Wait, author contrasts speed of development in China with a criticism of urban renewal in America without even addressing property rights in China? Those ultra modern subways and apartments of Chengdu didn't happen without many families being displaced.
Not to defend urban renewal, but if it had focused on railways instead of highways, I wonder if we'd be as negative today. For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't.
If by “divided cities” you’re referring to the physical disruption of highway construction, the same effect happened with railroads. That’s where the expression, “the wrong side of the tracks” comes from.
Also, the expression “getting railroaded” was coined by farmers to refer to the low prices they were getting paid for their produce by the railroads, who had established themselves as a monopsony by dominating freight. The construction of highways led to competition from trucks, which took away the ability of railroads to dictate low prices to farmers.
But setting aside old idioms, American cities were already shaped by the construction of railroads in the 19th century. They were certainly reshaped by the interstate highways but that was always going to be more disruptive than any sort of growth or improvement to the railroad network because it was a newer mode of infrastructure.
>> Wait, author contrasts speed of development in China with a criticism of urban renewal in America without even addressing property rights in China? Those ultra modern subways and apartments of Chengdu didn't happen without many families being displaced
Why are there "nail houses" (see https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...) in China but not the US? In almost all of those examples, a similar property owner in the US would have been forced to give up their property under imminent domain.
If it had focused on railways instead of highways we wouldn't see it as that negative, because rail lines already existed and widening that would have little impact.
And rail is incredibly more efficient, you need very little space to transport a gigantic amount of people.
This is especially true for interchanges, highway interchanges are freaking gigantic. Railway interchanges are cooperatively tiny.
For railway you wouldn't need nearly as much removal, and a railway is far, far easier to cross then a highway. You can start with at grade crossings early on and then overtime add grade separation. Grade separation is much cheaper for a railway.
Or you can build the whole railway above or below grade quite reasonably.
This rail line here can beat most giant US urban highways, Zürich Switzerland: https://ibb.co/sv8tzYK
With cut and cover, you can pretty cheaply build a railway and then build new building above, where the same people who live there before can live.
> For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't.
So by that logic it good to build highways, as long as the government also makes sure that everybody has a car?
If everybody can use the least space and energy efficient method to get around, surely we have great solution.
> And rail is incredibly more efficient, you need very little space to transport a gigantic amount of people.
I'd also like to note that overall capacity is sensitive to how big each train is and how fast it moves etc.
There are certain lingering, er, unserious yet overhyped proposals out there for systems using many low-capacity pods, but because you need some sort of safe separation between them it tanks the capacity. (Unless you run them in an unsafe way that will eventually kill thousands of people in compound pile-ups.)
The vast majority of people in the US do not live in places that are at all comparable to Berlin, or NYC for that matter.
> Shopping should be local,
Which means that you're limited to what's popular enough in your local area. And, it usually leads to small stores, which are inherently less efficient and thus more expensive.
> The US model of consolidating all schools into superschools and the move them deep into the subburbs surounded by parking lots is literally the worst.
Suburbs have schools because suburbs have lots of kids. FWIW, there is a tendency for folks to move from cities to suburbs when they have kids.
That said, city kids go to city schools. Yes, there is some "city schools are so horrible that we'll let some city kids go elsewhere" but it's [1] in the noise and [2] caused by crappy city schools/govts, not urban design.
Crappy city govts cause lots of problems, not just crappy schools, but if those govts could be easily fixed, it would have happened. (FWIW, almost all of those crappy city govts have been super-majority Democrat for decades.)
> Sightseeing, how else would you go sightseeing if not with the train. I dont get it. Would any place you want to go to be just full of parking lots?
No.
You're assuming that every place you go sightseeing has lots of people. That might be true in Europe, but it's not true in the US.
> The vast majority of people in the US do not live in places that are at all comparable to Berlin, or NYC for that matter.
I was illustrating that trains can stop in multiple places.
And this is true in lower density places too. For example here in Switzerland you have mountains, and trains go along the valley.
