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Comment by mymythisisthis | Hacker News Reader

To call it 'self-funded' is a bit of a stretch. Most rail financing went bankrupt and had to have been bailed up by the government at some point.

Even though rail was a greenfield project, native treaty rights were trampled, that should also be remembered.

Technology wise, it was WWI that killed rail, unintentionally. All the trucks, post war, were dumped and sold for cheap. Companies bought them up and started hauling goods to market, without having to buy real-estate, or a factory, near a rail line.

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"self-funded": sure, lets say "intended as self-funded"; "native treaty rights": yes, relatively greenfield compared to today

WWI and rail: another aspect was nepotistic political control (which might not have been a bad thing but definitely has an odor). [0] I wonder if dumping the Liberty trucks a conceptual/capacity jump start more than a physical one. The 1917 rolling stock was 2,250,000 freight cars [0], and roughly 10k Liberty Trucks were produced [1].

On March 21, 1918, the Railway Administration Act became law, and Wilson's 1917 nationalization order was affirmed. Wilson appointed his son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, as Director General of the newly formed USRA.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Adminis...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck

It's hard to think about how much technological change, and economies of scale played a part in our history.

In the 1920s suburbs became possible because of telephones, light bulbs,and radio, as much as they became possible because of cheap Model-T's. Lumber could be trucked in, instead of using horses to bring the wood to trains, or floated down river, dropping the cost of housing materials.

Real Estate was expensive along rail lines, but cheaper even a couple of miles away. So now developers could build diagonally out from rail lines.

In the 1920 most suburbs were still street car suburbs. Where street car company developed the land around the station.

Then the street cars went way and suburbs became ever larger and less dense.

Also zoning started essentially forcing suburbs and never let these areas develop out of the state of being suburbs.

What was built in the 1920 is mostly just fine. It really gets bad in the 1960s where everything started to be build for the car only.

But it gets even worse, if you look at classic US suburbs in the 1960s they look almost reasonable. Thin roads, houses reasonably close together. Then they started enforcing ever crazier requirements for the streets and ever crazier requirements for lots sizes and stuff like that.

This results in the already low density of 1960s suburb looking like Paris. Now you have suburbs that have literal highway highways between houses (where you can literally have 4 F-150 next to each other), with lots of distance between houses in all 4 direction, small houses not allowed, no duplex or anything else. Because of zoning literally ever commercial transaction requires a short car trip.

If there was no change, would there be history? Here is Foucault from Archaeology of Knowledge:

The notion of discontinuity is a paradoxical one: because it is both an instrument and an object of research; because it divides up the fields of which it is the effect; because it enables the historian to individualize different domains but can be established only by comparing those domains.

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