The best part is, I didn’t have to watch this and neither do you. The video title says it all.
YouTube recommendations be like, “I see you watching videos about how zoning and cars have destroyed urban centers in the US” and still suggests garbage like this.
That’s not to say the program was perfect, though. Just as much as it proved revolutionary to more rural areas, it gutted cities. Neighborhoods, predominantly poorer ones, were leveled to the ground to make space for Interstates and their associated infrastructure.
This often created clear, physical barriers between certain neighborhoods and urban centers, which reduced opportunity in these excluded neighborhoods.
They also had the effect of encouraging reduced density, which increases the environmental impact of cities, creates scenarios where job opportunity is linked to car ownership, and additional potential negative impacts.
At least he recognizes how much they fuck up cities.
Do you have other issues with the interstate highway system other than train good car bad?
I’m a bit torn, because I can see that having good road networks gives workers more geographic mobility (trains were not always affordable/practical for workers), but the negative impacts of the reliance on cars has been really bad.
Like many things in capitalism, it’s technically the best option given X constraints, and the mind trap of liberalism is acting like X constraints are a foregone conclusion.
The neoliberal argument about how Nike sweatshops in the third world are good because they tend to pay much better than local enterprises or subsistence farming can is a more severe example of the same phenomenon.
Someone else mentioned how they run through major cities and destroy neighborhoods. The scale of this distruction is hard to understate.
A big reason most US cities don’t have much of an active downtown is that they’re usually criss-crossed with highways. Interstates kill walkability in a city and can make it feel like a city is broken up into pieces.
White folks used the interstate system to create enclaves in the suburbs so they could create an existence free of black people.
That’s an issue with highways when they reach cities. But the interstate part where it’s connecting far away cities is cool
it runs through major cities, which usually destroyed impoverished non-white communities
they’re constantly doing repairs on it that never seem to actually get completed
traffic engineering is a bullshit field that somehow hasn’t caught on to induced demand after like 70 years
There’s actually research going back to the 60s that knew induced demand was bunk.
The problem is the auto industry and the fossil fuel industry lobbies congress continually for more road funding. Something insane like 80% of DoT funds on average are earmarked for auto infrastructure.
Now after 80+ years of these policies and advertising American car culture is a reactive force against funding other modes of transport.
Train good, car bad.
It was good at connecting parts of the country and creating jobs, but it was the start of federal policies to help fund the creation of roads (and running new highways through minority neighborhoods) instead of funding rail.
Incentivizing cities to build roads, then making them foot the bill for maintenance, leaves them in debt and they keep expanding to pay that off. Those policies also made cars necessary in most parts of the US, and the parking requirements of zoning laws caused downtown areas to be mostly parking lots in a lot of cities.
I guess the dunk tank may not have been the best place for this, but the issues this project created are never discussed and deserve to be dunked on.
highways are necessary for military deployments (cold war) and commodity transportation, though trains do both better
