Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them?

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-cities-history

by colinbartlett • 11 years ago

72 119 11 years ago

EGreg• 11 years ago

Aha so the great American success of Federal governent that progressives tout also displaced a lot of disenfranchised residents of cities. I guess there's no such thing as a slam dunk when it comes to giant projects like this.

pekk4• 11 years ago

The Interstate system is typically attributed to Eisenhower, a Republican. The attitude that infrastructure is worth having isn't really a "progressive" attitude.

bryanlarsen• 11 years ago

Eisenhower described himself as a "progressive conservative".

MichaelApproved• 11 years ago

Republicans tend to be conservative but they're not exclusively so. They can also be progressive. Of couse, not to the same extent as Democratic party but it's possible.

nostromo2• 11 years ago

Eisenhower is from the era when the South was all Democrats and the North East was all Republicans.

The most Republican state in 1952, his first election, was Vermont and the most Democratic state was Georgia.

Point being: political parties have changed so much over the generations, they aren't very useful as labels. This is why people are so confused about our first Republican president -- that guy from Illinois that fought against state's right and to free the slaves.

brandon73• 11 years ago

Don't make the mistake of conflating liberal with progressive, republican with conservative, nor the idea that someone who values small govt is necessarily a conservative. Those are all substantially different things, even though current majorities make them SEEM equivalent.

As a thought experiment, consider that most of our nation's founders were liberal but they favored small govt. Also, there is a number of people today who believe in classical liberalism but don't identify as progressive nor conservative; they are usually called libertarian.

Libertarians would generally eschew both Eisenhower, big govt programs, AND progressivism.

alexqgb3• 11 years ago

There's a big difference between a network of highways connecting cities and highway construction that guts urban cores. It's possible to value the former while regretting the latter.

bitJericho• 11 years ago

Well there are a lot of people wondering if civilization in general was a good thing for humanity! I guess we'll find out if we last much longer.

mehwoot• 11 years ago

Well the projects were successful, it's just people didn't care as much about disenfranchisement at the time. So of course the projects didn't magically care about that. In this case the federal government succeeded pretty well in doing what it set out to.

bluthru• 11 years ago

Aha so the great American success of Federal governent that progressives tout

This is like saying "LOL Progressives your federal military invaded Iraq under false pretenses! So much for the federal gubmint!"

The Interstate Highway Act was basically a big subsidy for the privatization of transit.

theVirginian2• 11 years ago

This would have been an interesting article if it didn't try to expose the highway system as some giant racist conspiracy.

selimthegrim2• 11 years ago

Maybe you want to read a little about Robert Moses and then come back here.

pekk4• 11 years ago

Many different people of varying motivations were involved in making the interstate system. It isn't obvious that any significant part of the motivations for that system were racist, let alone the primary ones. Moses' involvement in road planning around New York hardly makes him the architect of the interstate system.

Everybody wants to benefit from good first-world infrastructure, but fewer people want to pay for it, and anywhere you build it there will be NIMBYs who don't want it there.

tedunangst3• 11 years ago

Straight from Wikipedia:

Close associates of Moses claimed that they could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold.

Spooky232• 11 years ago

Read the Robert Caro book about Robert Moses. Racism was definitely a part of the man, but his existence wasn't defined by it. He was a man of his times.

He screwed over many a German farmer on Long Island, and those low bridges on the Northern and Southern State Parkways weren't seen as a problem for the powers that be in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Hell, the KKK was active there in my dad's memory.

alexqgb3• 11 years ago

It wasn't a conspiracy. In a country where laws against interracial marriage weren't struck down until 1967 (SCOTUS: Loving v. Virginia), there was no need to be furtive about racism. Quite the contrary, segregation was a selling point.

pekk4• 11 years ago

American history (and the history of many other countries) has lots of open racism. But it doesn't follow that the building of the interstate system was essentially racist.

theVirginian2• 11 years ago

You're right, the major selling points had nothing to do with ease of transportation

sologoub6• 11 years ago

That may be true, in all honesty, I don't know enough, but am trying to learn as much of this history as time permits. Not originally from US...

That said, US on average seems to be doing a hell of a lot better in owning up to such injustices than many other place. For example, I was bored last night and reading about the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia circa 1700s, and somehow managed to find out about TWO distinct ethnic groups and languages that barely exist today, but were more or less thriving as late as early 1900s in the area I would have considered nothing but Russian. If you are interested, read up on the history of Vyborg and Ingria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria. Good luck getting the current residents to even knowledge this...

