The idea that the father of the U.S. Interstate System — Dwight D. Eisenhower — never intended for his legacy to run through cities themselves always struck me as the kind of thing that was too good to check. Now, thanks to this article on urban freeways, I’m now aware of the actual documentary evidence, from April 8, 1960:
[The President] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way… [He] was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored.
The implication is that the urban highways sold the program to reluctant urban Congressmen, concerned they weren’t getting return on their tax dollars in some warped version of subarea equity. If so, it was one of the most disastrous failures at representing constituents in the 20th Century.
To say these highways should never have been built is not to say they should necessarily all be torn out; entire cities have sprung from them. Still, it’s one of the underrated tragedies in American history that what we feared Soviet bombs would do to our cities, we in a small way did ourselves.
If you read the book “Big Roads,” which is a history of the highway system in America, you’ll see that it’s not clear whether Eisenhower ever knew what he wanted with Interstate highways. He was actually very hands off in the process (which had been going for quite some time when he took office) and had a much smaller role in the whole thing than has been attributed to him.
What he said at the outset of the process and what he said midway through it were not necessarily the same thing either. I suggest reading the above-referenced book if you are interested in this topic. It’s a good read and really gives a nice nuanced history of how the thing developed, for good and for ill.
If you have a kindle or other ereader, it’s available for ebook check-out from the library.
Read that and Richard White’s “Railroaded” and you’ll have a pretty good overview of how interstate transportation evolved in the US over the last 150 years.
Is 20-20 hindsight worth anything?
Ike realized that mega freeways cutting our cities into slices of pie wasn’t a very bright idea. He also warned us repeatedly over allowing the military-industrial complex from driving policy to no avail. You see where that got us.
We were sold the idea by politicians and high priced engineering firms that Commuter Rail and a Metro system was the way to go.
Read the hype on CR from 1994 in the run-up to the election.
http://www.globaltelematics.com/pitf/Sounder%20Rail-Bus%20Cost%20Comparison%20Reso%20R1994-24.pdf
Can anyone name a rail segment built around here that replaced our buses that actually saves money or runs faster?
These are the same visionaries that gave us the train from Everett that cost ten times what a bus ride cost. Lakewood? (giggle, giggle)
Link, as built and planned? (you betcha, just wait another 20 years and you’ll see)
I suspect Mr. Dukes kids will be posting by then on how ST politicians and the ‘Cash Trough Crowd’ let our public transit system slip into receivership.
Today, Ranier Valley->downtown is faster by train than by the #7 bus. And Ranier Valley->airport is way faster, as pre-link you would have to backtrack at least as far as SODO to catch the 194. And in just 4 years (not 20), a train ride from downtown to the U-district will be quite a bit faster than the buses we have today.
Try ST’s trip planner for how lightning fast Link is.
From Rainier/Henderson they suggest the #7 bus taking from 32-36 min.
From Rainier/McCleallan they suggest the #7 taking 15 minutes or Link taking 17 minutes. I’m sure you can cherry-pick certain pairs to make you’re point, but the trip to the airport is longer than the bus was.
As for U-link, yeah, a two billion tunnel with one stop, going direct to Westlake had better be faster. Cheaper, we’ll see on that one, if you amortized the cost and plug in the debt.
The airport bus was a few minutes faster because it did what U Link will do to an extreme, not stop for a very long stretch. For that few minutes saved it forces all of southeast Seattle to spend half an hour on a bus in the wrong direction just to get to it.
From Rainier/McCleallan they suggest the #7 taking 15 minutes.
Um, yeah. That’s happened maybe once. Ever. Probably at 1:45 in the morning.
Always amazing to see someone who demands Link service for Federal Way — service whose utility and demand have already been demonstrated to be pathetic be even the most optimistic estimates, service whose sole reason for being on the table is political (i.e. not valid) — trying to undermine attempts at urban service that will actually work.
When you undermine and compromise and short-shrift something, it turns out less than ideal. Shocking revelation!
