It is true that decentralization was viewed as a major component of nuclear survivability, particularly in the earlier part of the cold war. This was the time period during which the FEMA (today's name) crisis relocation program was being devised, for example, and the high cost and complexity of crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent that it's probably fair to say that it was the main motivation with materiel movement as a second) served to highlight the inherent vulnerability of dense cities and keep it very much in the minds of government planners. Decentralized cities had an inherent advantage to planners in that money could be saved on crisis relocation efforts. Of course the crisis relocation program was never fully implemented, but the way of thinking was fairly influential.
The federal government had an enormous role in suburbanization of US cities in many, many ways, which is actually part of what makes it hard to address this point. Support for suburbanization was not coming just (or even primarily) from FEMA, all kinds of federal agencies had a hand. Much of the urban renewal work of the 20th century took the effective form of relocating poor people to the suburbs and replacing their inner-city housing with industrial/commercial/transport, for example the Model Cities program of the late '60s. This was in part a result of the general feeling that the inner city was where poor people lived and so improving their economic situation required getting them out of it, part of it was merely the practical issue that substantially improving a dense area is a lot more expensive than razing it and build something new there. I don't know if these programs were strongly influenced by crisis planning, they probably were at least in part, but it seems unlikely that crisis planning was a much bigger influence in federal advocacy of suburbanization than the more organic trends of white flight and urban decay that came out of a set of race and class relations, in a potent combination with some simple budget and timeline considerations.
My point is that nuclear planning was a factor, but the massive suburbanization of the postwar decades originated from many factors out of which nuclear crisis planning was only one, and I'm not convinced that it was one of the bigger ones in the end. Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists very openly advocated for suburbanization of cities and that view was influential, but at the same time so much of suburbanization was motivated by a new vision of the American dream that came out of the peculiarities of post-war economics and demographics, racism, the radical popularity of the automobile (which not only enabled low-density areas but often required the destruction of high-density areas to provide freeway access to business districts), and probably at least a few other things.
Any claim that "urban sprawl is a result of x" where X isn't a list of things is probably pretty hard to defend. A complete change in not just urban planning but people's patterns of life tends to require a confluence of factors.
I say that to say this- I didn’t move way out here to get away from some ethnic group or to some other insidious reason. I moved here because I have a large (blended) family and we wanted to own land. It’s a popular narrative to blame sprawl on racism or living above your means. I think the real reason is way more boring than that. Move away from a population center and things get cheaper. Gas is cheaper. Groceries are cheaper. Price per square foot is much cheaper. Those who are upper middle class can live well in the sprawl so of course they do. I have neighbors of every race religion and culture here. They all want the same thing- decent schools elbow room and some fresh air...
And what do you get when you have a huge number of people looking to buy brand-new houses? Urban sprawl, there's not really any way to avoid it.
The problem is this is a fundamentally unsustainable proposition. The US is hitting those problems now and it's not pretty. It's not just gridlock but problem that once things stabilize, maintaining sprawl costs more than maintaining a compact city[1]. The roads and the schools in the suburbs are often good only when they're new - once they age, the problem become visible (California is harbinger for the rest of sprawl land, this state has the older sprawl, remember). Poor services can cause an area of sprawl to become undesirable and then it's hard to recover - public transit is hard to add when distances are large but you can still wind-up poor people lacking vehicles in the hinterlands.
[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
What could that possibly be? I don't know of anything even on the horizon. Rails and steel wheels are more energy efficient but far more costly to build and maintain. Other nations use rail well by ... not having sprawl. Suburban sprawl essentially rests on the private automobile. As the gp essentially said, the draw of sprawl is a big house and a car, which can be nice 'till your whole planet is on fire and you're choking in rubble (I live in California, can you tell - But Texas will notce climate change too, if they haven't). A road is a just a flat piece of ground, it's pretty hard to find something simpler. Freeways are cheaper to build than railways. But the cost of rebuilding gets huge.
So basically, there are not solutions to these problems. We've basically hit Decline of the Roman Empire levels here. That empire took hundred of years to fall. I'm hoping things last past my lifetime.
