How interstates gutted American cities article

[silverback1065]

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-cities-history?utm_campaign=vox.social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Interested to see everyone's opinions on this.

[Sykotyk]

I don't disagree with much of it.

The highway system really didn't factor in what inner-city freeways would do to the cities. Or how it would increase the rate of suburban expansion.

Looking back on it, I think a hub and spoke type system would've been better. Think Baltimore's I-83 just ending near downtown. Keep the through route outside of the city (and not directly aligned with reaching through the middle with a gap), build the bypass around the city, and put a few spurs into toward downtown or major areas of interest (stadiums/ports/docks/etc). But, leave the city center relatively unscathed.

[jeffandnicole]

Likewise, I agree with some of it, once you get past the hyperbole. 

There's some interesting paragraphs in there, like this one: "The plan's key contributors included members of the auto industry (including General Motors CEO Charles Erwin Wilson) and highway engineers. Curiously, urban planners were absent – the profession barely existed at the time." 

If their profession didn't exist, how do they get invited in the first place?

Note another area where the article said "...most cities had just ripped up their streetcar networks because they were privately owned systems that weren't making money", then they go on to complain that the interstate highway system has recovered somewhere between 43% & 74% of costs via gas taxes.  When you have a study that has that much discrepancy within its own study, the study isn't worth much weight.  And what about that money losing streetcar network anyway?  If Joe Worker loses the transit system he relied on to get to work, he's probably gonna have to get a car.  And now that Joe has a car, why not move to the suburbs to give his family a nice yard? 

In the end, maybe the article should be about how the cities laid the groundwork to encourage people to move the suburbs, and the highway system simply provided a convenience for those people to commute back into the city for work. 

[kalvado]

There is a bunch of reasoning and approaches - but one thing these "urbanist" texts have in common:
How dare those, who actually earn money, choose suburbs over nice, high tax, overcrowded inner cities??

[Bruce]

There is a bunch of reasoning and approaches - but one thing these "urbanist" texts have in common:
How dare those, who actually earn money, choose suburbs over nice, high tax, overcrowded inner cities??

Or, on the extreme, how dare those wealthy families move further into sprawling suburbs and displace rural areas (farmland and forests) and siphon off large amounts of subsidies to build and support services so far away from the cities, while also demanding that urban residents that they left behind be forced to bare the brunt of freeways (air pollution, noise pollution, lack of walkability, etc.) all for the convenience of suburbanites.

[kalvado]

Or, on the extreme, how dare those wealthy families move further into sprawling suburbs and displace rural areas (farmland and forests) and siphon off large amounts of subsidies to build and support services so far away from the cities, while also demanding that urban residents that they left behind be forced to bare the brunt of freeways (air pollution, noise pollution, lack of walkability, etc.) all for the convenience of suburbanites.

One thing here - using walkability example.. Anyone may move into a walkable community any time. Same as anyone may move to a suburb any time... It is about personal choice, you know.
I hear a lot about making people move to inner cities - but I didn't hear about any proposals on disbanding cities, they are just left to die their natural way.

[NE2]

Too many people are personally choosing to fuck the consequences and let the planet burn.

[Bruce]

Or, on the extreme, how dare those wealthy families move further into sprawling suburbs and displace rural areas (farmland and forests) and siphon off large amounts of subsidies to build and support services so far away from the cities, while also demanding that urban residents that they left behind be forced to bare the brunt of freeways (air pollution, noise pollution, lack of walkability, etc.) all for the convenience of suburbanites.

One thing here - using walkability example.. Anyone may move into a walkable community any time. Same as anyone may move to a suburb any time... It is about personal choice, you know.
I hear a lot about making people move to inner cities - but I didn't hear about any proposals on disbanding cities, they are just left to die their natural way.

"Anyone may move into a walkable community any time"...Boy, you need to come over to the West Coast. Housing prices are high for any patch of land that is remotely within walking distance of anything. I'm stuck in the far exurbs where we're seeing massive housing price increases for crappy places like my own. It's just not feasible in this day and age.

If people were corralled closer to cities (using things like urban growth boundaries and restricted development, in addition to increased density in already-built areas), people would be able to access government services much easier without cars and things would be a little cheaper in terms of transportation costs. While that won't solve the issues of societies, it goes a long way towards upward mobility (of the socioeconomic kind). Also makes it easier to preserve natural lands that should stay as such, as well as working lands that should be producing food and not be turned into brown lawns.

[bandit957]

Freeways ruined our cities. They went "Keek! Ruin!" and ruined them all up!

[realjd]

There is a bunch of reasoning and approaches - but one thing these "urbanist" texts have in common:
How dare those, who actually earn money, choose suburbs over nice, high tax, overcrowded inner cities??