Hindsight has shown urban highways to have been disastrous. That’s true pretty much everywhere they exist.
Urban transit, on the other hand, is vital to every urban area around the world where it has been allowed to thrive.
@Mike:
First, scheduled running times for the #7 and #106 buses are not worth the paper they’re printed on, except maybe late at night. I rode it once or twice before Link was built and its glacial travel speed was downright pathetic. Link’s posted 27 minutes travel time between these two points, however, is actually quite reliable. In fact, the only real opportunity for delay is getting stuck behind a 71/72/73 in the tunnel.
In addition to improving travel times between downtown and the U-district, U-Link will also provide a desperately needed boost to capacity. If you’ve ever ridden a 71/72/73, pretty much any time of day except the middle of the night, those buses are packed. I can recall two times when a 60-foot articulated 71/72/73 bus actually drove right past me because it was jammed full of standees and there was literally no room to let me on – one of these times was about 8:00 on a weekday evening, the other was a Sunday afternoon. If crowds like that don’t justify investment in rail, I don’t know what does.
MIke: The trip from Rainier Valley to the airport is most definitely not longer now than it was on the 194 — you would have had to backtrack to SODO.
“a two billion tunnel with one stop”
I was skimming and thought you started talking about the Viaduct tunnel. While I am on the topic, from your tone, it sounds like you aren’t so keen on big ticket public transit expenditure projects; just curious what you think about the viaduct tunnel and the 520 expansion projects.
I do agree with MIke on one point, though – that the north Sounder line is a ridiculous waste of money. I am particularly disappointed that even when Link extends all the way to Lynnwood, ST’s own long-range plans call for continuing to operate the north Sounder line on top of Link.
If we really want a one-seat train ride from downtown to Everett, we should consider using the money currently spent on the north Sounder towards an extension of Link to Everett. At least a Link extension to Everett, I (as someone who lives in Seattle) might actually be able to use if I were to travel to Everett someday. The north Sounder line, I will never be able to use because the schedules make it almost impossible to ride unless you spend the night out there.
I’m of the exact opposite opinion: kill Link north of Northgate and use the money to build a state-owned rail line that’s immune to mudslides. Lease freight trackage to BNSF.
“Build a state-owned rail line that’s immune to mudslides”.
That’s exactly what we’re doing – it’s called Link.
But that does no good for Amtrak.
When will Sounder run every ten minutes even with a brand-new track? When will Sounder ever serve Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace and the east side of Edmonds where the bulk of south Snohomish population live?
Mike … your viewpoint seems perhaps uniquely Seattle-centric. Here in NYC, and our greater metropolitan area, no bus can compete with our subways and commuter rail systems. They may not be perfect, but they are rarely affected by weather, and never by the uncertainty of traffic. They run with very high reliability and, as such, they are an indispensable lifeblood of the region.
I suspect MIke either (1) has never actually been outside Seattle and experienced a real passenger rail system, or (2) is on crack.
Seriously. Buses have their place in the transport ecosystem, but there are also huge swathes of it that are far better served by rail, which (with dedicated ROW) has hugely greater capacity, is more reliable, faster, more comfortable, and more efficient.
Miles, I’m not on crack or any other illegal drug (nice try at changing the subject – FAIL), and have ridden urban transit systems in Tokyo, Paris, London, NY, ATL, CHI, SFO and many other cities.
I’m really a rail supporter, but not at the expense of the underlying bus system that for Seattle, will have to feed the beast.
Just look around you. PT is shrinking, not growing. CT isn’t far behind. MT is bankrupt and going further in the hole every year.
Meanwhile, ST is operating trainsets that squander money like they’re playing Monopoly.
My complaint has, and always will be against this gold plated monster we’re spending whole careers building, that doesn’t deliver on most of the hype used to sell it.
Concern troll.
@MIke
Actually I misread your message—I didn’t notice the “around here” in “Can anyone name a rail segment built around here that replaced our buses that actually saves money or runs faster?” [without those two words, it’s an obviously ludicrous question.]