At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully, more progress is made to that end.

m_mueller9• 11 years ago

As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather than added to it. That really doesn't make any sense to me. The way I see it, any healthy city needs local transport like metro or streetcar so sou can do your business there without wasting time (getting back to your car, drive to the next place you need to go, find a parking lot, walk). It seems like shopping malls have replaced that 'going to the city' activity - the problem there is that you have no choice in the individual stores - they tend to have one, max two of the bigger stores you need. Low competition results in low quality - then the next big thing gets built further away, people drive there instead and the whole cycle continues. The lesson here is to stop lobbying from becoming too powerful - building highways is not the problem, ripping apart public transport is.

sologoub6• 11 years ago

Los Angeles is the prime example of it.

So what are we doing now? We are having to build it back up! Unfortunately, the current construction is a far cry from what the old red car network was and doesn't really touch the San Fernando valley in a meaningful way. I am excited about the Expo line phase 2 though...

phamilton• 11 years ago

I actually think LA is very different case. The 101 is the backbone of California for a reason - it's been there since the Spanish built the California missions.

Los Angeles grew up around the highway, rather than the other way around. So instead of a beltway being built around a city, you've got a city stretched out along the highway.

That said, there are plenty of micro examples of defaulting to pavement over rail for public trans in LA. The so-called "black and blue" line in the San Fernando valley is a pretty amusing example. (Rather than put in light rail, they built roads that only buses could go on. This caused a lot of confusion and there were a lot of accidents in the first 6 months, thus earning it the nickname "black and blue") It was sort of a clever solution. The city knew how to build roads and so it stuck to what it was good at.

m_mueller9• 11 years ago

Check my other comment where I compared L.A. to Tokyo [1]. I kind of expected it already, but the outcome still blows my mind a bit..

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562430

hippich2• 11 years ago

Article mentioned metro/streetcars - these were not profitable, so were closed. Of course you can make tax-paid public transportation, but I guess because it has to be funded locally vs. funded federally as in case of interstate highways, it never happened.

__z2• 11 years ago

Most public transportation is taxpayer subsided.

m_mueller9• 11 years ago

The article also explained how the road system is subsidized (gas tax only covering 40-75% of freeway costs if I remember correctly). That's not too different from subsidies needed for public transport. If you want to see an example for highly profitable and privately owned public transport systems for cities, just look at Japan.

tsotha• 11 years ago

There are just a handful of public transportation systems that aren't subsidized with tax money. The Tokyo subway system is a good example, but even there it's probably only profitable because the subway lines own prime real estate around stations.

bane7• 11 years ago

When I was a kid, I used to go visit family in Dayton, Ohio. We would take a day to "go downtown" and hop on the local electrically powered trollybus, pay some minimal fee and get a comfortable ride from suburbia to city. We'd go and walk around and hit a few department stores, eat some food, maybe take the bus a couple more times, and then grab a trollybus to get back home.

It was easy, cheap and just worked. I understand some of the system is still active in the city. It's kind of mindblowing to me that there's only 5 such systems in all of the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Dayton

tedunangst3• 11 years ago

Why does it have to be a trolleybus? What's wrong with a regular (possibly hybrid) bus?

ZanyProgrammer• 11 years ago

In the Bay Area, Foothill Expressway literally replaced a good sized chunk of a rail line.

Prior to the early 60s, one of the Penninsula Commute rail routes actually split off in Palo Alto (right where Groupon is now, and where a Y existed until 30 some years ago), went down across El Camino and through where the VA is, and down Foothill to Los Altos, ultimately connecting up with the extant Permanente Branch. That was an alternate commute route from San Jose to San Francisco, hitting the west valley and south of San Jose.

Outside of the Key System, that was I think the biggest loss of rail transit in the Bay Area.

forrestthewoods2• 11 years ago

No. Any city needs a good way to get around. Ideally any person could go from any point to any point with ease. Theres nothing fundamentally special about the mechanism used to do so. If cars can do it, great! If they can't but trains and trolleys can, good!

I maintain that a pre-requisite to "good" public transportation is bad infrastructure for cars. If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed.

Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you.

Self-driving cars are obviously the future. Well, part of the future at least. I'm very curious what the "ideal" city would look like with self-driving cars at the center. What would a city look like if built from the ground up with them in mind?

rayiner• 11 years ago

Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you.