Also kudos for not being a racist...
But you might want to take a look at history. The US government actively encouraged urban sprawl with low-cost loans and redlining starting with Roosevelt and the New Deal.
"Beginning in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (HOLC) included in the FHA Underwriting Handbook “residential security maps” used to help the government decide which neighborhoods would make secure investments and which should be off-limits for issuing mortgages[...] Green areas were were explicitly homogenous, lacking “a single foreigner or Negro.”
SOURCES:
- https://www.thoughtco.com/redlining-definition-4157858
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/how-redlining-kept-black-ame...
I've heard that before, but the DOT claims evacuation was a minor factor. From https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/interstatemyths.cfm#ques...
President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United States was attacked by an atomic bomb.
President Eisenhower’s support was based largely on civilian needs—support for economic development, improved highway safety, and congestion relief, as well as reduction of motor vehicle-related lawsuits. He understood the military value of the Interstate System, as well as its use in evacuations, but they were only part of the reason for his support.
Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System.
The primary justifications for the Interstate System were civilian in nature. In the midst of the Cold War, the Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and Congress added the words “and Defense” to its official name in 1956 (“National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”). However, the program was so popular for its civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even if defense had not been a factor.
So I sort of suspect that evacuation was a bigger factor than the government admits, but that's purely speculative. Just like suburbanization there are definitely a lot of reasons the interstates happened.
>It is hereby declared to be essential to the national interest to provide for the early completion of the "National System of Interstate Highways", as authorized and designated in accordance with section 7 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. It is the intent of the Congress that the Interstate System be completed as nearly as practicable over a thirteen-year period and that the entire System in all the States be brought to simultaneous completion. Because of its primary importance to the national defense, the name of such system is hereby changed to the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways". Such National System of Interstate and Defense Highways is hereinafter in this Act referred to as the "Interstate System".
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-70/pdf/STATUTE-7...
There were also non-government actors pushing this - banks redlining the suburbs in order to achieve soft segregation in areas without formal Jim Crow laws on the books, for example.
The legacy of this is the most segregated city in the US, Milwaukee, is in the north, and a major cause was redlining.
Any way you slice it, nuclear deterrence, missile defense, containment theory and more generally any initiative motivated by the fear of imminent nuclear holocaust and the Red Menace were huge windfalls for industrial corporations from the end of WWII onward.
It was an effective way to siphon huge amounts of money from the postwar federal coffers for corporations that had made bank during the war, but were now left to justify why the government should continue shoveling money at them.
Now, this may not be the case for Houston's interchanges in particular, but it was certainly the case for many such endeavors going forward for decades. See also: SDI ("Star Wars"). And of course, there were other factors like suburbanization/white flight and the ascendant automobile industry. But all of these potential motivators were (are?) very entangled and hard to fully extricate from one another.
When people think about beautiful cities, they would mention Venice or Paris or Rome. All these cities were built for 'foot traffic' which still works perfectly fine nowadays. In those cities, the elderly and children do have an environment to move around by themselves and socialize freely.
When it comes to planning cities for people, it is worth checking out Prof. Jan Gehl: https://youtu.be/9_x5Hor2MP8
Rome is all but working perfectly fine, with commuter traffic locked almost daily by the tiniest fender bender happening on the highway around it
Venice is likewise a mess, situation was so bas they built an highway to go around the existing highway that corrected it to the nearby areas, and the lack of easy mobility in the city center is fuelling a severe living cost inflation
Rome could have invested in public transport instead of building highways. No one would be stuck in traffic. Instead, they used public space for cars. The old parts of the city though which are walkable work perfectly fine.