Still, in defense of Seattle, the sweet spot for (good) rail transport is typically in denser, larger cities, and that’s the direction Seattle is going. They’re thinking of how to grow the transit system in a way that scales.
It’s not easy—they’re hamstrung by many decades of poor planning and short-sighted subsidies for sprawl, screwed-up U.S. practice, customs, and regulations, short-sighted and selfish attacks by NIMBYs and the right-wing.
But if they don’t at least try, the best they can given the many obstacles, they future will be much more miserable….
I was traveling to Washington D.C. last week and discovered that they too have redundant bus routes that, when mixed with their wonderful rail system, don’t make a whole lot of sense. Behold the 5A line, created specifically for those who consider it absolutely essential to have a one-seat ride from Dullas Airport to downtown, without transfers. (http://www.wmata.com/bus/timetables/dc/05a.pdf).
Around the airport, the bus route is reasonable, going express from the airport to a suburban park-and-ride lot. But instead of stopping at the closest rail station, West Falls Church, it keeps on going along the very congested interstate 66, right alongside the Orange Line trains, with the next opportunity to get off the bus another rail station just west of the Patomic River, followed by one final stop in downtown D.C.
When I took this bus out of the airport at 8:00 on a weekday morning, it moved quickly at first, until it reached the section where it was running parallel to the Orange Line. At that point, we started seeing congestion, but there were no accidents so we still moved along at 30-60 mph along the highway. Then, we spent a full 15 minutes or so in a giant traffic traffic jam along the exit ramp to Rosslyn, our next stop. I never got to find out if the exit ramp into downtown D.C. was going to be the same thing because I actually got off the bus and transferred to the Orange Line, even though it turned a 2-seat ride into a 3-seat ride (their trains run so frequently a transfer between them is barely noticeable).
The real irony here is a private bus company saw the stupidity of this routing and created their own shuttle route which runs nonstop from Dullas Airport to the West Falls Church station all day every 30 minutes, the same frequency as the 5A line, which goes all the way into downtown. And even though the routing of the shuttle route is far more efficient than the 5A, it actually costs more to ride ($10 vs. $6) because the inefficient route is taxpayer subsidized and the efficient route isn’t. And because the efficient route is also faster, enough people are willing to ride it for the bus to turn a profit, even if it’s more expensive to ride than the public bus.
(The primary reason I even rode the 5A myself vs. paid the extra $4 for the other bus was that the 5A happened to come first, so when wait time was taken into account, the two routes were probably a wash, time-wise).
Maybe, someday the 5A route will finally go away, perhaps after they finish with the Silver Line. But in the meantime, when I think of our inefficient bus network that competes with, rather than feeds the rail system, it’s comforting to know that at least, we’re not the only ones.
“I’m really a rail supporter, but not at the expense of the underlying bus system that for Seattle, will have to feed the beast. Just look around you. PT is shrinking, not growing. CT isn’t far behind. MT is bankrupt and going further in the hole every year.”
Except none of the money going to build rail has come from those agencies. Metro’s had what, two tax hikes since Sound Move? Yet they’re still squandering huge sums of money on unproductive bus routes and not providing the improved urban service that they promised. Don’t blame Sound Transit and people’s desire for investment in rail transit for Metro’s crappy management and exorbitant operating costs.
The outskirts of PT are shrinking. Where nobody has ever proposed a rail line (except JB), and their transit-hostility makes it even more certain that they won’t be getting one this generation. Meanwhile, Tacoma does want to pay more for better transit, and is considering various streetcar (“Tacoma Link”) lines, and is still interested in extending Central Link to Tacoma. So you can’t talk about the county as if it’s all monolithic: different parts are more eager for transit, and specifically for rail transit, than other parts.
Eric,
That Dulles example does seem a little silly of WMATA*, but it’s apples:oranges to what I was talking about.
Unlike Link, the Washington Metro provides some pretty decent urban coverage. As such, city buses in DC proper work to complement the subway services, rather than to overlay or compete with them.
