Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

citylab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 146 posts

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#41

Post by thrownaway2424 »

jdhendrickson wrote: post #35
mholt wrote: post #3

I'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…

How does this work in the context of motorcycles?

Do you think motorcyclists can't travel on gravel roads? I do frequently.

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#42

Post by maxerickson »

mapt wrote: post #40
jff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear. In a big city with rising rents, people who already live somewhere ~have a right to be there~ and shouldn't have to go. In a small town, apparently, there's no possible reason people would want to stay.

It's merely a question of how heavily we subsidize their lifestyle with infrastructure & other spending from the state/federal purse, which ultimately comes from economically productive cities. One of the things we currently do, through differential housing prices, is send retirees to small towns with dead economies. They get a pension, Social Security, and Medicare, and that income is often the sole thing keeping th…

Yeah, your first paragraph is what I was getting at there (but why be clear about it when there is an opportunity to be hackneyed?).

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#43

Post by cwyers »

cwyers wrote: post #7
mholt wrote: post #3

I'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 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.)

Well, I went ahead and read up on Charles Marohn a bit, and... I think your reading of him is a lot closer to what he believes than mine was.

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#44

Post by refurb »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24
kylec wrote: post #15

Per 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.

> but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road. As long as those drivers can afford the tax burden to maintain the aging infrastructure, sure.

Transportation infrastructure spending at the federal level is currently 3%.[1] You could always argue that is low due to a lack of investment, but it pales in comparison to federal entitlement spending (59%).

I'd be much more worried about the tax burden due to entitlement spending than I would about transportation infrastructure.

[1]http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-fede...

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#45

Post by superuser2 »

jff wrote: post #36
maxerickson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear. In a big city with rising rents, people who already live somewhere ~have a right to be there~ and shouldn't have to go. In a small town, apparently, there's no possible reason people would want to stay.

>~have a right to be there~

Rent control causes landlords to fail to realize hypothetical profits; government-subsidized sprawl wastes everyone's money.

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#46

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jff wrote: post #36
maxerickson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear. In a big city with rising rents, people who already live somewhere ~have a right to be there~ and shouldn't have to go. In a small town, apparently, there's no possible reason people would want to stay.

I don't think I heard him saying that incumbent renters in a city have a legally-enforceable right of any kind to their apartments.

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#48

Post by omouse »

mholt wrote: post #3

I'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…

That's what's happened in the city of Toronto and surrounding areas; some of the roads are gravel but for the most part they're paved and it's a pain in the butt when you drive on pot-holed roads. There's some suburban streets that would do better to be gravel.

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#49

Post by ams6110 »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #28

A bit old, but still relevant - http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that if heavily loaded trucks are causing a disproportionate amount of damage they should be taxed at a rate which allows for proper maintenance of those roads.

Trucks are taxed more already. The problem is legislatures using those tax revenues for other pork and then claiming to not have enough money for roads.

Re: Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

#50

Post by superuser2 »

refurb wrote: post #44
toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road. As long as those drivers can afford the tax burden to maintain the aging infrastructure, sure.

Transportation infrastructure spending at the federal level is currently 3%.[1] You could always argue that is low due to a lack of investment, but it pales in comparison to federal entitlement spending (59%). I'd be much more worried about the tax burden due to entitlement spending than I would about transportation infrastructure. [1] http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-fede...

The social good supported by entitlement spending is sick people not dying and poor people not starving or being homeless.

The social "good" supported by highways is geographical separation between the middle class and the poor (which largely means the white and everyone else.)

Post reply on HN