Venice does have great ferry service and traffic in the city is almost non-existent due to lack of cars.
there's zero chance mass transit can accommodate people's needs, even if you somehow solve the shopping issue with local markets and fixed item prices, the job<>house graph will always look like a fractal set of overlapping stars.
cars is one of the most important social equalizer of this and last century. it allows people from basically all social status to move themselves, their family and their belongings at any time in full autonomy, enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places.
private cars win over public transit because it's a better product. the only way for public transit to compete is to mandate laws to make cars comparatively a worse product, which is fundamentally anticompetitive - once public transit become monopolistic, once the company owns a tract, they can abuse their position deciding pricing and timetables.
even in traffic, private cars offer a better experience: people are in their own space, under a roof from start to finish, with their preferred temperature and away from both obnoxious or influenced people.
forcing mass transit trough legislation will surely have some short term benefits, but also:
- more class divide between the richs, that will always be able to afford a car, and the poors who won't
- massive gentrification of well connected areas, while the poors get pushed out to where service is of less quality
- dependency of the poors to expensive third party services on any occasion they need to move themselves or their goods across a non serviced destination. rentals is not an option: rentals need a credit card, and guess who don't own one?
- dependency on public transit times. have an unusual work shift or need to visit parents? get prepared to wait in the open under the cold or rain. need to get your child out of school in a down hour because he's suddenly ill? too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours.
of course there's situation where mass transit gets convenient, like large cities where a significant percentage of the population shares the same source/destination points, at which point people will use it naturally on their own.
opposing private transit is going to destroy an important achievement of modern society, the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is. market, after all, need customer flexibility not to be captured. pollution is something to be solved with more efficient cars and better technology all around.
it'd be like discovering tomorrow that soap pollutes: some will want to force everyone to smell, some will create a better soap.
I think it's quite odd we nowadays think cars are the only possible form of transportation. We are not born with 4 wheels underneath our butt. The alternative is to build structures build for foot or bicycle traffic. Everything within 10k can easily be reached by either bicycle or foot traffic. By building infrastructure for cars, you create distances which are for cars only. They would otherwise not exist.
> enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places
That's only possible due to the external costs of cars not being accounted for. Burning dinosaurs and destruction of nature is nowhere to be found in cars. If you would price cars accordingly, we would start planning differently.
> once public transit become monopolistic
We already have the same monopolistic issue just right now with cars as the only means of transportation. Without cars, you're not able to move in large parts of the U.S. This excludes about 50%+ of the U.S. population (children < 16yo, people who cannot afford cars or cannot drive themselves due to health reasons).
> private cars win over public transit because it's a better product
Why are cars a better product? Commute and travel time are a huge economical factor destroying time. They take up loads of space and require infrastructure and maintenance paid by society.
> dependency on public transit times.
That's a political issue which could be solved. Most of the money spent nowadays is spent on parking spots and car roads. If you would spend the same amount on public transport, you could probably run a train every 5 minutes.
> too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours. That's also how we design our roads. They need to accomodate peak traffic at peak hours. Otherwise they're an unused piece of asphalt.
> the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is
Again, not taking into account external costs. Road traffic kills ~ 1.2M people each year insuring even more which do have a massive impact on the health system.
> pollution is something to be solved
By solving pollution but still focusing on urban sprawl and keeping traffic as-is, we will do the wrong thing better. That's an achievement but not solving the issue.
Feel free to watch the interview mentioned before. It does clarify some of the points I just mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_x5Hor2MP8
[edit: formatting]
a) keep everything as is. Leave up to 80% of public space to cars (as in L.A. for example), destroy all social interactions which could otherwise happen in those places, increase commute time due to cities designed around long distances and destroy our environment.
b) buy a new bicycle and a good rain coat, use our feet, expand public transport, improve our wellbeing by doing some exercise, reduce obesity and diabetes, socialize in public space again and save tons of tax payer's money. Whilst saving the life of 1.2m people.
Which one sounds better to you?
A is a straw man. There’s no innovation there. We need to redesign roads so that they are invisible and uncongestible. We either have to do personal air travel, which we don’t have the power density for yet or underground which is looking more promising. All people moving cars need to be electric and self driving. A car should be like a universal elevator, just get in and push a button. That’s the best option, 0 time dedicated to piloting your body through space and you’re able to live anywhere and work anywhere.
there's a load of people, especially in big cities, that commute further than feasible with bicycle.
and no, people will not want to live within biking range from heavy industry.
