You must log in or # to comment.
What I learned in Texas is that almost everything is a toll road too. So you have to pay to use the roads each time.
My vehicle is also air conditioned, but weighs 1000 tons and has 2000hp and hundreds of couches:
Seethe in jealousy, non-Europeans!
Seethe in jealousy, non-Brits!
[哈哈哈/하하하/ははは]
Still a subscription. Not quite to big oil, though.
Nope, no subscription. Check in, check out, pay as you go. https://www.sbb.ch/en/travel-information/apps/sbb-mobile/easyride.html
Pay as you go is even closer to what the post says about the big oil subscription. 😂
No, it’s really not
Yeah, but at least it doesn’t carry the same environmental cost.
That’s a lot of lanes. I’ve never been anywhere more than like, 10 wide and that’s counting both ways, and that’s in the city.
I hear if they just added one more all problems would be solved.
Looks like Houston TX to me. Horrible experience there, they are allergic to public transportation and sidewalks.
I once had to visit a client in Dallas and noticed their office was right next to a hotel, so I booked myself in there expecting to be able to just cross the relatively small side road on foot. NOPE.
Even doing it in the car was close to a half mile round trip if I followed all the rules of the road.
Linking the page for my favorite hair pulling topic on traffic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
By hyper subsidizing car road infrastructure we make it almost impossible to use anything else and competing infrastructure (trains, planes, seperated bus traffic) appears more expensive by contrast forcing more people to use cars.
Also the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) if I recall correctly.
Fascinating! Seems I have to thank the artists of my past for my supplemental progressive education.
Capitalism. That’s how that happened. They shaped the world in such a way as to sell more stuff. In this case cars.
Car-dependent development was the workaround that government officials devised to keep housing segregation in effect after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. If one needed a car to get around those new subdivisons, poor people couldn’t live there. If Black people were largely poor, and if government programs like the GI Bill were denied to Black people, well, that wasn’t a segregation law, so it wasn’t illegal, right?
Subsidizing the white middle class with government money so that they could afford to buy cars happened to work well for the capitalists, too.
(By the way, this isn’t a conspiracy theory. The people doing it weren’t shy, and left explicit, written records of their racist intent.)
They?
Everybody wants pleasure and security.
The kaijus are just the really successful ones.
This isn’t entirely the case, but the reality is actually no different. Long story short, a major reason that most of the US interstate freeways exist and have been built the way they have been is because they will stand up to moving heavy machines, like tanks. There’s long strips of straight Highway that can be used as runways.
The highway system was built so that in the event of a civil war, domestic uprising, or invasion, the military could more or less operate very adequately anywhere with a decent stretch of highway available, and some way to get there.
Until then, automobiles rarely had to travel very far each day, and couldn’t really run any faster than a few dozen miles an hour, partly because of the challenges of the terrain.
Automotive companies then took advantage of the newly built infrastructure and sold faster vehicles that could drive farther…
So blame who you want, but it was a joint effort between the civilian government, military industrial complex, and capitalistic automotive manufacturers, that drove (pun intended) us to where we are now.
I have my doubts that military considerations were anything but a ruse to help sell the nation on the cost. That claim feels a lot like an utban legend, with embellishments like the design accommodating aircraft landings. The contemporary source material from the people supporting it cited the economic benefits mostly. As well, the military voiced support for the system, but the Secretary of Defense was Charles Erwin Wilson. He had been CEO of General Motors before taking office. At his confirmation hearing, he could see no conflict of interest. It was there that he uttered that famous quote, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
The capitalist automotive companies had captured the military industrial complex, so I think maybe there’s a slight possibilty that the latter’s support for something that benefitted the former so immensely may not have been wholly genuine.
Doubt all you want, it’s a free country afterall.
Some (just some) of the information I’ve seen on this indicates that the freeways built in North America are massively over built for the use case. The amount of underlying structure and support for the roads is not necessary and just serves to add costs with no tangible benefit to automotive travel to those that drive on it.
The only good reason to be so over built is so that the roadway can be used for something that isn’t civilian traffic… Like the road being used as a landing strip, or to support tanks and other heavy equipment rolling overtop without entirely annihilating the road.
But hey, you do your own research. Come to your own conclusions. I’m not telling you anything as fact here, just relaying what I’ve heard, and what, in my opinion, is true. But that’s just like… My opinion man.
You’re missing the “privatized railways” and “trains need more grading” components.
Businesses need to ship cargo. However the private railroads road block attempts at public freight rail (which is massively more efficient) so the demand from businesses is to run truck traffic over highways which is where like 99.9% of road wear comes from.