New Yorkers have long commutes because of how phenomenally efficient their public transportation system is. During rush hour, it takes up to two hours to drive the 15-17 miles from my parents house in the Virginia suburbs to the middle of DC. An hour and a half is typical, most of it parked on I-66 or GW Parkway. The Metro North from Greenwich to Manhattan makes that 30-mile trip in an hour flat, like clockwork, in a far denser metro area.

Frondo4• 11 years ago

Nope. Having a good car infrastructure doesn't mean everyone has or can have a car.

No amount of car infrastructure will serve the need of having the city core fill up with workers driving in their own cars during the day, either.

In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again.

ak2173• 11 years ago

Try visiting Hong Kong sometime. Great road infrastructure. Great (possibly best in the world) subways. Roads are full of buses, delivery trucks, and taxis. Individuals don't own cars unless they're enormously rich, because it's 4-8x as expensive to own a car as in countries like the US.

TheCoelacanth• 11 years ago

Cities with good public transportation have longer commutes because a long commute on public transportation is far more tolerable than a long commute by car.

m_mueller9• 11 years ago

I'm sorry, but this is just a load of bollocks. There is a fundamental difference between public transport and cars, other than the upfront investment that was pointed out in another comment: A car is a ~12m2 sized thing that you have to (a) somehow route into the system (road space requirements) and (b) leave somewhere when you do your business.

(a) is an overhead of a factor of ~40 compared to people standing and a factor or ~20 compared to people sitting for the transport alone (I'm assuming here people driving alone, which from experience is how this mostly works out).

(b) is an additional constant overhead of 12m2 for every participant that's not moving.

In computer science terms, your network protocol sucks, and leads to inefficient cities.

Would you like an example? L.A. metro area has about the same size as Greater Tokyo, produces about the same amount of carbon emissions total (!) [5], yet provides space for 2.5x less people and produces ~2.4x less GDP at purchase power parity [1],[2],[3],[4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP

[5] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223399559_Twelve_met...

Goladus8• 11 years ago

As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather than added to it.

The population density and distribution of that density is massively different in Europe and Japan than in the US.

For effective shared or public transit, you need transportation hubs that are a convenient distance from where people are and where they want to go. If people and population centers are very spread out, then the transit becomes both more expensive and less useful. Even if you can take rail between two population centers, odds are good that you'll still have to drive a long way to the train station then drive another long way to get where you're actually trying to go. Because there's not a lot of population, transit can't run frequently without being a massive waste of energy, so schedules become less convenient.

Check out this density map:

https://dhs.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/popdensi...

Note how Europe is consistently dense over a very large area, with a core of highly dense areas all fairly close to each other like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Munich, and Bern, while the adjacent regions like Italy, the Balkans, and even Poland have fairly consistent population density. In Japan, the density is highly concentrated on Honshu, and even then it's concentrated into certain cities and prefectures.

The US, meanwhile, has only a few dense regions, mostly in the Northeast, with the rest of population centers spread out very large areas. Not coincidentally, those more densely populated cities tend to have more public transit than the average American city. There are notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles, but LA is not representative of most of the country.

brenschluss• 11 years ago

This is a chicken-and-egg problem. The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant.

If you consider that public transit makes areas walkable, creates street-level shops, restaurants, and cafes, and densifies areas as a result, then creating public transit is an argument for creating density.

gone35• 11 years ago

The US, meanwhile, has only a few dense regions, mostly in the Northeast, with the rest of population centers spread out very large areas. [...] There are notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles, but LA is not representative of most of the country.

Think again[1].

[1] http://persquaremile.com/2011/05/27/u-s-not-dense-enough-for...

m_mueller9• 11 years ago

Your link seems to be down. Any mirrors?

And btw. I wasn't even talking about HSR across country - this issue is debatable. What's IMO not debatable is the necessity of efficient local public transport within population centers, be it on (underground) rails, designated road lanes or street rails, I don't really care, as long as it's mass transport.

milspec• 11 years ago

I tried this "public transport" in San Francisco. It was a disaster. It takes forever and doesn't run when you need it. This of course is a big city with nice weather; ponder waiting by the curb during an ice storm while your bus/tram/streetcar is cancelled.

Even if it did sort of work, I'm not lugging two to four carts of groceries home that way, nor am I willing to make multiple trips per day.

Besides more free parking, what we really need is land reform. People don't live where they work because property taxes are grandfathered, real estate agents gobble up 6% of the home value, and so many other stupid expenses.

PhantomGremlin2• 11 years ago

Some public transport there works well. I've taken BART from the airport to a hotel downtown and it wasn't a bad way to get there. I felt safe, should I have been concerned?

