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Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
11–20 of 146 posts
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#12At one point in time an extensive road system is a competitive advantage. At another, it makes less sense. The same thing happened with Railroads during their heyday. I remember seeing an old railroad map with stops at all these small towns in Nebraska. Now, railroads are almost entirely commercial with very few passenger stops in small towns. It makes sense that at some point you just don't have the need for so many…
Well, to be fair, the history of railroads in the US is kinda crackheaded.
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#13[deleted]
The article is referring to Iowa not Kansas.
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#14At one point in time an extensive road system is a competitive advantage. At another, it makes less sense. The same thing happened with Railroads during their heyday. I remember seeing an old railroad map with stops at all these small towns in Nebraska. Now, railroads are almost entirely commercial with very few passenger stops in small towns. It makes sense that at some point you just don't have the need for so many…
Well, to be fair, the history of railroads in the US is kinda crackheaded.
What do you mean by that?
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#15Per capita driving may have peaked, but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road.
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#16I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than dete…
An untraveled gravel road is likely more expensive to maintain than a paved one, long term, when you factor in watersheds, plant growth, and vehicular damage caused by the road.
You also need to take into account that many of these roads are used to transport agricultural products, so the roads are in effect an agricultural subsidy (though not necessarily a bad one).
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, to be fair, the history of railroads in the US is kinda crackheaded.
What do you mean by that?
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Pre-Amtrak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_t...
Basically, an ongoing waterfall of corruption, regulation, NIMBYism, unfair (arguably) competition from other sectors, and a lot else.
It's not quite accurate to just say "Well, passenger rail is dead" as though it was some natural progression of things--especially when you look at it working in other nations.
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#18I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than dete…
I'm from North Dakota, and yeah, I would rather drive on gravel than ill-maintained pavement. ND has had to go the other way in the west because of the large amount of traffic[1] and pave and maintain some roads that would normally not merit it.
I am actually a little ticked that the northern states are not doing research on alternate materials / surfacing technology.
1) western North Dakota now has traffic such that I find Minneapolis / St. Paul during rush hour relaxing in comparison. I would hope for more rail, but they seem to keep crashing and I guess a pipeline isn't going to happen.
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch I read that differently than you, I think. I read it not as "we don't need roads" but as "we don't need all of the roads we currently have, we can get rid of some of them." I don't know if that's true, even with reduced demand, there are a lot of small towns that only have one main road going in or out of them. (I also am from Iowa.)
A related question is whether (and how) you make the people in those towns bear the cost of the town existing. Lots of small towns are nice and scenic. Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.
and a lot of those small towns are still active and are gathering centers for a large area producing product to be shipped to urban areas - towns disappear on their own, no need to be forced
Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
#20I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than dete…
My first thought on reading the post was to ask whether an analysis of roads strictly in terms of aggregate capacity even makes sense? It seems to me you have to ask where people are, where they need to go and why. Between any two travel points you can perform a capacity analysis, but doing so in the aggregate would, I think, shortchange a lot of smaller places.
Another Midwesterner, here (Minnesota, with family in Iowa and South Dakota). I think you're correct on the potential to shortchange a lot of the smaller towns. For example, the high school my dad went to (a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away) has since been consolidated with 2 other school districts, so some of the demand for roads has shifted to more of the main highways instead of a lot of the smaller, more rural roadways. Same thing happened to the school districts my cousins went to in South Dakota. Now, for the most part, they travel on I90 and I29 to Sioux Falls. I think the gp is correct in saying that "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a hyperbole. But I'd be curious to see what their DOT's plans are for collecting data on that capacity usage, and how it will play out, politically, if there are serious proposals to start to rein in spending on rural road upkeep in low usages places.