Private railways also have no incentive to expand service (it costs a lot to properly grade for freight and they have regional monopolies. )
That’s the thing. I’ve looked into it, not super extensively honestly, but never found any project specification that included clauses or numbers about military use. Further, the infrastructure isn’t overbuilt for the purpose, which is road transport of cargo. Trucks threaten to overburden the Interstate highways, which is why we have weight limits, and weigh stations to enforce them. Also, all.of the military vehicles I’ve seen on the highway are still just vehicles, modified from civilian models; even the tanks are not so.massive that they can’t transport them on a typical flatbed trailer. The last thing that makes me doubt the military-use justification is that it’s a double-edged sword: Our military can use them.to rapidly deploy forces, but invaders could also use them just as effectively, and to rapidly advance into the heart of our cities.
Eisenhower is called the father of the Interstate Highway, and he saw the need for economic reasons. The cost of construction was the primary fight, and “Defense” got added to the title of the bill authorizing it so they could justify spending some defense funds, but that looks awfully perfunctory, being added later.
Fair enough. I’m happy to have contending viewpoints on the matter and civil discussion about it. You’ve given me a lot to think about and more research to do, and I appreciate that.
I don’t know that I’ll remember to come back and comment here when I’ve done all that, so in the event I forget, I hope you have an excellent day/week/month/year/life.
There’s more to it. While the military bought in on it, the industries were the major pushers. Many towns had tram cars or cable cars (if you’ve ever been to San Fran, you’ve probably ridden these) but were bought and dismantled up by a then illegal collusion between like GM, Firestone, and oil companies a bit over 75 years ago and the legal cases lasted another 25 years.
There is a famous antitrust case on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Unfortunately this has resulted in such a profound malinvestment in public resources that it has turned a majority of the US into giant open paved areas: dangerous to kids, prohibitive of other small traffic, causes drainage problems, sun/wind exposure, urban sprawl, housing issues, huge parking lots, etc.
What if we made two separate sections that you could add or remove? Even better, let’s add a special vehicle to the front, with a trained driver. To aid the driver; rails. Oh, more people want to join? Let’s add a hitch system to the front and back of each “car” so we can add as many as we want.
Why did my brain go to motorcycle sidecar when you said a separate section you can remove? But yeah trains are the correct solution, this is coming from someone who loves his 01 Tacoma.
Yo, not bad.
Check it; double rail… side by side connectable trains. Somehow.
Modern designs are too limited. Make a 20 foot separation between the rails, giant 4x4 train.
That was actually a thing the Germans did on a few occasions, if memory serves they had to link the tow trains for the Gustav Railway Gun. I think it’s also been done on occasion for smaller locomotives to move overloaded cars.
With all those luxuries, why not just live in this thing and avoid rent?
Very luxurious going from point A to B, not so much stationary.
Source: My back hurts
Many people do sadly
“Can I sit in the recliner at work?”
“No. You have to leave it outside so that poor people can’t have apartments there.”
Unless you’re poor, then it’s also your apartment
But don’t let us catch you using it as one, that’s illegal.
It’s my comfort box. Everyone is subject to my comfort box.
I can have the comfort box with the high end everything or the misery box that mostly functions as I’m broiled alive sitting in traffic. But we’re all stuck on the same Turnpike together. It isn’t as though I have an alternative to the twelve lane interchange.
I’m gonna go for the ok-ish comfort box that was kinda cheap and missing fancier new bits but was kinda decent when it came out just kinda old now and somehow mostly still works
We all now how
I’m happy to never see wherever the fuck that is.
Houston
Everybody wants a back yard, nobody wants buses or trains
I don’t want a backyard, I want a park within walking distance.
I don’t want an expensive hunk of steel and plastic, I want a train that picks up every ten minutes.
I know a large number of people who feel the same way. But none of them have billions of dollars to lobby my mayor or governor or President. Hell, even when we do get a bit of outright bribery to bend things our way, a single petty asshole can foul the whole project.
Busses work perfectly well for suburban neighbourhoods with back yards. With 1000m² each, you can place more than 250 lots around a bus stop, so that no one will have to walk more than 500m. With average families of four, that’s a thousand potential passengers. Not enough for a metro station, but more than enough for a bus service every 10-20 minutes to get to the next train station.
What also works well: Build a few 3 story apartment buildings, a supermarket, a few small stores, a school, a kindergarten and a pub around a train station. Build the single family homes around that infrastructure and you have the perfect place for almost everyone. Families can live in the outer area, when the kids get older they can move out into the apartments and still be around. When they start their own family they move back into the garden homes and the grandparents who get too old to work their gardens can move to the apartments. And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
🤦♂️
…no one will have to walk more than 500m.
Well I would walk 500m.
And I would walk 500 more.
My neighborhood used to have three bus lines. I think it’s down to one, and we recently put in the laziest bike lanes. (Painting a bicycle in the hard shoulder is not sufficient!)