Most of your other points about mass transit are quite valid. E.g. "lugging" groceries. But why not "think different"? Can't you purchase in small quantities from neighborhood stores?

When I grew up in NYC it wasn't uncommon to shop just a block or two from home. You bought 1 loaf of bread, 1 quart of milk, a few pounds of potatoes, etc. It was easily possible to carry that stuff back to the apartment. It wasn't only possible, it was what you had to do. Hardly anyone owned cars.

I wonder what percent of residents of San Francisco own a car? How many use a car daily?

m_mueller9• 11 years ago

I think this is a case of where you just can't imagine living in a differently working system anymore. What you describe are typical problems in a place with bad public transport and/or urban planning that's not made for public transport (i.e. suburbia).

Here's how this works out in any Japanese or Swiss town/city above ~80k inhabitants: You have a public transport network where all the schedules are synched up. Ideally you have a metro/streetcar/trolley station nearby that can pick you up (if it's a normal bus you may have congested road, so you can't plan exactly by the minute, just like with cars). You go there 2min in advance. Once on board, you work/read HN/read/play/whatever [1]. You arrive at a trainstation, swipe a card, walk ~50m and wait 3min for a train. Again, read. 15-60min and 1-2 changes later you have arrived at your destination without even thinking about it, without putting you or anyone else in significant danger, without already being stressed out. On your way home you spend 10-15m more at one of the train stations where you had to change anyway, get some fresh grocery, and be done with it. No need for your exhausting weekly trips to the mall. You don't even have to leave the station building. Got anything else to do? No problem, there's service offerings for pretty much anything you need within 200m of where you are, because the train station brings so much density of people that it's worth it to have all kinds of stores open.

You know, I like driving - I dream about fast cars and all that. I just wouldn't want to be forced to do it every day with unplannable traffic conditions and all that. When I drive, I want to have an flexible schedule, i.e. the weekends.

tedunangst3• 11 years ago

Curiously, urban planners were absent — the profession barely existed at the time.

Huh? Wouldn't it have been even more curious to include people who didn't exist?

droidist2• 11 years ago

I guess the urban planners at the time included people like Robert Moses. From his Wikipedia page:

His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

RickHull• 11 years ago

Most curious would be whatever is happening in some alternate universe where up is down and left is right. But I'm guessing you knew that already. I think what is curious about urban planners being absent is that most people would expect the blame to be placed on their shoulders. That the blame is not placed on their shoulders is curious only if you aren't aware that the profession barely existed at that time.

In other words, the fact of the profession barely existing at that time is not a premise to the curiosity of their absence. For more of this, you should follow me on Twitter where I explain why jokes are funny.

vidarh• 11 years ago

It's exaggeration.

Hippodamus (5th century BC) was described by Aristotle as "the first city planner". Europe is full of examples of detailed urban planning dating back a millennium or more.

Roman cities were carefully planned out to ensure transport, water supply, defence capabilities etc.

After the Roman expansion, we have tons of plan-drawings for new city developments across Europe spanning hundreds of years.

The US too had any number of prominent examples of detailed city planning dating back to e.g. Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington D.C. in 1791.

It might be more reasonable to say that in the US, city planners were still not considered relevant to planning major transport infrastructure. City planners were employed to handle the layout of the interior of cities, and more often landmarks and politically important parts of the downtown areas. Why would you consult them when you wanted to figure out how to move people between cities? It was not seen as their domain.

Europe was different in this respect mostly because Europe already had the road networks, and population density along them, that means building freeways have been largely about upgrading/replacing existing "working" road connections that were already integrated into the urban fabric, sometimes through centuries, or even dating back to Roman times, and much less about creating entirely new road connections.

Add on to this difference that freeways were seen as a sign of the future even in Europe to the point where e.g. the London suburb where I live was proud to get a flyover cutting straight through the historic city centre in the 50's - it passes right by a market dating back to the 1300's, and a church dating back to some time before 960... Today it stands as a monument to the lack of respect for the integrity of the town the planners at the time had; then it was a monument to progress.

jpatokal• 11 years ago

Meh, the Romans and Greeks are upstart striplings when it comes to city planning. Mohenjo-daro in present-day Pakistan was built as a planned city in c. 2600 BCE, and Chinese capitals like Luoyang's first incarnations aren't far behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luoyang#History

ak2173• 11 years ago

I'd say heavy-handed urban freeway construction is all the more unfortunate, even tragic in how it caused the pendulum to swing too far the other way, resulting in the current culture of nimbyism and reign of misguided anti-development community activists.

