61–70 of 94 posts
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Well, out of curiosity, do you think suburbs are actually safer than inner cities?
crime data would seem to indicate so
But I'm white and make pretty decent money, so that's a big reason why.
Is it me or the author is simply making assumptions based on his "intelligent point of view". Here is my version: Urban highways create unparalleled amounts of wealth. By enabling people, businessman, police, firefighters to get from point A to point B faster; they boost the economy. They also reduce pollution, since you are not stuck in traffic. But hey, I have no data to back this up.
As to your claim, throwaway as it may have been, here is why I think it to be wrong.
First of all, police, firefighters and other public services rarely use highways in urban areas. The reason for that is that urban highways are few in number due to their monumental construction costs, so each highway tends to be a few miles away from the nearest parallel highway. As a result, going from A to B in the same city is often faster on arterials than on highways for trips that are 6 miles or less, because the detour to access the highway is longer than the time gain from using it.
Second, highways do speed up longer distance travel, but how much of a benefit is it really? That depends on the kind of travel. As I wrote in the article, rural highways that connect regions together serve an important economic role by helping to speed up the transport of goods and people between them. However, commuting is quite a different beast, because with regards to commuting, there is a phenomenon called "Marchetti's constant", people tend to make choices of location for their residence and their workplace to maintain a commute time of roughly 30 minutes on average, because people understand distance as travel time, not as actual distance. So when you speed up travel inside a metropolitan area (from suburb to city/other suburb), what you do is that you incite people to live further and further away from their workplace and from the stores they patronize.
Therefore, urban highways do not really lead to a reduction of commute times overall (some may have that benefit, but rarely is it generalized) but rather to an increase in distance driven. Which leads to more pollution (though often less concentrated), higher transport costs and a development pattern that makes transit non-viable, therefore forcing people to buy cars to access jobs and services.
An example of this is that in 1972, a study of commuting time and distance revealed that the average commuting time for people commuting 20-24 miles to work was 36 minutes, just 6 minutes more than for people commuting 11-14 miles. In other words, an increase of commute distance of 100% was associated by an increase in commute time of just 20%. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c8824.pdf (table 6.7, page 19 of pdf)
So higher speed was correlated with longer commute distances AND with longer commute times. Correlation is not causation, but that should give people pause when they claim to want faster roads to reduce commute times.
So higher mode share for cars and greater distance traveled means more pollution, more wealth expanded just to provide transport (which consumption, like electricity, has no good in and of itself). That's a drain on the economy.
Now, because I'm nice, I'll give you one thing: highways allow cities farther away to become economically integrated, resulting in much bigger metro areas. Since much of the modern economy gains from concentrating people and resources in an economically integrated area, this may be seen as a positive. However, what we've seen in Asia and Europe is that in the absence of highways, metro areas can still be just as populous, concentrating as many people and resources in one economically-integrated region... that region just happens to be much more compact, often concentrated around train stations, with highways going around inhabited areas, connecting industrial areas, serving essentially for trips to and from other regions.
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I would think it's primarily moving people from point A to point B (or, possibly from point C to point D via some stretch in between A and B). [Begin Rant] This brings up the biggest problem I have with Bay Area public trasnportation. I live 11 miles from work, but it's impossible to get there via any reasonable public transportation-based route in less than 1 hour. On flat land, I can bike at least 50% faster than t…
BART + fold-up bicycle?
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The problem of getting from one side of town to the other very quickly, without clogging up the "walkable neighborhoods" in the middle, with their narrow streets and wide sidewalks. The people going through get on the highway, out of the way of the people actually living in the town.
In the UK we have built bypasses for most towns and most of the traffic goes around them instead of through.
I'm a fan of ring roads, Rochester for instance had a small inner loop and a much wider outer loop of freeways (with freeway segments and decent arterials connecting the inner to the outer, it looked kind of like a wagon wheel) that meant you could get almost anywhere pretty quickly.
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The problem of getting from one side of town to the other very quickly, without clogging up the "walkable neighborhoods" in the middle, with their narrow streets and wide sidewalks. The people going through get on the highway, out of the way of the people actually living in the town.
In the UK we have built bypasses for most towns and most of the traffic goes around them instead of through.
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They were meant to get people from far out of the city into the city, fast, in a way that would only be accessible to professional-class whites, so that they could keep downtown jobs while moving their families to the suburbs and stop spending their property tax money on poor brown people.
Oh, great, now highway design is racially charged. Is there any topic left to discuss anymore that can't be twisted into a conspiracy against some race or gender? Next up: "C++ is not just an unsafe language, its syntax was created specifically to exclude people of color!"
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What problem were they meant to solve? (That's a serious question. I'm interesting in hearing how other people view the purpose of an urban highway.)
I'm not an expert but I'd imagine the biggest advantages are: Faster travel within the city itself. Easier to move in and out of the city. Reducing rush hour traffic on local streets.
Travel in the city gets slower because there's more traffic, it becomes harder to move into and out of the city due to increases in commuter activity, and rush-hour traffic on local streets gets worse as more people try and funnel into these highways.
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crime data would seem to indicate so
However, mortality data would disagree. Generally speaking, in cities you are more likely to be the victim of homicide and crime. In suburban and rural environments you are substantially more likely to be killed/injured in general. http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
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It's hard to deny the racial aspect of government subsidies to produce the suburbs, but the government's official intent was not racial, but emergent and was strongly influenced by the threat of nuclear war. Shawn Otto of sciencedebate.org covers this in his book on politics and science, "Fool Me Twice" (apologies for the typos from my book-scanner): ...it has long been the prevailing opinion that American suburbs de…
This is an interesting angle. Though how much of the housing was moved before the causes of "White flight" were in place? Still seems like Brown v Board would've caused the majority of the influx?
Most northern states (where a majority of major cities in the 1950s existed) didn't have legal segregation. They already had and still have defacto segregation.