Link is giving such a short shrift to urban coverage — hitting such a tiny slice of the city to begin with, and with stop spacing that is obscenely hostile to the way people use and move around cities — that 95% of our current urban bus routes will continue to exist. There’s the massive money waste. Instead of moving most of our urban trips onto rail (with its negligible marginal costs), we’ll be running lots and lots of expensive buses on top of and parallel to the trains. In perpetuity.
*(WMATA clearly thinks, perhaps correctly, that for long-haul trips with luggage, people will prefer the simplicity of a one-seat to downtown, even at the cost of frequency and sitting in traffic. Given that the traffic is only there a few hours per day, they’ve at least got a case.
The correct analogue would be our I-5 express buses, which even in the HOV lanes can sometimes get traffic-logged. Nevertheless, it has been calculated that few would benefit from having their long-hauls diverted to Link.
This exposes the limited utility of, and the folly of focusing on, “suburban spindle” rail service at the expense of manifestly more efficient urban coverage.)
[Okay, I’m sure I closed that tag.]
Eric,
That Dulles example does seem a little silly of WMATA*, but it’s apples:oranges to what I was talking about.
Unlike Link, the Washington Metro provides some pretty decent urban coverage. As such, city buses in DC proper work to complement the subway services, rather than to overlay or compete with them.
Link is giving such a short shrift to urban coverage — hitting such a tiny slice of the city to begin with, and with stop spacing that is obscenely hostile to the way people use and move around cities — that 95% of our current urban bus routes will continue to exist. There’s the massive money waste. Instead of moving most of our urban trips onto rail (with its negligible marginal costs), we’ll be running lots and lots of expensive buses on top of and parallel to the trains. In perpetuity.
*(WMATA clearly thinks, perhaps correctly, that for long-haul trips with luggage, people will prefer the simplicity of a one-seat to downtown, even at the cost of frequency and sitting in traffic. Given that the traffic is only there a few hours per day, they’ve at least got a case.
The correct analogue would be our I-5 express buses, which even in the HOV lanes can sometimes get traffic-logged. Nevertheless, it has been calculated that few would benefit from having their long-hauls diverted to Link.
This exposes the limited utility of, and the folly of focusing on, “suburban spindle” rail service at the expense of manifestly more efficient urban coverage.)
Still grinding that axe, I see.
Martin’s post raises a very important question.
Why is it OK to lie, cheat and steal to get your project approved, then squeal like a stuck pig when people want to hold you accountable?
If Dwight D. could come back from the dead, and see what our military/industrial complex has done to this country he would cry in shame, maybe even wish we’d lost the war. The road warriors would get an equal tongue lashing for their lavish flyovers built to save a few seconds at the expense of communities very identity.
Now, fast forward to today. How can anyone justify a rail line that continues to cost 10 times what the comparable bus line costs?
Please d.p., tell me how you justify it? (BTW, for the record, Link replacing buses from FWTC to Seattle is also a huge waste of time and money)
Zed, until I see costs per rider under comparable bus (Ops & Cap), I’ll keep my ax sharp.
I rather enjoyed this line from Multimodal Man’s link about the Interstate Highway system:
“One of the biggest obstacles to the Clay Committee’s plan was Sen. Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, chairman of the Committee on Finance that would have to consider the financing mechanisms for the program. Byrd never wavered in his opposition to bond financing for the grand plan. He was a pay-as-you-go man, who was described by biographer Alden Hatch as having “an almost pathological abhorrence for borrowing that went beyond reason to the realm of deep emotion.”
The justification is quite simple: getting around this city is a gigantic pain in the ass, and without real mass transit, it’s never going to be anything but.
You may claim that buses can suffice, but will be wrong. And not just because Metro and/or the city have shown their willingness to half-ass BRT… We are a city whose surface routes are mindfields of fatal bottlenecks; surface ROW to fix our problems does not exist.
…the underlying bus system that for Seattle, will have to feed the beast.