Nobody is saying that people shouldn't be able to choose where to live. Good urban planning though helps encourage people to want to live in a denser urban area. It's not about forcing people, it's about making it more attractive.

[Max Rockatansky]

See I look at this different than probably most people...  How many big American cities or big cities just in general had a well laid out street grid prior to the Interstate system?....not many.  Some notable exceptions would be cities like NYC, Phoenix and Salt Lake City which had a huge degree of urban planning.  For the most part many of the older American cities were built hodge-podge as they grew in the era of horse and buggy or maybe railroad.  Very little consideration was really given for things like urban sprawl or the flow traffic.

For me, I've lived in the three big cities in the U.S. and I can tell you that it's uncomfortable, cramped and generally an unpleasant way to live.  How many of you can honestly say you want to live in areas with more than 8,000 people per square mile?...how about 20,000?...how about 45,000?  If that's for you that's great but I don't think that a lot of post-war Americans in the Interstate building era wanted that and I think the majority of people today would prefer living in a cushy suburb.  More so there was a lot of societal issues in the 1950s and 60s beyond highway building that led to urban sprawl. 

My home city was an example of a lot of really bad things across the board beyond the Interstate system being built that caused Metro Detroit to expand....deep rooted social problems that still haven't resolved completely.  I think it's awfully callous to call the Interstates the sole cause of American urban decay when there was certainly a lot more factors that led to it.  Hell I'm not even touching on the shift in the work force from blue collar to white collar....each had a role. 

[Duke87]

The plan's key contributors included members of the auto industry (including General Motors CEO Charles Erwin Wilson) and highway engineers. Curiously, urban planners were absent – the profession barely existed at the time.

"Highway engineers dominated the decision-making," says DiMento. "They were trained to design without much consideration for how a highway might impact urban fabric – they were worried about the most efficient way of moving people from A to B."

Vox, quit throwing fuel on the fire of urban planners/architects versus engineers. We hate each other enough already!

This also strikes me as a bit... whitewashing of the reality that urban planning absolutely did exist at the time, but the mainstream views at the time were very different. The modern urban planning community would love to disown him, but Robert Moses was an urban planner. And he wasn't the only one.

The fact of the matter is that freeways through cities were often built with the deliberate intent of gutting them, or more specifically slums within them. The same reason neighborhoods were often ripped up to build public housing or civic facilities. The mainstream view at the time was that the best cure for urban blight was to simply bulldoze it and build something new in its place. The fact that freeways could be a source of blight in their own way did not particularly occur to people at the time. Nor did the fact that bulldozing blight does not solve the underlying social ills that cause it, and thus it tends to resurface elsewhere unless those ills are also addressed. We know these things now and it's part of why urban renewal is not undertaken on such grandiose scales anymore.

The other "bug" with the system as it was built is that routing thru traffic directly through the middle of a city is... not really the best way of doing things, since it puts traffic in a congested area that doesn't have any actual need to be there. The model employed by many early toll roads of bypassing cities and making traffic bound for them exit to head into them would be nice, if we had built more roads that way.

[kalvado]

.Boy, you need to come over to the West Coast. Housing prices are high for any patch of land that is remotely within walking distance of anything. I'm stuck in the far exurbs where we're seeing massive housing price increases for crappy places like my own. It's just not feasible in this day and age.

If people were corralled closer to cities (using things like urban growth boundaries and restricted development, in addition to increased density in already-built areas), people would be able to access government services much easier without cars and things would be a little cheaper in terms of transportation costs. While that won't solve the issues of societies, it goes a long way towards upward mobility (of the socioeconomic kind). Also makes it easier to preserve natural lands that should stay as such, as well as working lands that should be producing food and not be turned into brown lawns.

Is it just me, or you want to have a cake, and eat it too? You want to coral people into the city, and at the same time complain that city housing is too expensive for you?

[SP Cook]

Same old well-plowed ground.  People moved from crowded dark elite-landlord owned city apartments and tiny houses to beautiful, safe, green homes in new suburbs, with modern highways allowing them to do so and still work in the core city.  If they wished.  How dare they.  For the ELITE know what is best for all, often while not taking their own advice.

Thank God for interstates, suburbs, the car culture, and choice.  In other words freedom.

[cbeach40]

Same old well-plowed ground.  People moved from crowded dark elite-landlord owned city apartments and tiny houses to beautiful, safe, green homes in new suburbs, with modern highways allowing them to do so and still work in the core city.  If they wished.  How dare they.  For the ELITE know what is best for all, often while not taking their own advice.

Thank God for interstates, suburbs, the car culture, and choice.  In other words freedom.

