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Interstate Highway System: 50th Anniversary
Steve Melito writes "This week, CR4: The Engineer's Place for Discussion and News, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, "a giant nationwide engineering project" that transformed a nation. In 1994, the American Society of Civil Engineers described the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System as "one of the Seven Wonders of the United States". In 2006, this network of roads includes 46,000 miles of highway; 55,000 bridges; 82 tunnels, and 14,000 interchanges. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), excavation for the interstate system has moved enough material to bury the State of Connecticut knee-deep in dirt. The amount of Portland cement could build more than 80 Hoover dams, or lay six sidewalks to the moon. The lumber used would consume all of the trees in 500 square miles of forest. The structural steel could build 170 skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building, and meet nearly half of the annual requirements of the American auto industry.
Check back with CR4 all week as we cover the 'Roots of the Road,' 'the Politics of Passage,' 'Adventures in Civil Engineering,' and 'The Road Ahead.'" One of the things that's interesting about why Eisenhower pushed for the highway system was that he saw the Autobahn system in Germany during the occupation post-WWII and knew that that was one of the things that the United States needed to develop.
>"The amount of Portland cement could build more than 80 Hoover dams, or lay six sidewalks to the moon"
Wait a minute, nobody told me six sidewalks to the moon was one of the options! I would have totally voted for the sidewalk thing...
I hope they didnt count the roads in Pennsylvania, most of them (at least in NW PA) are in such bad shape, they shouldn't count as being part of a 'paved highway' system.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
That's what they should have done instead. I'd walk to the moon.
about enough potholes to covers the surface of Jupiter six times and enough roadwork delays to equal 13 years of your life waitng in congested traffic to get to work :/
...of businesses being charge for their customers using the roads. Yes, roads are a good argument for network neutrality.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Wait a minute, that would be more than one bridge per mile, on average. Is that actually correct? I don't remember there being that many bridges on any of the interstates I've driven on.
And has encouraged americans to use enough gas to fill a swimming pool, each year.
Ike also saw the wonderful mass transit capable of the european trains, but that wasn't good enough...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Call your local state representative. You may have to go around collecting signatures too.
God spoke to me.
And to celebrate, every inch is getting a facelift! Now, everyone please merge over into the right lane and slow to half speed. Be careful of the bright orange barrels; they have to last until the work starts in 6-8 months.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
55,000 bridges on 46,000 miles of highway? More than 1 bridge per mile? Sounds like we should've done a better job of surveying the route before starting to build freeways.
And the worms ate into his brain.
People are always so harsh on the government's ability to do things, and are quick to promote private industry as the better alternative, but this is one of the major public sector success stories.
I think in cases like this, private industry just would not have the resources and coordination to pull it off. Nor the motivation.
But in any case, NOBODY, public or private, wants to do mega-projects anymore. Complacency is the word of the day.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
"See Russia, we can out-fight, and out-produce you, and we both have nukes, so even if its close to a draw, we'll win."
Thanks Ike, for giving the US the upper hand in the Cold War. He's also the one whose parting words were something like "Beware the military-industrial complex." A wise man, why can't we get Presidents like this anymore?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
For all the copycatting Eisenhower did to establish our highway system, they sure did get a lot of things wrong. Looking at today's Autobahn is a wonderous thing comparatively.
An interesting factor in difference between our highway and Germany's autobahn is the 'curviness' of the road. The Germans wanted their highway to curve with the natural landscape, and be created with a minimal of environmental destruction, which we thought was stupid. As a result, we built straighter roads, blasting through mountains and paving over forests where necessary. The result of course, was highway hypnosis, which contributes to the higher death toll and accident count on U.S. highways.
According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), excavation for the interstate system has moved enough material to bury the State of Connecticut knee-deep in dirt. The amount of Portland cement could build more than 80 Hoover dams, or lay six sidewalks to the moon.
But how much is that in Libraries of Congress per Nielsen market shares?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Something I've wondered about is what will happen when, sometime in the not-too-distant future, we no longer need roads for transportation because we've invented some kind of autonomous flying vehicle. What are we going to do with all that real estate? At least where I live, the roadway is too narrow to be used for additional home construction, so does all this land simply become a vast system of pedestrian malls? Or can somebody think of a better use for it? Of course the realpolitik of the situation is that the various government landowners will try to maximize the revenue to be had from selling this freed-up land, so what kind of monstrosity are they going to foist upon us?
Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.
After the Normandy invasion Ike's troops were again slogging, this time through French hedgerows. Finally when he got to Germany and could use the Autobahn, well, you know the rest of the story...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."
- H. L. Mencken
The problem with highways is that there are entirely too many exits and entrances. Most of the traffic we experience is due to merging errors and crashes caused by merging.
If you look at a map of any place with urban sprawl, like Atlanta, highways are the first cancerous veins that spread the disease of McMansions and thirty mile commutes. If there were far less highway entrances and exits, and someone besides complete idiots in the zoning office, the inconvenience of driving five miles to the nearest highway exit would cause more people to buy homes closer to town. Cities would then be more efficent and better served by mass transit systems. With less cars, and fewer and shorter car commutes, we'd also lessen our dependence on foreign oil. People would be forced to do more with less, so instead of having entire floors that go unused (yet still air conditioned), more efficient townhomes and apartments would be used instead.
Proper city planning will determine which civilization survives the 21st century the best. It's too bad America is doing so poorly.
Sheesh, he wasn't a troll... it's a valid point, if simplistically put. /rolls eyes
We need both highways and mass transport, and the failing of 1950s planning was that it prioritized highways above all else. A better use of resources would have been to build the rural and interstate parts of the system the same way they were built, but to substitute trains for some of the capacity in the urban network.
In Europe, they've got it all. Their intercity highways are better than ours. And for commuting, they have train networks that actually work and are pleasant enough that people want to use them. Saves gas, saves time (the high-speed trains are faster and you don't have to park them), and you can still drive your car just fine when you are going somewhere the trains don't go or don't reach effectively.
At this point I'd like to see the next big infrastructure investment be in a European-style intercity, high-speed train network to give people an alternative to highways. It wouldn't work across the great expanses of the West, but it would work just fine from Chicago eastward and along the West Coast. Imagine getting from Boston to Washington in 3 1/2 hours without the hassle of airport transportation, TSA bullshit, etc., etc. and simultaneously reducing airport congestion. Sounds worthwhile to me.
One major thing that Ike failed to bring over from the German system: driver's education.
The U.S. education, licensing and renewal of drivers is a joke. Personally, I don't want anyone who didn't make 95% on their test on the road, but here we have most of the drivers who made 70% and it shows, every day. To further agitate the issue, law enforcement and insurance companies have too much forgiveness: four tickets/year allowed (in TX), defensive driving courses (what a joke).
I wouldn't drive to work every day if I had an alternative. Personally, I'd rather go back to horses.
"why can't we get Presidents like this anymore?"
Because anyone with huevos enough to buck the status quo or speak unpopular truths gets the Rove treatment.
So we'll be getting agreeable dunces from now on.
Dunces with strings to make them dance.
One of the things that's interesting about why Eisenhower pushed for the highway system was that he saw the Autobahn system in Germany during the occupation post-WWII and knew that that was one of the things that United States needed to develop. Just too bad it is STILL one of the things that the United States needs to develop. The Autobahn is a meticulessly well maintained super-highway with engineered drive surfaces, well gradiated turns, and minimal obstructions of view to drivers. The surface itself is designed to remove water from contact with tires, which greatly enhanses performance in wet weather. With almost no "small hills" to obstruct/obscure the view in front of the driver, situations do not exist for a slowdown that is over a blind hill to cause an accident since drivers always have more then enough warning of traffic slowdowns, accidents, or broken-down vehicles in their lane to either change lanes, slow down, or otherwise avoid the problem. This is also the reason why parts of the Autobahn system have no speed limits, only strict rules for which lane to be in and rules to let vehicles traveling faster then you to pass you... We STILL don't have ANYTHING NEAR LIKE THAT.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Interesting Triva. Why is there an interstate highway in Hawaii when it goes to no other state?
Because all military bases, when the project was created, had to be linked to the interstate system. It was one of the selling points to the public... we can move troops and equipment in case of need to other parts of the US. So the intertate highway system in Hawaii connects the militray bases.
It also has. just barely, but has the 2 mile straight length that was demanded in each highway every so often for landing endangered aircraft.