Build a mass transit system correctly, and we could have half the city-bus system we do. And that would save a lot of money. The problem with our Link plans is that the coverage is too scant, requiring so much wasteful corridor overlay, so much downtown redundancy, so many buses criss-crossing even our densest urban zones that wouldn’t be needed if the mass transit were designed to actually serve the masses.
Crowing about the need for tentacles to Lynnwood and Federal Way or Bear Creek of fucking Issaquah makes this worse, not because rail money is waste, but because building rail and then still running hundreds of closely spaced urban routes is ultra-waste.
[minefields]
I think there is a really fascinating parallel to be drawn between Eisenhower and mid 20th century freeway construction, and today’s construction of light rail, particularly within the Seattle area. Neither mode, freeways or light rail, are good or bad per se, but only work in the proper context. For freeways the optimal location is as a means of connecting to disparate urban areas, such as Seattle and Spokane. For light rail the optimal location is in and between dense or densifying neighborhoods such as Capitol Hill, First Hill, the U-district or downtown. In both cases while politicians sell the project on mode of transport, all that really matters is the land use.
In fact I tend to agree with MIke that light rail isn’t worth it without the corresponding land use, although I disagree that North Link fails this criterion. And considering how much neighborhoods like South Lake Union have grown in the 15 years or so since Sound Move was passed, how can it not be considered an embarrassment that locations were light rail has been invested in have not seen significant land use changes? Combine this with the inclusion of stations that are not surrounded by a strong urban grid (the MLK corridor and Tukwila) and it really defies the point of building light rail in the first place. Hypothetical system maps may sell, but good light rail is all in the details, just like a good interstate highway system is in the details.
Thank you Alex, for putting into words how I feel about light rail.
Too many folks around Seattle are in love with the mode, not the outcome.
I’ve somehow been branded as a light rail hater, but that’s just not the case. What I hate is building light rail to places like Federal Way, then cancelling all the 30 minute rides to downtown Seattle costing about five bucks a head, for rides to Seattle that cost ten and take 55 minutes.
Think outcome, think business model, think subsidy levels, then and only then think mode.
Hypothetical system maps may sell, but…
I might not agree with you on all points, but this one needs to be bronzed and mounted on every transit planner/promoter’s desk.
If I never hear another politician rave about the light rail that will “one day reach all the way to [insert remote auto-friendly outpost]”, it will be too soon.
Sounder from Kent to Seattle is *much* faster than a bus from Kent to Seattle.
I don’t know if this meets your criteria because I don’t know if Sounder actually replaced buses from Kent to Seattle (perhaps there weren’t any buses from Kent to Seattle).
It does, and I hadn’t thought about that condition. Sounder relieved current MT 158,159,162 to downtown, although they continue to run between trains and on either side of when Sounder doesn’t. It’s much faster than the bus, and I think more expensive, but would have to look at the numbers for each.
ST has paid a kings ransom to BNSF for the trackage rights. Adding two more trains is going to cost $136M lump sum just for the time slots. Sounder averages 379 boardings per trip, so over 40 years, that about $3,068 per trip per day, or about $8 bucks a rider just for access to the system, before any operating expenses are figured in.
This thread is about dead, but Sounder from Kent is 26 min. to King.ST. Add another 10 to get to say Union, so 36 min. for most riders.
MT trips take from 37-43 min from Kent Stn to 4th/Union.
Sounder is a better trip if you work around King St, and mostly a wash if you work central downtown. Most MT riders come off the east hill, so add in another 5-10 min transfer if your going to catch the train. Then there is no difference.
Hmm, ST paid BNSF $258M to lease trackage rights over a 35 mile corridor. The Port of Seattle paid $81.4 million to purchase the 41 mile Eastside rail corridor. What’s unfortunate is that the Port has no intention of ever using the ROW to move people or goods except by bike but rather to sell it to King County or local municipalities for road extensions (Redmond) and utility easements (Cascade Water Alliance).
