Watched a couple minutes of this but the narrator's caustic takes are a bit long winded and distracting.
The interstate system was and is one of the greatest civil engineering feats of all time. Prior to the US highway system it could take as long as 2 months to travel across the country by car. And prior to interstate system it would take at least two weeks.
It is a shame that many planners didn't anticipate that cities with interstates running through them would grow so densely around exit points and disrupt the grid or chop up the city in various "urban islands" but to call the system anything but a success is just wrong. If anything it's a victim of too much success.
I think more cities are aware of this now and you see more efforts to build insterstates at a lower level than the urban core to allow grids to more easily connect and to stop pushing so much local traffic onto the interstates themselves (as in Dallas, Boston and others).
Having just come back from Switzerland, I'm aware that street cars can be highly functional, but they work well there because the cities are quite dense, even when the population is like 50k or 200k, which in U.S. a similar city would be far more spread out.
> Having just come back from Switzerland, I'm aware that street cars can be highly functional, but they work well there because the cities are quite dense, even when the population is like 50k or 200k, which in U.S. a similar city would be far more spread out.
It's worth noting that US cities, even ones in the Western US states, were not always as spread out as they currently are: urban sprawl in the US was caused by the development of highways (and then interstates). Our cities used to have dense urban cores; we intentionally bulldozed and de-densified them to build highways.
As random examples: Denver[1], Topeka[2], Sacramento[3] (page 10). I picked these entirely randomly; Google just about any small-to-medium-sized US city and you'll find that it most likely had a streetcar network until the 1930s or 40s.
He has a bunch of videos pushing a term I think he made up called "stroads". Streets are fine (small slow local), roads are fine (big fast and not near people). Only "stroads" are bad, big and fast and yet directly touching driveways, and big cement parking lot deserts with a furniture store in the middle and you can't do anything but drive to or from.
I have no problem with his judgement of the shittiness of those things in either case, even if I'm not about to give up my garage and basement and workshop full of toys and tools and parts and materials to go live in some tiny appartment in a building with 20 other apartments and have to hire an uber every time my fart-powered electric bike isn't good enough.
I love my car(s) but this pattern of suburban development in north america is just objectively bad. It's like a sort of pathology where some legitimate initial need or pressure produced a response which has by now developed into some wildly disfigured monstrosity.
According to wikipedia, stroad was coined by a civil engineer.[1]
Also, while I can't currently find it via google, I am pretty sure that stroad had entered traffic engineers' lexicon somewhere in an engineering handbook.
Interstates to get from city to city are fine and good.
Interstates into the city that displaced black communities and created an artificial barrier to moving across the downtown area are not fine and good.
Sure, but since many cities are actively tearing down (or planning to) those interstates and replacing them with open space, housing, etc, I think it actually is true. So... :shrug:
Why not a national interstate rail system? Roads can still be used for flexible local transportation while railroads are used for mainline logistics and transportation of passengers.
Assuming you're talking about the USA: it's very big. No other country (except China) uses trains for US-size-wide passenger transport. Aircraft are more appropriate.
One driving factor in the creation of the interstate system was military - we wanted the ability to easily move troops/supplies across the US without airlift or rail. Not sure that's still a valid need (as in, I don't know - would need to ask a general).
Also, the US is huge. We do need some sort of road system to get across it. Building rail to everywhere is prohibitively expensive.
That said, we should/could have good high speed rail in the densest areas. Like expand the Acela corridor
tl;dr - DC-NYC tops the list (and include Philly and Balt). LA to SF is near the top. Chicago-DET-Toronto is up there. And on down the list.
Basically, there's no good reason (other than momentum/history) to not build out solid rail networks over parts of the US. I don't think anybody reasonably expects an LA-NYC link any time soon because flying is a better option for now.
The interstate system was and is one of the greatest civil engineering feats of all time. Prior to the US highway system it could take as long as 2 months to travel across the country by car. And prior to interstate system it would take at least two weeks.
It is a shame that many planners didn't anticipate that cities with interstates running through them would grow so densely around exit points and disrupt the grid or chop up the city in various "urban islands" but to call the system anything but a success is just wrong. If anything it's a victim of too much success.
I think more cities are aware of this now and you see more efforts to build insterstates at a lower level than the urban core to allow grids to more easily connect and to stop pushing so much local traffic onto the interstates themselves (as in Dallas, Boston and others).
Having just come back from Switzerland, I'm aware that street cars can be highly functional, but they work well there because the cities are quite dense, even when the population is like 50k or 200k, which in U.S. a similar city would be far more spread out.