Also from the discovery or history channel learned that lots of it was designed from the German Autobahn system and how the intersections don't stop traffic.
Too bad he didn't notice their train system while he was over there too. Our lack of a national public transportation system is wasteful and embarassing.
1. In the USA, everyone can drive, and does. Every kid 16 and over drives on the freeway. In Germany, I understand that a drivers license is not a gimme like it is here. I hear there are higher costs and stuff like that. So that filters out a lot of people as dumb as you and I were when we first drove on I-70.
2. Cost. They showed the way the Autobahn is constructed, and it can handle higher speeds than the freeway.
3. Terrain. From the little I saw, there are no Rocky Mountains for the Autobahn to cross. This makes a difference in what is a safe speed, and what kind of money you spend on making expensively-safe surfaces.
4. Tradition. I guess the Autobahn was always a speeding zone, and land speed records were even set there.
5. Congestion. Does the Autobahn have anything like the amount of traffic that the Interstates have on them?
Now, not all of these factors apply in all cases (no Rocky Mountains in Nebraska (That John Denver's full of crap!), no congestion on I-70 in Utah, etc.), but I think that when taken together they make a good case.
I guess there are other reasons, too, like different traffic laws that might have a greater impace or something, but I don't know.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Americans, we like our freedom.
I have never felt more free than when I hopped on a Shinkansen with little more than 30 minutes' notice, and traveled all the way across Japan in less than four hours -- all while reading a book.
I have never felt less free than when paying for an auto loan, auto insurance, registration, maintenance and gasoline, just to make life in my home city possible.
Latent taxation, poor public transportation and a national dependence on black goop sucked from beneath some of the most US-hostile countries on earth: you have a funny definition of freedom.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
While intercity high-speed trains sound great, they don't really reduce the dependence on oil much. What we really need to replace with rail are the commuting highways. New York has quite a large mass transit system, but it is really limited by the number of trains and buses that can cross the Hudson and East Rivers.
.
I think that the market is doing surprisingly well at encouraging people to take mass transit -- I've noticed ridership on my current bus line, as well as my previous train line, increase as gas prices have gone up. Real estate in towns with train stations is more in demand than real estate in towns without mass transit.
The next step is for states (with grants from the federal government) to build more mass transit. If you build it, they will come & all that. There are two problems:
1) NIMBYs objecting to railroad tracks near their property
2) People in government thinking that the government should not subsidize mass transit.
I believe that, in urban areas, mass transit should be funded at the same amount as the road system.
One other thing -- our roads are getting much more expensive to maintain -- tar is getting more expensive (it's a petroleum product, after all). Much cheaper in the long run to maintain rails than roadways.
In the end, though, what's repsonsible for dominance of the roadways over mass transit is the automobile industry. The federal highway system is a handout to the auto manufacturers, the fuel companies, and the workers in those industries -- not that I disagree with public works, I think they are necessary and good, but it's important to realize that the lack of support for mass transit initiatives among our legislators is due to the auto lobby and the auto workers' lobbies.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as I don't expect the Congress could ever again pass such a massive project.
Remember, the Interstate Highway System was a response to the problems of moving military assets across the US during WWII. It's great for visiting grandma, but it's really a national security asset.
So our current national security risk is our dependence on foreign sources of energy. I'd love to see a project on this scale to rebuild the national grid, make it easy to get wind power from the Dakotas or Solar power from New Mexico to Boston or LA. Our current grid can't do this and it's a big deal to make one that can. Tie in end-user-generated solar and build out broadband to everybody at the same time and you'd do a real benefit to the country.
When that's done we can get started with upgrading the Interstates for Personal Rapid Transit.
I look forward to reading the part of the series on the politics of passage.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What's this obsession with using screwdrivers to bang nails in?
Your example of a camping trip is possibly the absolute worst thing that a mass-transit system would be good for. Nobody in their right mind would suggest building a railway simply to take three people out into the wilderness. That's the kind of thing that cars are ideally suited for.
Conversely, commuter traffic, or bulk transport, are the absolute worst thing that personal transport systems are good for. You're using a separate vehicle, each with its own engine, for each person? When most of them are travelling the same route at the same time? That's just silly.
