new) urban areas, rather than just spreading. Or at least, there were a decade ago. I hope they've survived.

IDK where you live, but I live in a country with a lot of trams and trains (the Czech Republic), and the NIMBYs attack absolutely everything. It may take decades to overcome their resistance.

One example of many: in the city I was born (Ostrava), there is a tram line planned since the 1990s (on the chance that anyone knows Ostrava here: Poruba VIII. obvod). That is not a very beautiful neighbourhood, rather a standard Communist high-rise zone with a lot of loud car and bus traffic through the main arteries. But the NIMBYs are absolutely relentless in attacking the tram project and anything even slightly connected (e.g. relocation of gas lines) in courts.

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