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Urban highways destroy wealth

urbankchoze.blogspot.com

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Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#71

Post by ryandrake »

kchoze wrote: post #66
ryandrake wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

SJWs and identity politcs get on my nerves too... but on this case, it's hard to deny that the decisions of which neighborhood to raze were likely influenced by the racial majority of these neighborhoods. Though one could argue that this was more about political convenience than racial animosity... poor black neighborhoods put up much less of a fight against eminent domain and "urban renewal" than rich, well-connecte…

While it may be true, it's off-topic for an article called "Why urban highways destroy wealth". Inserting a discussion about race here is like going into an article about how Company XYZ is a bad investment and pointing out that their hiring practices discriminate against women. Even if true, it's off-topic trolling, but apparently this kind of trolling is OK here. Live and learn.

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#72

Post by grardb »

ryandrake wrote: post #71
kchoze wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SJWs and identity politcs get on my nerves too... but on this case, it's hard to deny that the decisions of which neighborhood to raze were likely influenced by the racial majority of these neighborhoods. Though one could argue that this was more about political convenience than racial animosity... poor black neighborhoods put up much less of a fight against eminent domain and "urban renewal" than rich, well-connecte…

While it may be true, it's off-topic for an article called "Why urban highways destroy wealth". Inserting a discussion about race here is like going into an article about how Company XYZ is a bad investment and pointing out that their hiring practices discriminate against women. Even if true, it's off-topic trolling, but apparently this kind of trolling is OK here. Live and learn.

>Someone posts a tl;dr about the article and says that the issues caused by creating urban highways are trade-offs that come with a solution to a different problem.

>Someone asks what problem urban highways are meant to solve.

>Someone answers the question, and the answer happens to involve race.

Would you have preferred if the question wasn't answered, so as to avoid a discussion on race? This isn't trolling, and it isn't off-topic. Very rarely do comments on the third level stay 100% relevant to the article being discussed. It sounds like you just don't like talking about race, and I bet it's easy to figure out why.

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#73

Post by ethbro »

ryandrake wrote: post #71
kchoze wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SJWs and identity politcs get on my nerves too... but on this case, it's hard to deny that the decisions of which neighborhood to raze were likely influenced by the racial majority of these neighborhoods. Though one could argue that this was more about political convenience than racial animosity... poor black neighborhoods put up much less of a fight against eminent domain and "urban renewal" than rich, well-connecte…

While it may be true, it's off-topic for an article called "Why urban highways destroy wealth". Inserting a discussion about race here is like going into an article about how Company XYZ is a bad investment and pointing out that their hiring practices discriminate against women. Even if true, it's off-topic trolling, but apparently this kind of trolling is OK here. Live and learn.

It doesn't happen a lot here, and it's absolutely relevant. You may not have a background in urban design / planning (I'm assuming), but racial politics has been a huge force historically.

It's not like people are bringing race into opinions about the primary colors here: this is relevant to the topic.

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#74

Post by jarek »

SFjulie1 wrote: post #59
JackFr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regard to the island problem, in Manhattan any bridge or tunnel which leads from a highway and primarily dumps you onto a local streets has a toll on the way in. This is expressly a throttling measure, as it's considered better to have a traffic jam on the highway going in rather than gridlock -- literal gridlock -- on the local streets.

Well, it makes sense. Why don't all city/stated paid engineers paid with public money don't work like and open knowledge community? A medieval based city (Europe) is often with bridges on a river. US squared big cities are often on rivers. And probably the same everywhere. Flux congestion due to bi partition of graphs is such a common pattern out there. The rivers are here because they were normal way of communicatio…

This is completely untrue. You can't look for planning information the same way you look for code snippets. This is like looking for medical research on Youtube. StackOverflow? Try https://www.planning.org/ and the Journal of the American Planning Association.

As well, in any profession with large public impact, there is a gap between what the professionals know and what the public accepts. A planner can tell you how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge, but it might not be so simple for a politician to convince people to pay millions, or worse, alter their lifestyle to make it happen.

To give an example: do you think economists and policy professionals don't have a lot of ideas to simplify and improve the tax code? Then why aren't they implemented? Because lobbying and special interests, because talk radio, because social equality, because families, because people think of themselves as impoverished millionaires, because messy real-life stuff.

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#75

Post by superuser2 »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #47
superuser2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not exaggerating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Roads Urban highways in the US are a facet of the American Dream vision of the suburbs as "a safe place to raise your kids," which is basically a euphemism for "far away from the scary minorities who live in cities."