Thanks, Martin. Would recommend to everybody a book called “American Road”, by Peter Davies, which recounts Eisenhower’s participation in the convoy of a dozen or so military trucks across the United States, to check condition of our roads.
Evidently the US military wasn’t very happy about the performance of our railroads in supplying the recent one-front conflict with Germany, and worried our ability to withstand an attack on both coasts at once.
The convoy barely made it. They wouldn’t have gotten through at all if they hadn’t taken along an enormous caterpillar artillery tractor, which dragged just about every truck a major part of the way.
Comment about present condition of our own cities partly as result of the resulting program right on point. It wasn’t either the Luftwaffe or the Soviet missile command that left Detroit like it is now.
But behind it all, isn’t worldwide experience that an unhealthy proliferation of automobiles generally occurs the first time it’s possible for most people anywhere to have one?
Since completion of bridge to Denmark, Skane provice in southern Sweden is becoming the suburbs of Copenhagen. While it may not be Lynnwood yet, similarities are disheartening.
Mark Dublin
“Since completion of bridge to Denmark, Skane provice in southern Sweden is becoming the suburbs of Copenhagen. While it may not be Lynnwood yet, similarities are disheartening.”
Except that the bridge has an electric railway as a part of its construction and operates at a higher-speed (either 100 or 110 mph, I forget) than anything we see in the USA save for clunky high-priced Acela.
The bridge charges a toll that is equivalent to the ferries it replaced (Dragør-Limhamn, Tuborbg-Landskrona) or supplements (Helsingør-Hälsingborg). Thus the vehicular traffic across it is light. Skåne may be growing, and many people are commuting both from Denmark to jobs in Sweden and from cheaper housing in Sweden to jobs in Denmark, but this is being done by train and not so much private motor vehicle.
You’re right- comparison between Lynnwood and Skane not even close. But was a little surprised to see amount of car traffic that was there- hadn’t seen northern Europe since early 1960’s, so only natural there were some changes.
No offense meant.
Mark Dublin
None taken!
Were the Swedes driving on the left still when you were there in 1960’s?
Also, we must remember that much of Western Europe was still rationing supplies until the mid-1950’s so car ownership does not begin to rise above 1 or 2 in 10 until the mid-1960’s.
I’ll add a supposedly true story to the mix. A mother and young-adult son drove from Cleveland to Los Angeles in the early 1930’s. They encountered no asphalt roads west of Chicago, save for within the cities they passed. Due to lack of available, up to date maps, in some cities along the way they would hire a man (it was the Depression) on the eastern edge of the city and have him guide them through the city to the western limits/western end of the local streetcar system, where upon the man was paid for his services and given streetcar fare to get back where he came from.
Because people organize around transportation, I wonder what it would be like without highways, probably even more sprawl along the highway lines?
If STB has taught us nothing else it’s that NIMBYISM is bad. Therefore, for us to complain about a freeway being built through our city is being a NIMBY.
“Excuse me, Sam, but not wanting a freeway in our backyard is not being a NIMBY!”
Um, excuse ME, but that is EXACTLY the definition of a NIMBY! So either being a NIMBY is a bad thing, or it’s not. Which is it?
Obvious troll
is obviousposts obvious reply to his own obviousness.Opposing projects with demonstrable benefits on the basis of irrational fears and contorted logic makes you a NIMBY.
Opposing projects of a sort that has consistently proven to cause disproportionate harm for little benefit makes you a rational party to urban planning.
What world do you live in where every issue is so black and white?
Besides not wanting freeways to cut through urban areas, Eisenhower initially preferred the system to be tolled. The analysis by highway planners concluded that too much of the network could not be funded successfully that way. Does urban fuel consumption subsidize the interstate network? I don’t know the answer but it might interesting to know
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/96summer/p96su10.cfm
Much of this history is described in the Big Roads book I mentioned above. I think this book also does a nice job of capturing the beginnings of car travel and just how appealing this was for people. The adoption rates are staggering.