ojbyrne• 11 years ago

My understanding is that a significant part of the motivation for the interstate system was military, which doesn't seem to get any consideration in this article. Wikipedia says:

"The Interstate Highway System gained a champion in President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was influenced by his experiences as a young Army officer crossing the country in the 1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America. Eisenhower gained an appreciation of the Reichsautobahn system, the first "national" implementation of modern Germany's Autobahn network, as a necessary component of a national defense system while he was serving as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. He recognized that the proposed system would also provide key ground transport routes for military supplies and troop deployments in case of an emergency or foreign invasion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

thrownaway2424• 11 years ago

Eisenhower never intended the IHS to go through city centers, though.

hippich2• 11 years ago

I don't know much about autobahns. Do these go through cities, or go near cities?

mschuster91• 11 years ago

Yup, just look at Berlin and Munich. Munich is surrounded by a (partially) 8-lane ring, and numerous Autobahns end within 10min driving distance of the city center.

bane7• 11 years ago

I subscribe to reddit's /r/retrofuturism and I've formulated a hypothesis about this. The future we used to want was full of what I like to call "garden cities" [1][2][3][4]. Massive structures spaced far away from each other and in between carefully curated green spaces. The obvious problem with this vision is that getting around anywhere turns into a huge problem. This appealed to transportation companies and car makers came out on top and we ended up with the rest of the problems, without ending up with the garden cities. It turns out these visions of the future are bad for a whole host of reasons, transport was only one.

1 - http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...

2 - http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg

3 - https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379

4 - http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-crazy...

DanBC• 11 years ago

Have you read William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum

A dodgy Russian site has the text http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt

bane7• 11 years ago

No, but this sounds kind of amazing. I'm adding it to my queue right now!

I'm going to give the TV adaptation a quick watch also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BmRiDxrnPQ

ghaff• 11 years ago

Brilliant story. A number of years back, I used the theme as an intro to a consulting report I wrote. It's probably the best counterpoint to the Zeppelin-filled skies of utopian science fiction of a certain period.

ak2173• 11 years ago

lib.ru is not exactly dodgy. It's the oldest Russian online library, founded in 1994.

andrewliebchen4• 11 years ago

The "garden city" movement was a thing, but not quite what you're describing. "Towers in a park" was an organizational scheme for cities proposed by Modern architects, such as Le Cobusier in his Ville Radieuse proposal, and is maybe more like what you're thinking.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse

bane7• 11 years ago

Brasilia is definitely the kind of alternate future garden city I'm thinking of. I mean, can you imagine walking between buildings at opposite ends of that area? In that heat?

Why not build taller buildings? Crammed together on a grid, provide underground walking areas?

There's certainly no shortage of cars there https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bras%C3%ADlia+-+Federal+Di...

mirimir2• 11 years ago

There's also Paulo Soleri. In his plan for the Newark Airport, he proposed to house the entire population of New Jersey. The runways would have been on the roof.

Spooky232• 11 years ago

Chalking everything up as racism is a real one dimensional way to look at this issue. You really got to think through process in context... The world had just been through two devastating world wars. The past was 30 years of depravity... People were focused on building a better future.

I think in those days, nobody saw vibrant neighborhoods. They saw cold water flats, often desperate poverty and the legacy of the past. A rare visionary would look at a 1950 industrial waterfront or tenement neighborhood and see a valuable public resource that the public needed to be connected with.

jqm• 11 years ago

Exactly. What I got out of the article was that GM and some racists conspired to destroy America's cities and pollute the environment so the rich could get richer.

(FWITW, I'm highly in favor of green cities and efficient public transportation. And highly against politically charged exaggerated one sided articles.).

csomar• 11 years ago

The article criticises the cost of the entire interstate-highway and yet he focused on the couple highways that are inside the city.

I think that the cost of the interstate highway was mainly due to, you guessed it, building the highway interstate (I might be wrong).

The interstate highway also serves a different purpose than driving to work. It links states. Any industrialised country should have highways to link major cities. Heck, my underdeveloped country has highways that links all of the main cities (around 80% of the population)

mirimir2• 11 years ago

But this new arrangement had the backing of President Eisenhower, who was especially interested in seeing the system built, partly so it could be used for troop movements and mass evacuations in the event of a nuclear attack.

I've read that US interstates were designed to accomodate mobile ICBM launchers. That was the pre-silo plan, as I recall. Does anyone else recall that?

mieses• 11 years ago

Rail guts cities. We have a cotton candy view of it since we don't see it much.

Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them?

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