Re:Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't Califo...
by bobthepanda on Sunday October 20, 2019 @02:52PM
(#21306216)
> 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.
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.