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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

As a kid, I remember at least in the area I grew up in(USA, kinda poor) there were a lot of pedestrian bridges and underroad tunnels. I realized it's something I rarely if ever see as an adult in pretty much everything built since. Did they just stop making them?

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I was always warned away from them because who knows who might be inside. There were some legitimate issues with the lack of any eyes on these spaces permitting mildly antisocial behavior, and some illegitimate issues with every other made-for-TV crime movie featuring a rape or murder in them; The "back alleys" of suburbia.

The answer mostly is about when they built them. My guess is this was from the 50's or 60's on a lot of this stuff, when the amount of suburbs was still low which limited the costs of infrastructure spending on maintenance. Now we can't afford that because we have zillions of miles of roads that have to be paved and kept up for low tax providing single family homes. The density of these houses is too low to justify tunnels/bridges all the places we need them.

Then add in modern cost disease on top of it and it starts making sense.

Roads are nothing to governments budget. They are big to normal people but the cost is very small to any town and they are visible. That is why so much happens - - you can build them for cheap enough and get votes without spending much. Or you can appear to cut spending without touching the budget. Anyone who really cares about spending ignores roads while those who don't play games with that area to look like they do something without affecting anything

Roads are a fair chunk of the budget, but health related expenses generally are far more. The problem is a car dominated city generates massive health costs. Walkable cities are healthier cities. Walkable cities reduce crashes both with other cars and pedestrians. Walkable cities reduce pollution and lower the amount of total road miles needed by their citizens.

I fully agree, but the fact remains roads are not that expensive in the grand scheme. Well they are not that expensive so long as the city isn't stupid about growth projections - strong towns likes to take some examples of cities being stupid and extrapolate that to all cities.

Citations please - road maintenance is usually a large part of budgets. You can't just build a road without maintaining it.

Check out the budget of any government. Most publish it. public works are 5% in my community, plus 25% capital dept. I can't tell how much is roads vs parks, sidewalk, or water supply though. schools come from a seperate budget. at state and federal levels where most taxes go roads are even less.

> You can't just build a road without maintaining it.

Sure you can, just look at Indiana.

In the UK at least subways under roads have gone out of fashion I think mainly as they get used by homeless as shelters and urinals. SO we get more road level light operated crossings.

as for footbridges they were uncommon in towns at least.

Better to design a street that can generally be crossed safely, than to make a road so dangerous that pedestrians have to use tunnels and bridges. People should be able to cross a street safely anywhere.

I mean, not exactly with the cities that already exist. I mean, we could do what you say, but you'd get voted out of office and hung on a cross for the immediate economic crisis you'd create in most major cities. You simply can't have 1 to 2 vehicles per household as exists in our suburbs now with all the places those cars go miles away. It will cost places like the US tens to hundreds of trillions over decades to 'fix' this issue.

People don't like them because they attract trash and junkies. The maintenance cost is too high. To say nothing of the cost and environmental law protection that prevents their construction.

So because we don't take care of the mental health of addicts in this country, we also have to sacrifice the lives of pedestrians on the altar of King Automobile?

So long as we allow addicts to make public infrastructure unfriendly to others, those others will vote for less public infrastructure. And you do live in a democratic society as a person with a minority position. Up to you which of your goals you want to optimize for but I think at least two of them are currently in opposition.

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