And in creating that, they now have so much more infrastructure per square mile to maintain, and so many exasperated social and economic problems in the urban core that need fixing. In other words, taxation.


Can't swing the pendulum too far either way. Neither pre-war density nor post-war sprawl is truly sustainable in North American culture. It needs to be balanced.

[Max Rockatansky]

Same old well-plowed ground.  People moved from crowded dark elite-landlord owned city apartments and tiny houses to beautiful, safe, green homes in new suburbs, with modern highways allowing them to do so and still work in the core city.  If they wished.  How dare they.  For the ELITE know what is best for all, often while not taking their own advice.

Thank God for interstates, suburbs, the car culture, and choice.  In other words freedom.

And in creating that, they now have so much more infrastructure per square mile to maintain, and so many exasperated social and economic problems in the urban core that need fixing. In other words, taxation.


Can't swing the pendulum too far either way. Neither pre-war density nor post-war sprawl is truly sustainable in North American culture. It needs to be balanced.

But more than half of Americans live in urban areas now.  The only reason that is allowed to happen is because of urban sprawl.  If anything we're lacking in rural areas, smaller towns, blue collar jobs...ect.  Basically suburbs are basically just part of mega-cities that we call a Metropolitan area now.  Everyone wanted the house, white picket fence, 2.3 kids, 2 cars and a dog...for the most part they got it.

[empirestate]

I was mostly just interested in the before-and-after aerials. Wanting to see many more, I followed the link, and I was not disappointed.

[kalvado]

Can't swing the pendulum too far either way. Neither pre-war density nor post-war sprawl is truly sustainable in North American culture. It needs to be balanced.

And question is where the balance is.
There is NYC area, accountable for 1/14 of US population; NYC+LA+Chicago - 1 out of 6. Is that a swing of pendulum, or natural trend for conglomeration?
My impression is that this trend is going to be more important than anything else. Small cities are just falling in a gap between rural  living required for farming, and megapolis trend.
Or, maybe, this is just another side of pendulum swing?

[Max Rockatansky]

I was mostly just interested in the before-and-after aerials. Wanting to see many more, I followed the link, and I was not disappointed.

That's pretty solid link.  For me it was weird seeing old Tiger's Stadium in a booming neighborhood on Michigan/US 12 back in the heyday of Detroit before the city declined.

[Bruce]

.Boy, you need to come over to the West Coast. Housing prices are high for any patch of land that is remotely within walking distance of anything. I'm stuck in the far exurbs where we're seeing massive housing price increases for crappy places like my own. It's just not feasible in this day and age.

If people were corralled closer to cities (using things like urban growth boundaries and restricted development, in addition to increased density in already-built areas), people would be able to access government services much easier without cars and things would be a little cheaper in terms of transportation costs. While that won't solve the issues of societies, it goes a long way towards upward mobility (of the socioeconomic kind). Also makes it easier to preserve natural lands that should stay as such, as well as working lands that should be producing food and not be turned into brown lawns.

Is it just me, or you want to have a cake, and eat it too? You want to coral people into the city, and at the same time complain that city housing is too expensive for you?

In a perfect world, increased density within urban centers would allow for housing stock to rise and meet demand, keeping costs lower than they are now.

Housing in the suburbs aught to be more expensive (which it would be without the massive subsidies for services to sustain it), given that it's cost-prohibitive for a business or government to adequately cover them.

[silverback1065]

i think putting all the blame on interstates is short sited, as with almost every issue in this world, there is nuance. 

[jeffandnicole]

i think putting all the blame on interstates is short sited, as with almost every issue in this world, there is nuance. 

Its been rumored I-90 caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

[kalvado]

In a perfect world, increased density within urban centers would allow for housing stock to rise and meet demand, keeping costs lower than they are now.

Housing in the suburbs aught to be more expensive (which it would be without the massive subsidies for services to sustain it), given that it's cost-prohibitive for a business or government to adequately cover them.

And in a real world of supply and demand, you could get an apartment, for example, in Santa Fe NM, for a fraction of your California rent being factor of X larger - and within walking distance from State Capitol. You now, demand must be not very high - unlike where you are.
And don't forget that property values - once again, in our shitty world of supply and demand - tend to go up near city center, since land supply tend to be very tight in those areas, and land production was ceased quite a while ago. 
But let me know if you can find a semi-perfect megapolis with low enough housing cost...

[bandit957]

Land used to be free - a fact that is largely covered up because they don't want us to know.

[Max Rockatansky]

Land used to be free - a fact that is largely covered up because they don't want us to know.

Care to qualify how it was free?  Who is "they" and what do they want "us" to know?  I love how "they" always never has a name or a face...I would love to see both for once.