Not a gun but nuclear missiles: https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-cause...

It was done for a very rational reason: making country more immune to a nuclear attack, especially the retaliation to its own nuclear attack (i.e. a nuclear attack that is coming in convenient time of day and week because you chose the time). It works perfectly to that purpose: it is whole lot better to keep all relevant population in separate houses with basements, with little combustible material around, than in multimillion cities with no way out of them.

If U.S. launched its missiles while all these people just came home from jobs say at 11pm ET/8pm PT, and people in the Soviet Union were on the way or at their factory jobs during Moscow morning on Siberia mid-day, it would be a slaughter for the Soviet Union and an easy win for the U.S.

Have a source for any of that?

Sounds like a completely made-up justification after the fact.

Surely someone would have raised the point that the soviet union could just launch it's missiles in the middle of the work day.

Also, Moscow is tremendously sprawled out.

Ah, I just did Google on it, and lo and behold:

"... While it is true that various factors contributed to phenomenal growth of the suburbs between 1945 and 1960, historians have thus far paid little attention to policymakers' fears of atomic attack as a significant factor in population dispersal. ..."

The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence K. Tobin, Pages 1-32 | Published online: 06 Sep 2010

I work in tech/finance. I am old enough to remember that, after the 9/11 attack in 2001, banks were required to set up their datacenter/DR sites at least 50 miles away from their main offices to avoid a complete wipe-out in case of nuke attack.

I'm going to recount this in person someday and get the "he's a nutter" response.

To me the simpler theory is that the US has been quite wealthy since World War 2 and has lots and lots of space.

Which doesn't mean that building sprawling subdivisions is a great idea, but space is a pretty easy thing to sell.

Those things enable sprawl, but they don't force it.

Moscow is also tremendously dense. It's sprawled out because it has so many people in it, but the vast majority of those people are packed into apartment buildings. The same goes for all other major urban centers. A typical Russian (or rather, ex-Soviet) cityscape looks like this, and can go for miles:

http://images.e-flux-systems.com/2014_04_Bric-III-Yugo-Zapad...

Now imagine an airburst nuclear explosion over this, just low enough to maximize the blast wave.

There's a reason why Soviets heavily invested into protecting the populace from such attacks - the entire Moscow Metro system doubles as a nuclear bomb shelter, complete with blast doors.

Federal Highways in the US are designed to increase national security. The best example is certain bridges are in certain places so that their destruction would cut off the easy path for mobilized enemy armor. They're designed to be easily blown up on purpose.

You got any credible sources on that? It sounds like one of those urban legends that people like to repeat. The Eisenhower interstate system was built in a post-nuclear world, and in a post-nuclear world it's hard to imagine there ever being a mainland invasion of the United States. The bombs would be flying before that, and there wouldn't be anything left worth invading (on any side in the conflict). Being able to utterly destroy the other nation and its military forces within minutes by launching thousands of ICBMs is a much more credible plan of war than blowing up some random bridges on your own turf, and indeed that is the logical course of action that we did go down.

I don't know about the bridges specifically, but that the interstate system had an explicit national security purpose is not just well-documented, it's literally right there in the name of the law that created it: National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.

My issue with the bridge thing is that it's easy enough to blow up bridges, especially as you're retreating from the territory they're in, regardless of their location or construction. It could cost billions of extra construction dollars to unnecessarily site a bridge in anything but its obvious ideal location (e.g. the shortest possible span).

My understanding was that it was created to mobilize the military and transport resources across the continent, not to make it easy to cut off enemy routes.

But likewise, I have no references either.

The military purpose of the interstate is moving friendly troops around (logistics).

Now this is a lot more true, and the military value of having good transportation within the boundaries of your own land has been known since at least Roman times, and likely much farther back.

It doesn't explain the bridge blowing up thing, however.

> The best example is certain bridges are in certain places

And you cannot utter their names or locations because?

I had never considered this and something else about it makes perfect sense to me.

It also explains the "white flight" of the time. What we now call the "inner city" was allowed to remain black and brown with the expectation that the country would be alright if they were incinerated while the more -valuable- people had been relocated to the suburbs.

The Soviets would be able to get their retaliatory body count while eliminating people that the US didn't really value in the first place.

There was a serious attempt to do that in the 1950s, although it didn't have great impact. It is, however, why IBM corporate headquarters moved from Manhattan to Armonk, NY.

'easy win' = the people in the area die more slowly rather than in the initial blast? Apart from the now-radioactive work centers (that are the wealth of your country), take out your city centers and industry, and you also take out your transportation network. Hello, famine.

Seems like Japan didn't get that memo having been bombed twice.

Ah, that's a good point. Still, it seems the design pattern has outlasted the attitude that created it.

It's probably not even a decision so much as a probable consequence of having a much smaller population and opening of new frontiers to settle over the course of the country's history, ending up today with about half the population spread across about the same total area, and not uniformly. What has been our decision is to respect individual and local preferences (NIMBYism) and to ignore certain infrastructure improvements.

Given that sprawl is not a new phenomenon but obesity is I don't see how you can claim this is responsible for making us fat.

Sprawl IS a new phenomenon, though. We didn't see the kind of suburban sprawl that we see today until after WW2, when cars became THE way to get around. It became more and more dominant and entrenched as the interstate highway system developed.

Remember, we're talking about relative density within a metro area, not how close each metro area is to the others. If you look at cities that were more or less fully developed prior to WW2, like Boston, you find that they're more compact, as opposed to, say, LA or Phoenix.

That said, I don't think it's the only thing making us fat. But I do think it's one contributing factor.

True, but even in Boston they can't get public transportation and infrastructure right. Boston is almost certainly one of the most vibrant economic hubs in America and one of the most compact cities, but the subway absolutely sucks, is completely outdated, and can't adequately service proximal cities like Somerville. The city is also desperately in need of further tunneling and infrastructure expansion to service the Cambridge / Somerville area as well as the Sea Port but I can't see that ever happening. It's taken us over five years to fix a single small bridge with two lanes in each direction...

When I read about proposed public transit projects in Boston that were never built, most of them had actually been _court mandated_ by the Big Dig mitigation lawsuits, but they still didn't get completed. Very mysterious.

To be fair about the 'single small bridge', it seems like smaller projects suffer proportionately larger delays due to being considered low priority, ridiculously lax work scheduling, etc. Although the financial scales are completely different, it takes my city (Toronto) approximately the same time to build a subway extension as to renovate the bike trail that runs near my house.

This single small bridge, the Longfellow Bridge, is a crucial artery connecting Boston with its surrounding cities and towns across the river. I should have emphasized in my initial comment that it is a high priority project.

The patterns of the LA basins development was set by the Pacific Electric Railway, in the 20's and 30's - the freeways if you look almost all parallel former PE lines.

How can we better quantify the costs? That's where, I think, many people have a blind spot.

Don't have an authoritative answer for you, but I thought this chart was pretty great; it shows the profit/loss for the local government (so, taxes vs spending) for different neighborhoods for a city in Lousiana: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...