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Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

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

#51

Post by oldmanjay »

innguest wrote: post #38
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.

Yes, and women should pay more for health insurance since they go to the doctor more often. However neither of those things will happen because common sense and communism are polar opposites despite their shared etymological roots. EDIT: sophists can downvote but what they can't do is cope, or they would engage my arguments. EDIT 2: for the slow, the argument is that it is natural to want those who use a resource the…

You didn't make any arguments. I can't even decipher what your position might be here - perhaps trucks should be subsidized by normal traffic because it's somehow related to sexism or communism?

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

#52

Post by amyjess »

gtCameron wrote: post #32
cjslep wrote: post #25

"The [Iowa] primary highway system makes up over 9,000 miles (14,000 km), a mere 8 percent of the U.S. state of Iowa's public road system." [0] So while laudable, it would be very nice if North Carolina followed suit with its ~79,000 miles of maintained roads (largest of any state) [1]. But I doubt that would happen, my friend at NCDOT says the culture emphasizes building new roads (or the ones that get wiped out by…

North Carolina does not have the most maintained roads of any state, they have "largest state maintained highway network in the United States." This is a function of them choosing to maintain roads at the state level instead of the county level. If you look at road miles by state [0] regardless of the actual entity that maintains them, they are 16th. [0] http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/

Their highway network is still pretty large, though.

Texas also has an all-state-maintained system (except for toll roads, which are private, but the free service roads are still state-maintained... and Texas tends to favor adding service roads wherever possible), and their road network is the second-largest state-maintained highway network in the US. When you compare the physical size of the two states, NC really comes off as having an excessive amount of roads.

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

#53

Post by computmaxer »

sophacles wrote: post #37
darkstar999 wrote: post #29

So how do you let roads "deteriorate and go away"? Wouldn't there be huge unsafe potholes in the transition? What kind of roads would they abandon? I didn't click through to all the references, but this article doesn't give any solutions.

Huge chunks of the midwest are a paved checkerboard of roads spaced at 1 mile intervals. Many of these get 3-5 cars passing a day, if that. There is no need for a lot of these to be paved, as they serve as field access roads. The houses off these roads are farm houses, and most of the farmers I know don't mind either way if it's a gravel or paved road. Some actually prefer gravel, as in the winter, when it is icy, th…

That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are definitely roads checkerboarded at 1 mile intervals, but most are gravel in between some paved ones.

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

#54

Post by vl »

raldi wrote: post #47

The article has a map showing which states have already hit peak traffic; does anyone know of a per-municipality or per-county list? I'm really curious about whether this has happened in San Francisco.

Yep, it's unclear how it's measured and if the metric applied correctly. For example, in Seattle traffic jams get only worse over years. Clearly it hasn't "peaked". Yet map from the article shows that it peaked in the Washington state as a whole.

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

#55

Post by CamperBob2 »

superuser2 wrote: post #50
refurb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Wow.

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

#56

Post by efiftythree »

blhack wrote: post #26
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…

Those gravel roads also need some upkeep, though. I also grew up in Iowa, and the difference between the gravel roads I took to get to my friends houses there, and the gravel roads we have here in AZ is night and day.

An adjustment in the allocation of funds would allow counties to bring more road graders and operators online. Right now I believe they simply dont have the capacity to do proper maintenance on all of the level A roads on a frequent enough basis. This might also allow for the conversion of some state highway routes and level B roads to level A roads.

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

#57

Post by ocschwar »

darkstar999 wrote: post #29

So how do you let roads "deteriorate and go away"? Wouldn't there be huge unsafe potholes in the transition? What kind of roads would they abandon? I didn't click through to all the references, but this article doesn't give any solutions.

It's not so much the roads as the BRIDGES.

Iowa's road map was drawn from afar, before any surveyors could look at it, so there are a lot of bridges keeping the road grid continuous over rivers, creeks and dry streambeds.

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

#58

Post by scarmig »

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…

Isn't Berlin a net-taker compared to other major German cities?

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

#59

Post by quandrum »

innguest wrote: post #38
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.

Yes, and women should pay more for health insurance since they go to the doctor more often. However neither of those things will happen because common sense and communism are polar opposites despite their shared etymological roots. EDIT: sophists can downvote but what they can't do is cope, or they would engage my arguments. EDIT 2: for the slow, the argument is that it is natural to want those who use a resource the…

If women were making profit off the health care, then yes.

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

#60

Post by nulltype »

vl wrote: post #54
raldi wrote: post #47

The article has a map showing which states have already hit peak traffic; does anyone know of a per-municipality or per-county list? I'm really curious about whether this has happened in San Francisco.

Yep, it's unclear how it's measured and if the metric applied correctly. For example, in Seattle traffic jams get only worse over years. Clearly it hasn't "peaked". Yet map from the article shows that it peaked in the Washington state as a whole.

Hilariously, the graph in the article is "Vehicle Miles Travelled" not "Hours spent in vehicle" which could be increasing while the other decreases.
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