I wouldn’t mind living in an apartment building, so long as it’s equally co-owned by the people who live in it, and by nobody who doesn’t. And that it has a green space on the property for recreation and a community garden.
I don’t want a back yard. What I want is the noise isolation and the feeling of safety and personal space. I also like having the ability to use that space for personal projects if I want to.
I have seen condos and other urban spaces that are well-built enough to provide the same benefits that I see from a back yard. But they’re very expensive.
My basic point is that people sometimes forget what they really want, and instead focus on something that has given them those benefits.
I have both (not so much on the train front unfortunately).
I used to just think of this as yeah sure things are just bigger in America, it’s a huge place with lots of people… but then I realized that the cities with ridiculous numbers of lanes like this aren’t any bigger than cities in the rest of the world. Houston (pictured) isn’t even in the Top 200 biggest world cities.
There are 29 countries in America that aren’t like this. It’s really just the USA.
The built-up parts of Canada are about as bad.
It’s sprawl. Building up costs too much via some combination of building taxes, NIMBYs, and construction overhead, so people build out instead. Building out means more and more miles of infrastructure (Roads, water, electric, natural gas, signs, gas stations, etc., etc.) per capita.
Then when the people in the sprawled-out suburbs want to visit the city centers anyway, because that’s where jobs and shopping inevitably are (People live where people live), they have to build massive roads to get in and out.
I’ve looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 using it per day. Let’s be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
Its crazy. At its widest it has 26 lanes. It amazes me that they just kept widening it, instead of thinking “We’ve added 5 lanes, we should probably find an alternative solution”.
In the city where that exists, they really isn’t much else that’s viable. Decades of bad urban planning mean that comprehensive public transportation is not cost-effective in that area. And “not cost-effective” doesn’t just mean “expensive”, it means “would cost an order of magnitude more than the city budget”. So the only real solution for them in the short term is to build the world’s most ridiculous laughingstock of a road.
Key phrase being “short term” - nobody seems to build with a 20+ year plan to improve the city in America, whereas in European cities every time I visit one I haven’t been to in a decade, I usually notice I’m reaping the benefits of major infrastructure improvements which take decades to plan and build. Short term, selfish (what will get me elected again, or what will pay me the biggest bonus) thinking, and corruption, is what keeps American cities shitty
Yep, just look at Tokyo.
people argue that japan has an easier time doing public transport because it’s a slim island that’s roughly linear from north to south, so it’s easy to serve it by one public transport line.
But the same is true for the US, where most people live either on the east coast or on the west coast. You basically have two slim, linear areas that can be served by 1 line of public transport each.
Another problem is that the US has stupidly strong private property rights. Everyone whose land is going to need to be confiscated to build the railroad tracks will try to bilk the high-speed rail authority out of every dollar they can, and because the US has a very strong civil court system which strict procedural law, it only costs a landowner a few thousand dollars to cause millions of dollars worth of legal headaches for the rail authority
isn’t that also true for highways?
It’s even worse in Canada where 50% of the population literally lives in a straight line in Ontario/Quebec
And we’ve been “studying” high speed rail in that corridor for roughly 40 years now. One of these days we’ll build it, I swear!
I have never been on a road like the one in the picture.
I’d have a nervous breakdown.
When you look at old cars, they were simple. Small, just enough power to get around. SUVs are monstrosities that shouldn’t exist.
Old car:
I mean it’s pretty long and probably not great on gas mileage, but hey, it’s dead simple.
I love the look of older vehicles. I even want a few. I just don’t want to have to drive them anywhere. I’ll be content with a few bikes and a nearby train station.
Hey found the guy that can point out the exceptions. How hard can I roll my eyes.
That’s rich coming from you.
Don’t follow, can you explain? Are you stalking me? This is the second strange message I got from you today.
I got your back, bro. I went through his history and pasted that same response to one of his random comments.
It isn’t an exception. The car pictured is still much smaller than modern US cars (I think the pictured one is a US one but not 100% sure)
It’s not smaller than modern cars. That’s a 1960 Licoln Contiental with a curb weight of 5,000–5,700 lbs (depending on the exact specs) and 227 inches long. For reference, a 2021 Cadillac Escalade has a curb weight of 5,635–5,823 lbs and a length of 211 inches.
Let me rephrase to be more precise. Cars of that size are not common anymore in the US, judging from then vs now parking lot photos. I know small cars are still being made; they’re making smaller cars than ever before these days, but that’s not an argument against there being a trend of cars becoming bigger on average over time.
My argument is that it ebbs and flows, but it’s been mostly big all the time. Sometimes, ridiculously big. They might be sedans that are shorter than a modern SUV, but most of that height is empty space. The curb weight is as bad as it ever was, and the road footprint might have been worse in the past.