Well, out of curiosity, do you think suburbs are actually safer than inner cities?

That's complicated.

For one thing, inner city murders are dispute resolution for people who don't believe in the courts far more often then they're random. If you're not involved in gang feuds, you can write off a good chunk of the murder rate. You also have to look at those stats adjusted for density. Chicago has a lot of murders because it is large, for example. Per capita it is unexceptional.

Cities are made less safe when only the desperate remain. Funding for services that contribute to safety (schools, mental health, homeless shelters, even police) crumbles with the tax base. A middle class re-immigration to the cities in theory brings with it the money and political will to rebuild those services. What we see now in decaying cities is not an essential property of cities, but an effect of their abandonment. New York is a great case study about how a city can clean up and bounce back from this, though it's tactics were sometimes flawed.

In places without the density to support transit, you are less likely to be the victim of a street robbery but also far more likely to die in an auto accident, particularly a DUI. I have insurance for my phone and a backup debit card at home. I only have one life.

So no, probably not. Particularly the further away ones. As "average daily hours in a car" grows, your safety does not.

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#76

Post by brightball »

splitrocket wrote: post #57
gr3yh47 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You've also got to factor in people's perceptions vs just statistics.

Take gun homicides for example. The vast majority of people who push for gun control that I've had discussions with (totally anecdotal, I realize) will cite mass shootings as a reason rather than gang violence even though the latter accounts for an astronomically higher percentage than the former.

The difference is that, if you're not in a gang you generally don't have to be concerned about dying in a gang shootout. A mass shooting on the other hand, could happen to anybody in a public place regardless of whether or not you've removed yourself from other likely causes. In other words, you have no control over the latter so it creates a higher level of fear even though it's rare.

Similarly, flying in an airplane exacts more fear than driving a car because when you're in a car you feel in control.

Lastly though, it is about more than just safety. I have 2 kids. I moved to the suburbs.

In the suburbs I can have more yard space and house space and room space and quiet for the kids to play than if I were in the city. Safety wasn't really a factor as much as just having space (for me at least).

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#77

Post by brightball »

ideonexus wrote: post #34
jacobolus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

That is incredibly interesting. Thank you for posting.

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#78

Post by mladenkovacevic »

I always had this idea for a highway conversion that makes it into a sort of a railway for individual cars.

SO imagine you drive on your local streets until you get to this "highway". Then via some mechanism (something like the drive-through car wash but more heavy duty obviously), you merge onto the highway and get pulled by electric motors (perhaps even motors within your own car) along with all the other cars. You can then relax in your car, read, nap or watch videos until you are taken out at your exit ramp.

No pollution, no grid-lock, no accidents. Just a smooth ride all the way to within 2-5km from your destination.

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#79

Post by [deleted] »

SFjulie1 wrote: post #15
nashashmi wrote: post #3

TL;DR version: - Urban highways cost more money than urban transit - They divide cities logistically. - Introduce pollution - Are very unsightly to neighborhoods - Steal traffic from roads in commercial zones and undermine regional commercial activity. - Put emphasis on car-first neighborhoods and businesses (which give little ROI). - Encourage urban sprawl and community inefficiency. My take: These points are unders…

TL; DR $ person transported/km for highways >> subway For all the cons you quoted. Living in montréal, biking all year. The problem is much more the diffusion of the flux (aggravated by graph partition and an asymmetry of rules making turning left strongly discouraged). They don't seem to have any engineers studying hydrodynamics, percolation, diffusion or geometry or physics in their offices. They reason in terms of…

[deleted]

Re: Urban highways destroy wealth

#80

Post by euphemize »

Living in Montréal, I'm happy to see this article. The highways / traffic situation is horrible here, but I will point to one example in particular.

Getting to the airport: there is no way to get to the airport easily. There is a dedicated bus line that might get stuck in traffic for 10$, or you pay 35$ for Uber, or 50$ for a normal cab (which also might both get stuck in traffic). You need to plan at least 2 hours from your house to get there, often 3 hours in advance for your flight. I've taken the bus dozens of time, and you can see the faces of the poor passengers, realizing they thought 1h to get 20KM away would be enough.

I go back and forth to Amsterdam and the difference is embarrassing. I get to Schiphol, hop on a train (every 5 mins), it costs 5 euros and I'm at Central Station in 15 minutes.

Light train? metro extension? How hard can it be?

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