What's appropriate is to use a rail system for commuting from suburbia to the city centre twice daily, or to carry a million tonnes of coal from Texas to New York City (or whereever). And you use the car when you want to go camping.
The first step when decided what the right tool is for a particular job is to be aware that more than one tool exists!
While all of the glory is nice and neat, let's look at the drawbacks: 1. For all the money spent on the interstate system, we could've built up our public transportation infrastructure, which needed a makeover, and have enough money to invest in cities, which also needed a makeover. 2. Sprawl and Suburbia: Now we are faced with sprawl and suburbia. While some may find this a good thing, I personally prefer the European lifestyle in large built-up cities. Suburbia is not self-sustaining. A public transportation system is not feasible in surubria. Do you know of a suburb that is not next to a city? If so, it's not called a suburb, but a rural area. 3. Strip Malls: they existed in very limited quantities before the interstate system. 4. Bad Maintenance: While we built the highways we don't know how to maintain them... pieces are going to crumble bit by bit until we have a makeover or until everything's gone 5. America is a gas-guzzling addict: Even Bush said so. The first step to fighting this adiction is admitting it. Before the interstate, we relied less on cars and more on public transit. Of course, it was harder to get around too. 6. Ever try breathing in L.A.? Yeah... you know what I'm talking about. 7. Trucking Industry - transporting things by train and using trucks for the last n miles is far more efficient, and using electric trains is even more efficient. 8. American teens are now forced into cars at the age of 16, which not only promotes bad lifestyle habits, but also continues the sprawl and suburbia. 9. Declining health/obesity: I admit, I'm not thin as a string. I tried both walking and driving to work for 6 months at a time... after 6 months of walking/public transit (which increased my commute by about 20 mins) I found amazing results - not only had I lost weight but also started feeling better, less stressed ("Ah another train will be along in 7 minutes, no big deal, no need to rush") and I also got some work done on the train/subway. Talk about benefits Of course some may find these things as benefits, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder (or however the saying goes). Now for the benefits: 1. Easier to get around the country. 2. Drivers are independent from public transit's schedules (of course this is a chicken and egg question: if there were more passengers, the service would be more frequent). 3. Americans can enjoy their suburban dream (although I don't think suburbia is a dream.... even considering the fact that crime rate in suburbia per 100K people is higher than it is in the city; also, in the city you know where most of the crime's happening and you can avoid those areas if you so desire). 4. Cars are not a luxury anymore, but rather a necessity. 5. American teens can break out of their shell when they turn 16. 6. ......
In the end, it's all about what kind of lifestyle you want to lead and whether or not you're a typical suburbanite or the new urban type.
-Palal
Although some historians claim that Eisenhower's motivations were military in nature, the nation's civilian population reaped the rewards
True, but the military aspect played a huge part in the funding for the interstate highway system. The interstates provide a tried-and-true platform for moving tanks and other heavy war material a very long distance, with minimal fuel and minimum time. A column of tanks can move across the whole of our nation in about three days time. That's significant when you consider an enemy force not wanting 2,000 M1s staring at them.
Informatus Technologicus
I've driven the Autobahn, and I've done tens of thousands of km driving on the US Interstate highway system (running a SCCA race team means a lot of long-haul driving going from event to event)
The only thing the Autobahn has going for it are the occasional unlimited speed sections, most of which seemed absent on my drives from Stuttgart->Nurburg and Stuttgart->Munich - there were speed limits on most of the distance (either 120 km/h or 140 km/h)
Incidentally, posted speed limits notwithstanding,average car traffic speed on Interstates in the Midwest is between 120-140 km/h.
So what has the US system got on the Autobahn?
1) Interstates are numbered odd numbers North/South and even numbers East/West. Main routes have 2 digits, and connectors and bypasses have 3 digits, where the last two digits are the ID of the MSR that it connects to. This makes it very easy to tell (in most cases) which Interstate you need to be on, even if you don't know local geography that well. If you are West of Detroit, and you want to go to Toledo (south of Detroit) and you are on I-96 approaching the the I-275 interchange, you can tell that:
a) you are travelling E/W
b) 275 runs N/S
c) 275 links up with 75, also N/S
d) So taking 275 to 75 is moving you in the right direction.