Soviet-style housing planning is a good middle ground. There, most flats can enjoy silence (you only hear cars that belong to your neighbors and no passer-bys) and still the districts are planned for walkability and public transport.
Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.
We should not build our apts for cars and align to them. If cars are loud and noisy and destroy our social life, we should focus on solving the car problem and not trying to build around cars.
Not the case in most of Europe IMO. The apartment buildings were built along very narrow streets to either fit inside perimeter of city walls or (later) because real estate was expensive. Due to narrowness of roads, these apartments are not very well lit and are depressing (you can't see the sky through the window, only the building across the street). Here in Poland, it basically wasn't until central urban planning by communists until we had cities which are livable, car or no car. This is reflected in real estate pries, where apartments in the old, historic buildings can be cheaper (despite often being right in the city centers) than in the (much denser) soviet conglomerates.
> Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.
Even cars at 30 km/h make plenty of noise (when accelerating to that speed). I'm not sure what you mean by "social aspects" of streets?
Not to forget: streets were used that way until ~80 years ago. We just can't remember them any different any more.
I still see some of that in my dense city with car traffic. Obviously, this now happens on the sidewalk and not on the street itself. The major difference is kids not playing on the more major streets.
well the '70s blocks in Poland do have quite some shared greenery, at least the southern part were I've been extensively, but I saw them also up north, even in the outskirts of 'special case' cities that have had their historical centers preserved or restored like Gdansk [1] or Torun [2] - that's what planner can do to encourages a local and social aspect to the local neighbors
but still it doesn't solve working places interconnection in a way that makes walking nor public transit satisfactory.
1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Danzica,+Polonia/@54.34153...
2 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Toru%C5%84,+Polonia/@53.02...
interestingly even factual, sourced post like this were victims to trolling; I though there were protections to anti social behaviour in place, but alas, here we are.
It isn't change per-se that is usually the problem these days, but the rate of change, and sometimes the rate of change of the rate of change.
Legitimate complaints (e.g. this will mess up traffic) are fine. "Neighborhood feel" complaints (e.g. this building is too tall, it doesn't fit the neighborhood character) should be met with "thanks for your feedback, but that's not a good enough reason".
Of course if there is widespread consensus among voters on how they want their city to be developed, fine. But right now, the current system allows a handful of very vocal opponents to development to derail new housing.
That's why doing housing/zoning policy at a much higher level, ideally statewide, would be much better. Japan has that (for their equivalent of states) and you don't see these distortionary effects. Then you'd see the development happening where it really truly does make the most sense, and as a side effect gentrification would be lessened because not as much new construction would be happening in farther out marginal neighborhoods because the demand would be satisfied closer in. Incidentally this also has positive benefits in lower commute times and less environmental impact.
In that case, vulnerable populations in gentrifying neighborhoods were no more likely to leave than equivalent populations in non-gentrifying neighborhoods.
For me, the obvious mechanism is that, well, it's true that people who leave may often blame gentrification / increased costs for their departure. But on the other side of it, without gentrification people may still have left, but for different reasons: to get away from crime, to go somewhere with more amenities. It's possible that these two tendencies somewhat balance each other out.
The question is which of these is worse for the people living in the area.
http://otworld.weebly.com/robert-a-heinlein-the-last-days-of...
I do think it is an effective strategy. Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tokyo and kyoto were spared for different reasons but they were spared. No sense in wiping out every single city. For the US, a nuclear attack would probably be against symbolic populated cities like new york, san francisco or chicago, ideally the US would surrender after that point and if there is no surrender, military targets would make more sense (hawaii,san diego,san antonio,anapolis,etc...).
The idea is, if you have a small number of targets to defend you can defend them better. Just like with infosec, you want to reduce attack surface so you minimize exposed services or inputs.
That's what MIRVs are for.
The strategy, if it existed at all and it isn't just a post-hoc explaination, was probably designed around the time the strategic bomber was the primary, and only, method of delivery of atomic bombs.
I did not know about MIRVs, this comment thread has been educational.