There are plenty of good examples of train in lower density areas. And they use many of the same principles. I used to live next to a Unisco World Heritage site that has a train threw it and the train stopped at most villages many that only have a few 1000 people.
> Which means that you're limited to what's popular enough in your local area. And, it usually leads to small stores, which are inherently less efficient and thus more expensive.
Yeah because US supermarkets are famous for their wide selection of very diverse products from all over the world. Its not like what those stores are actually full of are like 500 different breakfast cereals from the same 2 companies.
Small stores being less efficient is only true if you only look at the store itself. If you look at the overall system they are more efficient. The lower prices some of these super stores offer are because they just externalize to costs to local infrastructure and local government.
The reality is taking in more people from a large amounts of subburbs isn't going to radically derisive the product portfolio.
The reality is 95%+ of your daily needs can easily be served from a reasonably sized local market. Here those kinds of small stores have their own cheese, meat, fish and fresh bread section. I rather go to such a store here then these superstores that I have been to in the US.
> Suburbs have schools because suburbs have lots of kids. FWIW, there is a tendency for folks to move from cities to suburbs when they have kids.
I'm not against school in the subburbs. My point was, and this is a historical fact. School got massively bigger and less local. You can have many smaller schools in the subburbs as well. But because of 'efficiency' things were consolidated into these mega schools. Meaning the avg travel distance to schools went up a huge amount, meaning far fewer kids could walk or cycle.
And because of that it was also incredibly dangerous for kids to do that so it basically forced everybody to take the car.
Its a complete desaster in terms of everything from efficiency to health. And it has not actually made providing education cheaper or better.
Cities aren't load, cars are loud. It being loud is literally an urban design issue.
> [2] caused by crappy city schools/govts
They are crappy partly because of the general attitude towards city and how transportation funding and school financing works in the US. Again that is an urban design issue.
> Crappy city govts cause lots of problems, not just crappy schools, but if those govts could be easily fixed, it would have happened.
What a great attitude to have. Society can never ever improve. If it could improve it would have already improved. We are all doomed. The West is going to shit. Balblabla.
There are lots of places in the US where things are improving as well.
> No.
> You're assuming that every place you go sightseeing has lots of people. That might be true in Europe, but it's not true in the US.
You simply can't deny that lots of places that are famous for sightseeing have lots of cars and lots of parking. Sure not every place has it, but plenty do. And guess what, its the places that actually have the most people going to.
I'm sure you can go to some place in Alaska that is beautiful, but that that not where most people actually go on vacation. And its not where most ultra individualistic US car users drive their cars too.
Where people actually drive too, is almost always a well prepared place connected to a highway with lots of parking provided.
Its a simple fact that lots of beautiful places that we currently reach with trains or bus would be much, much worse if there was no public transport to it.
No assuming you have a transportation system that actually makes sense. Trains have these things, called 'stops' and then different people get in or out depending on what journy they are on.
The train stations should be connected by walking, biking, trams (basically trains), subways (also trains) and buses. And car dropoff too. Maybe some parking.
Hirarchy, that how you create an efficent system from anywhere to anywhere. Fast intercity trains, regional trains, S-Bahn, Trams and so on.
It works great an I assure you not everybody works in the same place, and somehow trains are still very well used.
Today on my day off into the mountains Im gone take an trolly bus, then an electric regional train and then a disel bus into the mointains. With lots of stuff I have to carry. Its perfectly fine.
At anytime I can check an app, tell it where I want to go and I almost certainly have reasonable connection within the next 15 min.
So maybe instead of snark, you could actually learn something about tansportation engineering.
If you want to see what single rail corridor can do in a city, check out Münich S-Bahn for example. And then do the math on how large a highway would have to be.
> Trains have these things, called 'stops' and then different people get in or out depending on what journy they are on.
Yes, I’m aware of this. And if you have enough population density, which most of Europe does, you can have frequent train service because enough people will have overlapping trips at the same time that they can share a rail line.