If your goal is to encourage people to use cars less, then I think it’s useful to really spend the time trying to understand the psychology that makes the car so appealing to so many people. I found that this book really helped me to understand that more clearly.
“Does urban fuel consumption subsidize the interstate network? I don’t know the answer but it might interesting to know”
Hell yes. So does rural local-road fuel consumption.
When Eisenhower saw the German autobahns during and after World war II, he wanted the interstate system to be modeled on them. However, they went into a totally different different direction, destroying the urban landscape in a similar fashion that the WWII bombers did to the German cities.
You have to realize that while the feds were imagining these long cross-country freeways that would provide reliable high-speed routes to link distant cities and ports, urban planners of the day were already dreaming of one-mile freeway grids. So when the federal funding became available, all the “shovel ready” projects were urban freeways that planners had already been thinking about, but didn’t have a funding source.
This is how I-5 through downtown was built. It was one of the first sections of official interstate highway funded. WSDOT had previously drawn up plans for a freeway from the newly annexed northern Seattle suburbs into downtown, to be funded by tolls at the Ship Canal Bridge. However, the plan never came to fruition, and was filed away briefly. When federal highway money became available for the first time, WSDOT dusted off the plans, made some minor adjustments to allow it to continue south out of downtown rather than ending in a half-dozen downtown exit-only lanes, and submitted them.
The feds were happy that Washington had such a thorough plan on short notice, and approved the funding.
If WSDOT hadn’t dug up that failed toll-road proposal, I-5 probably would have been built in what’s now the 99 corridor, instead of being built parallel to it a stones throw away. And then the DBT would make a ton more sense.
Interesting historical fact there. Now, who were these INSANE planners who wanted one-mile freeway grids in cities, an insane concept which has no rational basis?
Why, the City of Seattle, with their envisioned “1985 expressway network”. A version of the plan from 1961 shows 4 different N/S freeways through the city and 7 E/W freeways. Some state DOT plans from the same era show an additional Lake Washington bridge from Sand Point to Kirkland, which would have been tied into the city’s planned E/W freeway roughly where 50th is.
Public opposition to the Thomson (N/S in the 23rd/MLK/Rainier corridors) and Bay (E/W via Mercer/Broad) expressways, not to mention the unlidded I-90 trench carved through the CD, managed to get construction delayed over and over again. In ’72, the city put the Thomson up for a public referendum and it was rejected by a landslide. The 1985 freeway network was never seriously brought up again after that. However, eastsiders continued to chatter about I-605 (then planned to run just 2 miles east of 405, rather than the distant Snoqualmie/Monroe/Everett route that’s tossed about nowadays) and the Kirkland-Sand Point floating bridge for a bit longer before deciding they were bad ideas.
This is the point I try to convey to people. American highways were never intended to carry “urban commuters”. They were intended as long-distance cross-country travel like European highways.
Political pressure has forced highway alignments to cut through the city. We don’t like it, highway engineers don’t like it, but to politicians, it’s a good way of saying “we got something accomplished”.
Apparently, I-5 was supposed to go around Seattle until politics kicked in…
And I’ll restate my position. Every mode of transport has its place, including cars. There are things that cars can do better than public transport, like low-volume long-distance travel. Unfortunately, we as a country are making our cars do what it’s not designed to do: Urban commuting.
The Trans-Canada Highway is a good example of what Ike wanted. Drive on it into Calgary and it turns into a large street.
See also Northbound BC99 after it passes YVR.
That’s very standard in Europe as well. Highways don’t simply stop right at a city. It goes around. If it does go “to” a city, it transitions into a limited-access large arterial before it reaches the city. This reduces the amount of traffic being dumped at the city center.
Again, the problem with the U.S. is that we’ve turned highways into short-distance express arterials, which was not its original intent.
The problem with linear highways and urban radial highways is they ignore the 2-dimensional nature of car travel and try to make cars into trains.
Under the highway system, all cars linearly “get switched” onto the main line and then get one behind the other — like the coupled cars of a train — and head off to the same centralized location.