2) There is only one allowed intersection between any two Interstates. The intersection of I-69 and I-94 is unique. That is NOT the case with Autobahns, which can loop back on each other and cross in multiple places. This very nearly got me lost on the way to Stuttgart from the Nurburgring, and the only reason I caught it was that the sun was in the wrong place after the interchange....
3) On/off ramps onto Interstates are labelled with the name of the nearest major city AND the direction of travel - so you might see "I-70 West - Topeka" and "I-70 East - Kansas City". Autobahns are labelled with the name of SOME city in that direction, but I never discovered the pattern; and with the city density in Germany, trying to find the city on the map (in one of two directions) while rapidly approching the exit, without the aid of a dedicated navigatrix, can be daunting.
4) Exits are numbered with the current mile marker value, and the mile marker value itself is the distance along the Interstate within that state. Working out time, distance, and fuel problems in your head become VERY simple. If I am at mile marker 20, and I need to take exit 140, and I am travelling at 60 MPH, then I have 2 hours of travel before my exit. Note that this wasn't always true - Florida and Georgia held out on sequential exit numbering for a long time - but as far as I know, everything is mile marked now.
5) I refute the claim to "highway hypnosis" being a problem; having done multiple all-night driving stints trying to make it to events on time, the general straightness of the Interstate makes the road network safer (especially in bad weather) gives you much better sightlines, and saves fuel, especially with big rigs. The few exceptions to this rule can really stand your hair on end imagine coming around a corner at 70 MPH with 14,000 lbs of car hauler to find that traffic has stopped dead... yikes!
Seriously, the US Interstate system is a wonder of design and is transportation networking done nearly perfectly. It takes almost all the best features of the Autobahn and then improves on them.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
In Europe, they've got it all. Their intercity highways are better than ours. And for commuting, they have train networks that actually work and are pleasant enough that people want to use them. Saves gas, saves time (the high-speed trains are faster and you don't have to park them), and you can still drive your car just fine when you are going somewhere the trains don't go or don't reach effectively.
I live in the UK. We used to have the best railway network in the world. Hell, we invented them. Then we had Margaret Thatcher, who loved cars, and we had decades of apathetic state-funded railway management, and then we sold the whole lot off to Railtrack, who didn't maintain the network for ten years and caused several huge railway crashes, and as a result the rail network these days is expensive, unreliable, and slow.
And it's still orders of magnitude better than the US system. The last time I went there --- it was to North Carolina, and I'm quite aware that North Carolina is not the US's best point --- it was like visiting a third world country. Where any European airport is smoothly integrated into a quiet, cleanly running mass transit hub, we got out at Raleigh into a dirty, smelly car park full of honking horns. We had to hire a car to get to the fairly large town where we were going simply because we couldn't find out any other way to get there. (There may have been buses, but we were all completely unable to find any kind of centralised bus timetable system.) It was a hell of a culture shock.
This April I went skiing in Austria. I got the bus from my house to Reading railway station; got the bus there to Heathrow; flew to Munich; got on the mass transit from the airport to central Munich; got a long-distance train to Jenbach; got on the Zillertalbahn mountain railway to Mayrhofen; and then got on the Postbus from Mayrhofen to the guest house where I was staying; I got dropped off at the door. Sounds complicated? I went to the Deutschbahn website, told it I wanted to go from Reading, UK to Juns, Austria and it routed the whole lot for me. Through three countries. Everything was on time, too.
Are there really enough people going from Boston to DC to support a 4 hour train over a 7 hour one?
Add stops in Philly and New York, and, absolutely. Boston to Washington is under 450 miles. A good train should be able to cover that distance in 3 hours, or 3.5 with stops at the outer edge. Shuttle flights run either hourly or half-hourly between *all* the city pairs in that group and are usually full. "Chinatown" buses leave almost as frequently and are also full; a faster, cleaner and safer train with reasonably priced tickets would probably peel off some of those travelers. And I expect if people could travel around the Northeast without the hassles of the other methods, or the insanity that is parking in New York or Boston, they might travel more often. I know I would -- as a Boston-area resident (for the moment) I'd go to New York every month just for the hell of it.
In my world the trains would not only be faster but cleaner, more pleasant, and much more frequent and reliable. My vision is modeled on the intercity line between Geneva and Zurich, Switzerland. Those trains run hourly and are a wonderful way to get places, unlike anything we have here.