The advantage of a highway network is that a single vehicle can simply take the fastest route from point to point all by itself even if relatively few people are traveling that route. Germany is about the same land area as Montana or New Mexico. Those states have populations of about 1 and 2 million, respectively. Germany has 84 million. Texas has twice the land area of Germany and a population of 30 million. So yeah, if you’re going just about anywhere in Germany there are probably enough people going the same way at about the same time to make a train a reasonable solution. That’s not going to be true in the United States. And even Germany has the Autobahn, which was decades ahead of the American highway network in sophistication.
> At anytime I can check an app, tell it where I want to go and I almost certainly have reasonable connection within the next 15 min.
I live within a 15 minute drive of just about everywhere I need to go on a regular basis. Why would I wait that long for the train when I could just be there already?
> If you want to see what single rail corridor can do in a city, check out Münich S-Bahn for example.
Looking at average population density is nonsensical - people aren't uniformly distributed. Most live in relatively dense urban areas and most trips they make are local. America isn't special in any of these regards.
The advantages of road networks as efficient means of point-to-point transportation disappear very quickly as the rate of non-point-to-point trips increases. Static routes like commuting and grocery shopping account for most traffic and are incredibly wasteful. You aren't stuck in traffic because of bespoke trips that necessitate a car, you're stuck because people make the exact same trip from A to B and back every single day.
Actually I'm not often stuck in traffic, because I live somewhere with a big enough road network to service the local population, which is dispersed widely enough that we don't have huge amounts of density. We also don't have natural geographic chokepoints, which was a common cause of traffic congestion in Seattle, where I used to live.
Highway networks are expensive and relatively low capacity, which lead to traffic congestion in urban area, which is where the majority of Americans live.
High speed roads should be limited to rural area and no more than two lane, one for each direction.
> High speed roads should be limited to rural area and no more than two lane, one for each direction.
Because no freight moves by road, only people. And even those people mostly shouldn't.
That is, your "should" doesn't actually work in the actual world. Trucks carry something like 60% of the freight in the US. You could say that rail should carry more of it, and that works for longer distance, but regional traffic is usually more efficiently handled by truck. So unless your vision of the future is people living in their cities, with nothing in their apartments, and not eating, you need better roads than that.
And then, you run into human nature. Some of us like going places, and more of us want to do so than you seem to like. Your "should" becomes "you should live your life the way I want you to, not the way you want to". You should expect a rather hostile response for that...
The majority of traffic on the road are....personal users, not freight. Induced demand and the usage of personal cars is what clogs road networks in urban area. Usage of mass transits such as train and trams will reduce road usage and freer flow of freight, with freight moved onto trains as much as possible, and reduction of urban area footprint.
I didn't say we should get rid of roads, I said that high speed road should be limited to 2 lanes...in rural area, exactly the area that don't need high capacity roads.
I see that you've never driven Interstate 80 across Wyoming. It's rural, and it still needs to be high capacity.
You're trying to get to the world that you want (aren't we all?), but you're not starting with the world as it is, but with a world that exists in your head. As a result, your "solution" is completely unworkable in reality.
Unworkable in reality how? Is it political? Is it economic? Is it physics? Is it geometry?
What about Interstate 80 that makes it special? Is it about freight carrying capacity? Can that be substituted by trains? Why does it have to be in that particular way?
You can say that a solution is 'unworkable', but you haven't explained your model of the world state well enough to convince someone. You haven't explained even "human nature".
Is my proposed "solution" politically unworkable? Yes, based on prevailing political opinions, society mores, cultural expectation and preferences. But perhaps you mean something else.
Nope. You're the one proposing the change; you have the burden of proof to demonstrate that your proposed change is an improvement to the existing situation.
The traffic is there. It's not going to fit on one lane each way. What are you going to do with it?
Try to fit it on railroads? Can you show that railroads can realistically handle 250% of current freight traffic, and 100000% of current passenger traffic? My gut feel is that they can't. If you have evidence that they can, then let's see it.
Or are you just going to tell the traffic to go away? Tell people to buy less stuff, so that less freight moves? Tell people to not go places, so that there's less passenger traffic on roads? The answer to that is going to be middle fingers from a huge number of people.
