> American highway system is arguably one of the best in the world

No, I'd say the German Autobahn system is the best in the world, followed by France (expensive) then UK, before USA.

USA is good because they tend to go to central cities, where European motorways deliver to a ring road. You can commute to work on a US motorway, but between cities they aren't special.

> USA is good because they tend to go to central cities

This is great if your only metric to measure is "could I possibly get there in a car."

This is terrible for pretty much every other factor, including

- neighborhood desirability: highways are terrible neighbors to live next to due to all the air pollution, noise pollution, visual impacts, and traffic impacts

- transport capacity: roads become congested far faster than other modes of transportation. Another issue is that pre-automobile neighborhoods are generally designed to distribute traffic across a grid, not concentrate it at highway exits and offramps.

- public health: the prioritization of the highway has caused a lot of asthma in high-density, low-income areas. The absolute primacy of the car and the creation of car-centric environments have also decimated active modes like walking and biking, or walking to transit, and this is probably a big factor in why Americans are less healthy than other developed countries' citizens.

- equity: highways today mostly run through low land value areas, because they were the cheapest to build and the citizens living there generally had the least political power. This was also intentional; many cities had the policy where bulldozing and splitting existing poor or minority neighborhoods to build highways was an "improvement" to remove "urban blight". As such, the impacts of highways in the US tend to fall disproportionately on the poor and minorities.

So you agree that it's "one of the best in the world"?

The US highway system is extremely impressive given the low population density.

What is the difference between a bypass highway and a ring road?

OP probably means that very few highway goes through cities in Europe, whereas you have big highway junctions in cities. (Eg Boston Big Dig.)

That makes sense. Thank you!

Lobbying is another problem. For example, the Koch brothers have been involved in lobbying against (and placing public advertisements against) local public transportation improvements in a number of cities because it will hurt their oil industry companies and investments.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

1. The highways are such good competition that they make the already-dubious capital and operating cost picture of passenger rail even worse.

2. The US has the best freight and logistics rail system in the world. Existing rail right of way favors freight uses at the expense of passenger trains, which makes the passenger trains even less palatable. This is a feedback loop, where in turn rail ridership is low and gets even less resource share.

It’s because we already have highways and our car culture is hard to change. Highways were also originally built for national defense with the economic benefits as a secondary force. Defense projects traditionally get tons of funding in the US.

Convincing a generation that witnessed two world wars to back a massive defense project wasn’t difficult.

>Highways were also originally built for national defense with the economic benefits as a secondary force.

That's the standard story. From what I've read though, Eisenhower wanted to build the Interstate Highway System for a number of reasons of which defense was only one--and possibly a fairly minor one. But he knew that playing up the defense angle was a good strategy to get the plan passed.

Roads were built in the ancient Rome mainly for troops, horses, and chariots to travel with ease for battles and defense. Similar story.

Can you elaborate on the national defense? How is the highway useful with defending the country? Defending from who?

I can only think of highways as secondary runways for planes but I'm unsure as to how much that helps your case.

Wars are won with logistics not guns. Getting troops and supplies across the country would be key to defending it from an invasion.

The interstate highway system was built in part for military purposes and partly designed by the Army:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

The only reason that I-95, for instance, extends as far as it does, is because of the Strategic Air Command bomber base in Limestone, ME. A lot of the other more nonsensical routings of the interstate system make sense when you take into consideration where strategic bases were located in the 50s and 60s.

Evacuating cities in the event of an atomic attack was also cited as a reason though that obviously seems questionable as well. As I wrote in another comment, the defense justification was probably mostly just a way to get the help get the act passed.

Katrina and Harvey showed that at best, evacuating cities with highways is an extremely long, drawn out process that will most likely leave the most poor and destitute (who don't have cars) totally stranded.

Yes. Basically you can't rapidly evacuate cities. Maybe highways help a bit but, if you can barely handle commuter traffic on a given workday, you're certainly not going to completely and quickly evacuate a city if there's some threat--and that's before you even get to the issue of people who don't own cars.

So the idea that highways would be useful if there were an imminent threat of nuclear attack looks pretty silly.

It depends on how quickly and how far you need people to evacuate.

Lower Manhattan on 9/11 was evacuated mostly by foot and sea, with over half a million evacuated by boat alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_response_following_Se...

They don't completely solve the problem, but it would be much harder to evacuate the cities without the highway system in place.

Rail has upper capacity in the ranges of 60-90k passengers per hour, whereas car lanes are in the range of 2-3K passengers per hour in free flowing conditions. Granted that 60-90K figure doesn't involve people trying to shove furniture, pets etc. into their vehicles, but you could move quite a lot more with rail.

Rail is also used as part of the evacuation, but most people will want their car so they can carry enough supplies to last for the evacuation period. In fact one of the most egregious aspects of the Katrina disaster was New Orleans explicitly told Amtrak their trains were unnecessary [1].

>"We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09...

It provide ways for military vehicles to cross the country easily and long stretches of highway could be used as aircraft runways.

War puts enormous strain on a country's ability to move things around the country.

Our collective experience with public transportation on rail is AmTrak, which is demonstrably bad compared to other country's rail systems.

Or lack of experience. Want to go from Denver to Albuquerque? The shortest route goes through Illinois. I'd love to take Amtrak -- there's even a station in my city -- but anywhere I want to go, it's faster and cheaper to fly.

Even in the northeast corridor, it is usually slower and more expensive to Amtrak than it is to drive, let alone fly.