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Urban highways destroy wealth
81–90 of 94 posts
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Very rarely do comments on the third level stay 100% relevant to the article being discussed.
Thank goodness. Some of the best, most interesting and informative comments come from discussions that digress into tangents. HN would be much less interesting without these.
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed. And scientific papers should all be available to the public especially when funded with public money so should the data. Privatizing public funded work is theft of the people.
I do not trust any kind of expert or "wise people" that want me to trust them without having access to their so called wisdom.
I do not hear the "necessity is evil but we have to live with it". If people are not willing to prove their worth to the community and being scrutinized they should gracefully resign and admit they are not fit for the mission. This coward attitude is disgusting from people having a corporation that protect the security of their job based on ethic.
And last but not least, they should not spend money of others resulting in the slavery of public debts if they cannot give tokens that -at least- they did their bests in terms of means to achieve their goals.
People with powers should accept to be liable for their actions : it is called responsibility.
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#84Is 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.
I admit that data is hard to find, but that's not a reason to discount rational exploration of this issue. There's plenty of anecdotal cases for it, just see the devastation of Detroit, for example. 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 highw…
> 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.
I don't understand this point. Living further away doesn't mean they stop patronizing stores entirely, they just patronize different stores. If a store sees their clientele move, they can either move themselves, or if both regions now have enough customers to support it expand to another location.
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed. And scientific papers should all be available to the public especially when funded with public money so should the data. Privatizing public funded work is theft of the people. I do not trust any kind of expert or "wise people" that want me to trust them without having access to their so called wisdom. I do not hear the "necessi…
> I do not hear the "necessity is evil but we have to live with it". If people are not willing to prove their worth to the community and being scrutinized they should gracefully resign and admit they are not fit for the mission.
Great, so now they've all resigned and we're back to the start with no idea how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge.
Best ask StackOverflow.
> Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed.
You have a long day ahead of you if you want to rant about non-open licensed academic papers
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admit that data is hard to find, but that's not a reason to discount rational exploration of this issue. There's plenty of anecdotal cases for it, just see the devastation of Detroit, for example. 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 highw…
> 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. I don't understand this point. Living further away doesn't mean they stop patronizing stores entirely, they just patronize different stores. If a store sees their clientele move, they can either move…
What he is saying is that highways encourage people to build everything more spread out, including residences, offices, and stores. He’s not claiming this is problem for the stores per se, or that it inherently changes the relationship between people and stores.
The problem is the increased money and land spent on transportation, the increased pollution, the unfriendliness of the system for pedestrians / anyone who can’t drive, and the inability to build mass transit to cover the same areas.
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK we have built bypasses for most towns and most of the traffic goes around them instead of through.
And we all saw how well that worked out for Arthur Dent! 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.
Rochester has an extremely sad downtown area, because it’s tightly encircled by highways killing any connection to the surrounding areas, and it was turned into an office park filled with parking lots. Only a few blocks (where there are students) have any kind of vibrancy. For anyone who doesn’t have a car, it’s the perfect dystopian nightmare. A great illustration of what the article under discussion in this thread was talking about.
It was much more of a real city up through about 1950. This comparison shot is striking: http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/
At least they’re trying now though, http://www.cityofrochester.gov/InnerLoopEast/
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#88Highways are only useful because there are so many of them that connect just about every community in the contiguous US - what economists call a "network effect". Therefore adding a new highway tends to make the other highways and roads it's connected to more useful. Likewise, public transit systems like the NYC subway are useful because there are so many of them.
When the first train is built in a metro area, it's not going to be useful to very many people. As more lines are built, however, that first train line becomes useful to more people because they can transfer to another line, or a bus line. As the third and fourth lines are built, the marginal utility of that each new mile of tracks goes up as the train becomes feasible for more people.
Of course there are examples of both highways and trains that probably shouldn't have been built where they were built (http://streets.mn/2014/07/07/strangulation-on-the-green-line...). My point is that cost comparisons of building a new highway versus building a new train are skewed by the fact that most metro areas have a mature (even crumbling...but that's another point) highway system, but few is the US have a large network of public transit yet, other than buses that are often slow, late and dirty.
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
With respect to San Jose, it's a crock. The only remotely "urban" area is downtown, and that is fully served with highways (880, 280/680, 87). Light rail is a joke, with routes having been chosen for political reasons rather than true demand, and it is useless for transporting goods. This article, like many on the topic, also take a one-dimensional view of highways -- as people movers. The flow of goods and services…
> With respect to San Jose, it's a crock FWIW, the sentence quoted above says that cities with fewer urban motorways are overrepresented in that list of the richesty urban centres, it doesn't say every city listed meets that criteria. The article also discusses goods and services in the case study it's looking at - comparison between the Montreal subway and highway built for the Expo. i.e. about how moving passengers…
"it doesn't say every city listed meets that criteria"
But it does list San Jose first, implying that it is (most?) representative.
...
"Also, I don't quite see the argument on emergency services... Emergency services need to go from any random point to the nearest hospital"
Exactly! And what is the fastest way to the nearest hospital with an open emergency room (let alone a real trauma center) in such areas? I don't know, but I assume that most cities lack real hospitals within fast access of downtown by surface streets (due to traffic, if not also distance). In the San Jose case, you're talking VMC, which would be 20+ minutes away by surface streets but maybe 8 minutes using 280.
In San Francisco, the only hospital South of Market is SF General. (Technically South or East of Market, but SOMA is a well-known term).
Re: Urban highways destroy wealth
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
With respect to San Jose, it's a crock. The only remotely "urban" area is downtown, and that is fully served with highways (880, 280/680, 87). Light rail is a joke, with routes having been chosen for political reasons rather than true demand, and it is useless for transporting goods. This article, like many on the topic, also take a one-dimensional view of highways -- as people movers. The flow of goods and services…
And two of those highways (87 and 280) are pretty decent sized barriers between neighborhoods and downtown. Ever try walking from Diridon to SJSU or the Federal Building? There's also a lot of historic housing south of SJSU cut off by 280.
Diridon to SJSU is straight down Santa Clara St. I'm missing something with that example. That stretch of Santa Clara is more walkable than before 280 existed... if you wanted to walk it then.