This was pretty much the strategy towards the end of the war. More than 60 Japanese cities were firebombed, civilian casualties probably exceeded those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even if there was an effect, I’d be very surprised if the signal wasn’t wiped out first by railroads and then by cars.
The goal was to get Japan to surrender, and Emperor was considering it. His generals were fanatically opposed, and if the Emperor were to be killed by the bomb, they would fight to the last man, woman and child.
US administration could then pick it's poison - leave Japan as is, suffer and inflict massive casualties from a ground invasion, or commit nuclear holocaust.
Playing around on Nukemap, 5-6 800kt warheads are enough to kill the majority of people in Houston and give third-degree burns to the rest. A Russian RS-28 Sarmat ICBM should be able to carry 10-15.
Or, with a single 20 megaton warhead, it would kill 1 300 000 people immediately and injure 2 000 000 people.
More than just a theory. When we were clearing out my grandparents’ house we found a pamphlet (I think it was Civil Defence, but it could have been a different agency) which was basically the paper equivalent of a government-issued FAQ about nuclear war. From my own 2020 knowledge of what they knew then, it was remarkably good stuff, written for a general audience. I remember reading it and thinking that the mockery we have for ‘Duck & Cover’ really isn’t fair, at least with respect to this pamphlet: it didn’t claim that a desk would protect at ground zero, but did (correctly) note that the harmful effects of a bomb decrease over distance. I think it was from late-40s to early-50s.
I recall that one of its points was that tightly-packed cities had been susceptible to the conventional bombing campaigns of the Second World War and would be even more susceptible to nuclear bombs, and consequently it made sense to spread cities out.
> if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.
Well, it would be superlinear: if you imagine a hex grid of blast radii, the centre radius is one, the inner ring is six (cumulative seven); the next ring is is twelve (cumulative 19); the next ring is 24 (cumulative 43), and so on. 1:7, 7:19, 19:43 — it adds up!
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=29.7500709&...
The US Army hasn't had strategic nuclear weapons in a very long time, if ever. On the other hand, theater-level weapons like the Pershing (10s (mostly) to 100s of kt) do a pretty fair approximation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "missile command"; Army Missile Command mostly has problems, not solutions. (They build things.) (Standard Missile 3! (https://images.wisegeek.com/billboard-ad-against-blue-sky.jp...)
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Yeah you'd have a good chance of having more survivors due to the nature of nuclear weapons, but I don't see that influencing choices like wanting to have a suburban home and etc.
This sounds like some armchair theory.
The USSRs guidance computers were quite bad, and reentry would have scattered multiple payloads without those.
Having talked to people in the programs from before the iron curtain fell they got around this problem by building larger bombs so the radius of destruction was larger than the radius of uncertainty around a target, to the point that dead-reckoning was viable.
The maximum bomb size the USSR designed on top of Huston: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=29.7589&l...
In short, were the USSR serious about dealing with urban sprawl it wouldn't have taken much effort to build weapons that could vaporize Huston sized cities.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=29.7589&lng...
In fact big bombs were an early trend for two reasons. One was that the delivery system was expected to be bombers dropping one or a very few bombs with mediocre accuracy and so you wanted maximum destruction from each delivery. The other was that they were worried bombers wouldn't be able to get directly over some targets due to air defences, so you'd drop the bomb short of the target and use the massive area of effect to cover the remaining distance for you.
What, you people dont believe me? You seriously think we sprawl to protect ourselves from nukes? Like the enemy isnt just going to launch more nukes, or cluster nukes?
If anything, the sprawl would just make the nuclear strike worse, because there's a greater chance you'll survive and have to live through revelation. Here's how you protect yourself if a nuke is on the way: you duck your head down, and kiss your ass goodbye.
No it's just plain ole racist, classist, corrupt government trying to use fear of Russians to drive oblivious americans who dont pay attention, to buy more cars from their rich motor company friends.
That government is mostly in the past now, but the sprawl is a monument to their philosophy, which was racist, classist and corrupt.
That's the first time I've heard this theory.
Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.
Not to mention that fallout, breakdown of infrastructure, disease and hunger that followed a strike would affect the entire city in any case.