> Can you show that railroads can realistically handle 250% of current freight traffic, and 100000% of current passenger traffic? My gut feel is that they can't. If you have evidence that they can, then let's see it.
The system that has barley seen any investment for 100+ years and is disadvantaged by every possible regulatory and legal mechanism can't currently do it, therefore it is unworkable.
Of course if you don't invest in a capability your not gone have it. The highway system has seen an absurd amount of investment and thus is currently handling these things.
Nobody claims that you can't change it tomorrow. But the question is what is possible if you do things like proper land use and transportation planning.
And we have very good evidence that highways are inefficient and unhealthy.
> Tell people to not go places, so that there's less passenger traffic on roads?
This is pretty much the stated aim of my local council in London - they have a target to reduce car journeys by x% by 2030 or so. They want to achieve this by basically increasing journey times by adding congestion, removing lanes etc.
A very cherry picked point of view. Here are the actual goals:
"Reducing car use and increasing cycling levels will help address many of the challenges we face, including the climate crisis, air pollution, health and inactivity, road danger, congested roads, and fairer access to amenities, jobs and services. It will enable children to travel independently, create more pleasant streets and strengthen the economic recovery of our town centres and high streets. As we emerge from the pandemic, cycling, walking, wheeling* and public transport will help us achieve the goals that will ensure London’s success."
"The UK must significantly reduce its carbon emissions to meet its legally binding goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and avoid the worst effects of climate change. The Mayor has set an ambitious goal for London to become carbon neutral by 2030. Transport is responsible for more than a quarter of London’s carbon emissions, although this proportion is increasing as other sectors decarbonise more quickly The electrification of London’s buses, now the greenest fleet in Europe, and the rollout of charging points will help reduce emissions, but this will not be enough. Even if all new vehicles are electric by 2030, transport emissions are still likely to exceed what is needed to limit global warming by 1.5°C without substantial traffic reduction. Swapping private cars for sustainable modes is therefore essential."
By the way, wanna see something embarrassing? https://youtu.be/T3LLgzO_PrI?t=234. Japan had 100% safe, 100% punctual, high speed and throughput trains figured out in 1964.
"Over the Shinkansen's 50-plus year history, carrying over 10 billion passengers, there have been no passenger fatalities due to train accidents such as derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons."
Population density of whole region isn't as relevant as you think. The most relevant are metropolitan areas and areas of high traffic corridors. That is where trains and mass transit make the most sense.
Some people in the US like to pat themself on the back about this. The reality isn't that impressive.
Because the US has basically no passengers on the rails, its of course far easier to get things on the rails. Given that the US basically doesn't have passenger, the number are not that great.
Plus, Europe has ocean on 3 sides and generally a much longer coastline so lots of stuff that in the US uses rail, in Europe simply uses water transport.
In general a lot more things simply use local resources, for historical and political reasons.
Switzerland for example matches the US in terms of cargo modal share. But if you look what we had to do to achieve this high % while still having very large passenger numbers its incredibly hard. Basically it requires a concerted effort by government to prevent road use and to have a concert policy of all government and private institutions working together to enable it.
If you compare the US freight system to a actual peer competitor, the Soviet Union, the US doesn't look that great:
If the US actually had a concert policy of increasing modal share of rail compared to road freight transport, the US could do so, so much more. It would be a great thing for the environment and everybody in the US.
> Yes, I’m aware of this. And if you have enough population density, which most of Europe does, you can have frequent train service because enough people will have overlapping trips at the same time that they can share a rail line.
If you are in a low density place you don't need high frequency to have a useful system.
I used to live in a place that had only villages of a few 1000 people with lots of farmers around. Having a 1hly small rural train is perfectly useful and a great thing to have.
And you only basically need a single rail line with a few crossing places to provide that kind of frequency.
The idea that trains are only useful in a super dense place is just one of those myths the US population has been brainwashed into.
> The advantage of a highway network is that a single vehicle can simply take the fastest route from point to point all by itself even if relatively few people are traveling that route.
Wrong. Highways has intersections that are spaced out. Each intersection requires a huge amount of cost to set up.
