Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Mass transit is how you create large population centers. A big reason small towns collapse stems from the degradation of their incredibly expensive per-mile asphalt system collapsing under the weight of heavy trucks and eighteen wheelers. The cost of maintaining the road infrastructure cripples the municipal budget.
Commercial Rail takes that weight off the back of the local community. And busing allows for denser housing closer to the center of town, which saves money on everything from municipal plumbing to trash pickup to public schooling to health care delivery.
Historically, small towns have relied on centrally located city services to both fuel local commerce and keep cost of living down. The death of a small town's city center is typically the prelude to the collapse of the township on the whole. That's a fact people who actually live in these towns are keenly aware of. But it is routinely overlooked by big city suburbanites who think everyone in the family owning a $40k personal vehicle is normal and taking the bus or the bicycle into town is something rural communities are totally unfamiliar with.
I'm not a big city suburbanite nor can I afford a $40,000 car.
I'm not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads, though I'm sure its a problem for some.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force. The state maintains the major roads here and many smaller roads are private, dirt, maintained by an HOA, etc. Though yes, some areas have some potholes, though not nearly as bad as those in large cities I visit like Memphis or Louisville.
Also small cities, within the town center are perfectly walkable and small enough that we don't really need a bus. But to get to that walkable area, you need a car.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I'm all for it.
However,
Some of use don't want large population centers or we'd live in the city and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
A 2015 study by the Cornell Local Roads Program found that the annual cost of managing a mile of road in a handful of New York towns and cities varied from $4,429 to $10,440. Meanwhile, a 2016 analysis of Washington State’s county roads came up with a range of $1,528 to $23,651.
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Telling townships to maintain large, far flung asphalt road networks is demanding the impossible.
In biggest municipalities that's true. But then the largest time sink for police is... traffic enforcement.
Much of the rail infrastructure already exists, although cities have been cannibalizing it to expand the highway capacity for decades. Show me a small town in America that's older than 50 years and I'll show you the rail line that runs through it.
But getting permission to actually use it? That's not a money problem. It's a politics problem.
Come to think of it, the town in from had a train, as did most of the neighboring towns.
That is until they ripped all of them up to make bike paths. Florida Rails to Trails I think it was called. And they did a half-assed job in a lot of places, just ripping up the rails and then not really providing or maintaining the "trail" part.
Texas has a similar program, although the trails through Houston are at least decent enough to bike on.
But I'm more thinking of the plan for the Houston Blue Line, which was defunded under Tom DeLay back in 1994. A commercial line running from Katy to downtown was literally just sitting there unused, and Shelia Jackson Lee had an earmark to turn it into a passenger rail system. It passed through half a dozen smaller communities west of the city and would have drastically reduced congestion into the bigger shopping districts.
After the federal funds were stripped, the city tried to go at it alone, under a succession of Dem mayors. But just as Bill White was getting ready to sign off on the overhaul, Governor Rick Perry claimed the track as part of a state-backed toll road extension. The entire line was torn out practically overnight, to be transformed into the Westpark Tollway at enormous state and federal expense over the next five years. It became one of the most expensive-per-mile toll roads in the country when it was finished - around $15 to $20 (surge pricing!) travel less than five miles and still managed to lose money for the private operator, who had to be bailed out by the state a decade later.
Now both the Westpark toll road and the even bigger, more expensive I-10 "managed lanes" have private commercial bus programs to bring people into downtown from the suburbs. That's the closest we're allowed to have to mass transit in my city. But if you ask why, you'll get an earful about how its unfair to rural folks for anyone else to use a vehicle that holds more than six people. You'll even get this explanation while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic behind a six car pile-up at the 59/610 interchange.
Yeah that does sound frustrating. I mean, traffic generally is. I also hate the idea of toll roads.
My issues, I guess at the end of the day, is that I:
Currently need my car. Short of living off the land or mooching off of others, I need it to survive.
I don't see a clear path forward, which doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for one but if Texas is any example it seems like the whole fuck cars movement is just people yelling into the void.
2.a. That path forward cannot exclude rural peoples or presume that everyone can or should move to a city. Nor should the opposite be the default. 2.b. People need to be able to have productive conversations without name calling (thank you for that by the way I'm learning a lot from you). The fuck cars side of this seems to paint a picture in which the solution is cut and dry and so obvious and anyone who doesn't see it or disagrees is an idiot or intentionally dense. But it's a superfuckingcomplex issue with many nuances and variables ranging from local zoning to county, state, and federal law.
I don't yet know what the path forward is but anytime I try to say what it isn't or speak against obvious propaganda people try to paint me as a liar, shill, idiot, redneck etc. (obv I'm not talking about this one thread lol). And its like, I'm not here because I want something different than the fuck cars crowd. I just disagree with how people seem to think a car-less world (which I dont personally want) or vastly altered infrastructure (I do want and this certainly includes less cars, jiet not none) would/cloud actually work.
Anyway if ive been difficult I apologize. I'm autistic and already have someone in another comment calling me an imbicile because I apparently took someone's argument too literally lol.
I haven't read all the links you sent yet but I'm sure ill be bored tomorrow and I'll check them out.
It's a captive society. People aren't simply yelling into the void, they're yelling into a wall of money. Money owned by a cartel of people who won't let people out of their cars.
These suburban landscapes aren't natural. They aren't sustainable. People can't just live 20 miles from one another and expect infrastructure to just exist in the gaps indefinitely.
The costs are simply too immense.
The rural communities are drying up because of these huge gulfs. People are being forced into the cities by economic necessity. And the only way to reverse this trend is to rebuild the old small town centers. It's can't just be Amazon warehouses shuttling cardboard boxes to people in the ass end of Idaho because that's where land is cheapest.
Cheers to that. Although that's going to be a harder one than the infrastructure bit.
It echoes a certain amount of car industry propaganda. There's plenty of truth in it, but that doesn't matter when the words are used to divert billions of infrastructure dollars to an extra four lanes on a ten lane highway.
Nobody in rural West Texas is going to see their lives improve once we're done wiggling the stretch of I-45 that runs through Houston.
No problem. You came around and this has been a good conversation to have. Glad to speak with you.
I acknowledge that for the continental us suburbs exist and can be solved, however is there a better method for hostile areas like Alaska, where planes and roads are the current methods of transit. I would imagine that more rail service between Fairbanks and ancorage would help, however there are tens of thousands of people spread across thousands of square miles.
Whittier, Alaska relies primarily on elevators.