To be fair you could have pointed to a specific era such as the late '70s and '80s post fuel shortage. '50s and '60s cars are notoriously inefficient solid steel death landships.
Yes I could add approximately 5653 caveats to everything I say. Let’s begin.
*
That’s some quick counting!
How about a whole parking lot? Do these look especially small to you?
Do you even live in the US and have you SEEN how fucking HUGE vehicles driven by the average person are now??? There aren’t even CARS around hardly anymore. They’re massive trucks, suvs, or crossovers. Ford doesnt sell cars in the US anymore because of this (except the mustang). You can barely buy a wagon in the US now. Vehicles are FAR bigger and heavier than they were in the early days. Your photo depicts mostly tri five chevys which are not even large cars. Now yes caddy’s have always been huge but that’s their brand.
Have you seen how big cars actually were in the past? Like look at the actual numbers of what people actually drove.
Here’s a list of most popular cars by year in the US from 1950 onward: https://www.rd.com/list/the-most-popular-car-the-year-you-were-born/
You can pick out times where there actually was a small car that was most popular. 1956 Chevy Corvette. 1961 Jag E-type. 1972 VW Beetle. It never lasts, though (and that’s even ignoring the fact that the first two there are sports cars that are specifically made small for performance reasons). To follow up what happened with each of those a year later, 1957 brings the Ford Skyline, which is gigantic. 1962 has the Lincoln Continental, which isn’t ridiculously large, but not especially small, either. 1973 is the Chevrolet Monte Carlo which is also more performance oriented, but not that small, either. 1974 brings the Impala, which is rather large for a two-door, and then 1975 is the Cadillac Sedan de Ville, which is the dictionary definition of land yacht. That was right in the middle of an oil crisis where we might expect a move towards smaller cars.
Yes, SUVs are taller and the truck market is absolutely ridiculous, and that does have an affect on pedestrian safety in itself. Popular cars aren’t particularly heavier than popular cars from decades ago, though, and they often have a smaller footprint on the road.
Yes 😭
Ok let’s begin! 🙄🙄🙄
Do you have any evidence your claim is true?
What is that question even? Do you have evidence to the contrary?
That’s not how claims work.
🙄
You could just say “no, I don’t have evidence”.
See, that’s art.
Wildly unsafe for those inside, but art doesn’t have to be practical.
More importantly: wildly unsafe for those outside
Our entire continent has been given almost wholey over to the automobile, and despite it being a wasteful, ultra expensive, and inefficient way of transporting people and goods, because of entrenched interests we cannot well improve on it with even interstate freight and passenger rail being opposed by oil companies and car companies and probably Road repair companies and everyone else.
A real popular government would rally the population to overcome those entrenched interests and make a viable Interstate freight and passenger rail, it will not get any easier in time and it has to be done.
It would be a proper use of borrowed money as it would pay for itself many times over and lower the cost of living and doing business and make the us more competitive.
Without needing automobiles we could have higher standards of living with vastly lower expenditures.
This biggest argument i see is people somehow think things like transit will remove their freedom of mobility, when in reality it vastly improves mobility, especially for those who can’t or don’t want to drive.
It blows Americans minds when they hear about how people go skiing in Switzerland, taking public transit from their front door to the foot of the ski hills.
Buts it not possible to play any sports without the dodge ram 3500 extra cab mega box extra large big horn edition.
The dodge ram commercial shows some guy driving offroad, smashing through snow, then climbing out and going skiing.
Some sucker buys the truck and spends 3 hours stuck in traffic slowly driving to the ski hill with his skis in the back.
My grandmother was trapped inside her house for years at the end of her life. All she could do was wait for people to visit her because she couldn’t drive.
When I lived in a small city in Japan, if I went out during the day, there were ancient people all over the place who had taken the bus into town.
Anybody who would say that the American way of throwing elderly people to the wolves is better… Well, anyone who says that is just an inhuman monster, aren’t they?
“Cars are freedom!” … so long as you register it with the government, insure it with a private insurance company, carry a photo ID from the government. Where a train you just pay and get on, or a bike you just ride.
Relying on the automobile has made us exceptionally vulnerable. At any time our only means of achieving an income can be removed. We spend magnitudes more money than we could otherwise and everything from building infrastructure to support so many cars everywhere, to the cost of cars and repairs, too the ability of others to take that away from us at a moment’s notice.
With designed cities we could have housing on a direct line to our business sectors on a public transit, which would free up a substantial portion of our income, while if the housing was constructed intelligently and fairly we would free up the better part of half of our costs to live.
Also remote work could Free People from the commuting nightmare in White Collar work.