Highway intersections also take up a gigantic amount of space and are horrible places for humanity.
Train stops and intersection on the other hand can be small and efficient. They are often beautiful places and you can even have shops and development there.
New towns pop up on important rail intersections and stations, but not near highway intersections.
> Germany is about the same land area as Montana or New Mexico. Those states have populations of about 1 and 2 million, respectively. Germany has 84 million. Texas has twice the land area of Germany and a population of 30 million.
Now you are just making ridiculous arguments. I can't actually believe that you are making those arguments in good faith. But I am going are as if you were in good faith.
Nobody is making the argument that Montana or New Mexico should have a train system like Germany. Literally nobody. But they also don't even need full highway either. Normal roads of maximum 1-2 per direction and normal intersections should be perfectly enough for that kind of density. You can then still have excellent public transport with buses for much of the state.
But even in a place like Montana trains still make sense. There are still town like Billings or Bozeman and friends that are easily large enough for a train. Maybe not a high speed train. Where I live having a single village of 1000 people not be connected by regular trains is considered strange. Billings is significantly larger then the largest regional city here and that city has an S-Bahn system with multiple lines of 15-min interval trains.
So while Montana as a whole doesn't need a huge system, each town still can use trains and trams in a number of ways.
That said, and the reason why I think you are arguing in bad faith, is that if you actually look at a density map of the US. You comparison fall completely on its face.
The reality is, the US actually has very nice locations for trains. You brought up Texas. Yeah Eastern Texas is mostly empty, but Western Texas isn't. So instead of just taking arbitrary political boarders, you need to actually look at the regions where people actually live.
And when you actually do that, you realize that the US has a number of urban mega clusters that are actually perfectly placed for trains.
Basically, Bay Area, Southern California, Great Lakes, Texas Triangle, Northeast Coast, Florida.
Are the most important ones, there are few other depending on how you look at it. If you do your density analysis based on those actual regions were people actually live, you will see that your 'density' argument falls flat on its face. And those regions actually mater, not arbitrary state borders.
For example, the very successful train line from Paris to Lyon. Turns out that Dallas to Houston is actually about the same distance. Oklahoma City, Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston have plenty of population and are in optimal distance for a rail network.
The Great Lakes region has more population THEN LITERALLY ALL OF FRANCE and isn't much bigger. Arguable its actually better for rail then France is.
So please for the love of god spare me the 'its all about density argument'.
Basically 80% of US population will live in such a urban region soon. So your argument is simply wrong. Local density does matter for ridership and things like that, but that is very much a DELIBERATE DESIGN and has NOTHING to do with overall density of a the US or individual states.
This is a video that goes threw the US and shows them visually:
> I live within a 15 minute drive of just about everywhere I need to go on a regular basis. Why would I wait that long for the train when I could just be there already?
Of course, for places you go regularly, you don't need a train or a car. I live in a place I can walk everywhere in 10 min or less. And with 15 min on my bike I can literally be on an actual mountain/natural trail.
Have you considered that trains are also useful if you don't use them regularly? Do you never want to drink or smoke weed? Do you never go to another place where you don't have a car available. Do you understand that there are people in the world who can't drive for various reasons.
And you don't actually wait for a train for 15min, you just do literally 5s of planning by looking at the clock. Even with 0 planning the majority of the time you would wait 7min or less.
I'm also in Germany and public transport is obviously good but you still get weird cases. I live in the south of a city the size of Karlsruhe, work in the north. With public transport it's 1 hour excluding the way to the bus stop and the waiting. With a car it's 16 minutes, with a bicycle it's 35 minutes. Comically enough the shortest path is with a car and not a bicycle.
Tomorrow I have a flight at 12:00. If I want to get there (~200km) with a car it's 2-3 hours depending on traffic. If I want to get there with train+bus it's 5h11m minimum, if I go right now it's 8h26m, if I want to catch my flight tomorrow it's 9h10m (and I'll be there at 8:40 instead of 11:00). It's also more expensive than driving there and leaving my car at one of the airport's parking lots for a week. I'll save ~50 euros by driving and set off at 8 tomorrow instead of 23:30 today.