So, of course there are “traffic jams” — but only in the way that trains must wait for each other to move (like trains heading into the Penn Station tunnel in New York, or on occasion, the Sounder) and get stuck waiting for one another.
I was traveling to Denver today, and from the window of my Southwest 737, it occurred to me — nature builds cul de sacs, not highways. Nature is fractal in nature, when it needs to traverse an area it does it most efficiently — with branching structure.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-9Frb9ifutrA/T1w6PkId7-I/AAAAAAAAAk4/KLiEjjbweDc/s640/IMG_20120310_130001.jpg
So, too, the best way to use cars is in a branching, 2-dimensional style.
Gridded streets, and linear highways heading to a single centrally dense location — belong to the outdated, 1-dimensional technology of rail.
Hmmm, most incoherent strawman ever?
Have you been drinking?
The “roads” of a leaf.
http://fractalenlightenment.com/wp//srv/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/intricate-design-of-a-leaf.jpg
What could be more non-linear than a grid? How is that not diffuse and 2D?
And look at your leaf, after all that branching out towards the edge, they all flow into arterials, and from there into freeways. Which is exactly what happens in suburban/exurban hell.
Mr Bailo doesn’t recognize the advantages of a grid. A grid is the best compromise for allowing everybody to go everywhere in the shortest possible distance. Of course a direct diagonal road would be even shorter, but we can’t have roads for all the queen-moves and knight-moves on a chessboard, or the whole city would be entirely asphalt. If you’re in a car and encounter traffic, a grid allows you to switch to a parallel street with lower traffic. But because each person has a different origin/destination, they naturally choose different parallel streets anyway, thus making congestion less than it would have been. Cul-de-sac systems inevitably have only one main road in and out of the system, and these roads get huge traffic concentrations that don’t occur in gridded cities, with cars lined up for multiple blocks. I see traffic queues in Issaquah and Medina and places that don’t seem to have any equivalent in Seattle even with the latter’s larger population.
Grids are the lowest level of 2-dimensiol travel so they at least take advantage of cars.
However, the trouble starts when you want everyone going to the same place at the same time.
A grid of asynchronous uniform origins, travelers and destinations, could be good (but not as good as a b-tree under the same circumstances).
Diagonal roads create a famous paradox whose name I forget: adding them wrecks traffic flow and creates slower travel for everyone.
A grid, or something very close to a grid, is in fact the most efficient layout for diffuse car travel. (I think a triangular grid would probably work, but nobody’s tried it; a loops-and-spokes design is almost as good as a grid).
When you’ve got more concentrated traffic, you don’t want cars, you want trains.
In a leaf, there is a single source of nutrients, which within the leaf is the stem. There’s a similar pattern in the human body with veins and arteries, as the single source of oxygenated blood (and sink for de-oxygenated blood) is the heart. There is a branching arrangement in all of these. Look at how blood travels through the system. From the heart, to an organ that does something with it or to it, then back to the heart. All trips go through the center. A blood cell coming from the stomach, bound for the foot, will travel through the heart first. This is the epitome of a radial system. It requires massive infrastructure in the center — huge arteries and veins, and the heart, a pretty large organ that must never fail if the whole organism is to survive.
The public Internet is this way as well, and it requires massive central routers. On the other hand, mesh networks allow shorter, less congested paths between random pairs of nodes. The mesh is the epitome of a multi-dimensional technology.
I like meshes.
The heart is more like the generator in the electric grid…it maintains baseload…or pressure.
Each cell in the leaf is capable of photosynthesis, yet needs raw materials…so it is a producer-consumer economy.
The Internet is actually designed on a peer-to-peer mesh basis. The degree to which it is not implemented that way is a matter of money, mostly.
The Web, on the other hand, ends up being a ‘scale-free system’ with a strong central point, but this is due to the natural of social organization. The central point can easily vanish without breaking the system, mind you, and new central points can form quickly.
I get it now. Bailo wants flying cars like the Jetsons.