I didnt make the argument that trains were better for every possible situation on the planet. I was refuting the claim that it only works if everybody has to go to one place.
Its of course also the case that the Western world after WW2 fully embraced the car and made sure its the most efficent while basically making sure street space was cleared of anything else. Before that street space was full of different uses.
Its only more expensive if you assume you already have a car, and a garage and so on.
And for a society, every single study shows that overall for society, private car travel is the most costly and the worst for the envoirment. You arent actually paying for all those costs.
From where I live airport is 1h by car and 1h 10min by train. Combined with parking and everything you will likely be faster with the train.
> Assuming everyone is going the same place at the same time.
If railways were in place, people would have built around the railway destinations, just like cities throughout history were typically built on waterways for easy transport of goods.
The flexibility of the car encourages sprawl which gets you into a situation exactly like what you're describing, where it just seems obvious that trains aren't good enough. The same sort of sprawl just wouldn't exist in a train-dominated transport system.
What about it? Not everyone goes to work at the same place at the same time unless you’re talking about a literal company town, and if we still had those, they probably wouldn’t let you own a car.
No, but having a strong network of trains, trams, and buses makes it easy to get from one place to another regardless of where you’re going. You only get those crappy “the city has one train that runs once an hour” in some US cities
It’s how nearly all of my coworkers commute, even though we live in different cities and leave at vastly different times
Are you talking about passenger railways? Everywhere I've lived in the US has had a railway running right through town. It's one of the few things the government can't just seem to reroute. But it is always freight rail
If you use your railways for passenger trains it is quite common to reroute the railways around towns to get higher speeds. Which has drawbacks and advantages. As a tourist I do not like it.
Railroads would still split cities. The reality is that American cities need highways. We have too much space relative to our population and our cultural focus on individualism mean that people will always prefer single family homes. Those cant exist without cars and people with cars need to be able to commute. The displacement was tragic but Im not if it couldve been done much better. If we're going to build the highways going through poor areas makes sense, eminent domain is much cheaper.
This. It’s rather funny, because I observe among my peers, who are millenials, that if they can’t have a thing (cars, houses), then no one should have them.
> We have too much space relative to our population
If you're arguing that there's an abundance of space, this is true in many countries (and was certainly true prior to the Federal-Aid Highway Act or Levittown).
> We have too much space relative to our population and our cultural focus on individualism mean that people will always prefer single family homes
Why? There are plenty of locales in the US where this very much isn't the case.
> Those cant exist without cars and people with cars need to be able to commute.
If we're simply talking about the average daily commute for the average person, why? There are still plenty of cities in the US that have effective public transportation.
People strongly prefer single family homes in places where zoning codes forbid the construction of anything else. It's not clear that there is any reason people should always prefer such homes, in the absence of such restrictive regulation.
I dont think this is true. Even in the densest places there are still tons of single family homes. Certainly many people dont care about having one, but I think most Americans always will. Of course you have to think about cost trade offs, but since we're talking about politics I think voters will consistently vote for policy that enables SFH living.
> Even in the densest places there are still tons of single family homes.
That is generally the case when the zoning code forbids the construction of anything else; otherwise, density would increase progressively, largely via conversion/addition, and you would never see neighborhoods of single-family homes abutting commercial/multifamily neighborhoods, with a sharp line dividing them, as frequently occurs in modern American development. Anytime you see such a dramatic transition, you are looking at an artificial boundary created by zoning, and that means the properties just over the line on the single-family side will be simultaneously overcosted (because they are close to an area of high demand) and undervalued (because they cannot be developed to meet the demand).
The preference is so consistently overwhelming that we needed to make it illegal to build large apartment buildings in most major cities to enforce it.
If I had to choose I would probably choose a place to live over a car. Be that renting or a mortgage. I am however a European, so perhaps less in love with cars than some cultures.
Not to defend urban renewal, but if it had focused on railways instead of highways, I wonder if we'd be as negative today. For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't.