Slower trains could cover the regional lines between each city. With the rebuilding that would be necessary for the high-speed trains, the regionals would speed up too.
>> The lumber used would consume all of the trees in 500 square miles of forest.
What do they mean "would"? If that's the amount of wood used, then 500 square miles of forest was most definitely consumed, no?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
It's a combination of a bunch of things.
In Germany the roads were designed with much higher speeds in mind, and are kept in much better repair than US interstates, which were designed (outside of an urban area) for maximum speeds of 65-75 mph. In the early 70s, when there was an energy crisis, there were studies done that the cars of the time were much more fuel efficient when only traveling at 55 mph. So, fedral legislation was enacted requiring states to lower their speed limits to 55 mph (if they wanted to receive fedral highway funds). After raising the limit a couple of times, in 1995, Congress gave full authority to the states to determine their own speed limits, and some states keep it lower for fuel/environmental reasons.
Germany also does a much better job at making sure the roads are well maintained. If you're going 120+ mph, and you hit a stretch where the road isn't completely smooth and there may be some pot holes.
Another reason is that Germany has laws regarding driving habits. You're not allowed to pass on the right, nor are you allowed to drive for extended periods in the left lane, and you can actually get fined if you're caught doing so. Until they actually put in some driving laws like this in the US, not having a speed limit is not something that's going to happen any time soon.
If there's anything more important than my ego around, i want it caught and shot now.
I've visited the US. The whole "stockpiling" grocery shopping mentality is frightful. You people have bread that lasts more than a few days... that's just not right. Most of the stuff in the shops in the US is atrocious "long life" processed rubbish.
People in sensible countries just take a walk down the street to a local shop, or at most, hop on a bus or train to the city centre, market, or supermarket for a couple of bags of food.
Buying fresh produce is a delight. Fresh fruit, vegetables, meat from a butcher counter, warm freshly baked bread. You just can't expect to buy that in bulk weekly/fortnightly.
Besides, you can have a car too, or take a taxi, if you have a big family or genuinely need to stock up for some big meals.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Please stop comparing our size to the size of other things; please stop covering us to a certain thickness in material; please stop laying our women end to end (and remarking that no one would be surprised); please stop filling in other places or events with multiples of our population. Enough is enough!
-- Connecticut Residents Against Nonconsensual Comparisons
The same is more or less true of most of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, which first opened in 1938. Most of the on and off-ramps have been lengthened and straightened, and a couple of big highway interchanges added where new roads sprung up, but the road itself hasn't changed in my lifetime. Believe me, the new ramps were necessary. The old ones were all decreasing radius blind curves dumping right into traffic with no runoff room. The Exit 27 Southbound onramp (technically on the Hutchinson Parkway, but essentially demarcating the border between the two as well as between NY and CT) was literally a 90 degree spur two car lengths long with a stop sign at the highway. It hit the highway right after an overpass with no visibility so there was no way to see if cars were coming. You just stopped your car perpendicular to the road, checked that there was nobody under the bridge at that moment, punched it and crossed your fingers. Another feature which has just recently changed is the Sikorsky Bridge over the Housatonic River. This engineering marvel did not previously support pavement. Instead its surface was an open steel grate. I'm not kidding. Riding a motorcycle over this in the rain with a passenger was perhaps the scariest thing a human being could undertake. But to be fair, at least half of this structure was part of the Wilbur Cross Parkway, not the Merritt (the WC, the Merritt and the Hutch were all Rt. 15 and shared an exit numbering scheme). The road itself is exactly the same size and shape as when it opened. It retains its rural charm scores of unique and beautiful overpasses.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
In the end, though, what's repsonsible for dominance of the roadways over mass transit is the automobile industry.
I agree with you, but I also wanted to add in that it's a big handout to the trucking industry; the way we currently tax commercial use of the highway system is totally inadequate.
Truckers "pay" for the use of the highway network (theoretically) through the federal tax on diesel fuel. This is stupid: it's insufficent to pay for the network, and also discourages passenger-car use of diesel (because it makes the fuel artificially expensive).
A tax that was actually based on pound-miles travelled (pounds of cargo times distance travelled on the network) would be more fair, and it would create more competition for the transport of cargo over other means. I think you'd see even more containerized freight being moved by rail, with only the "last mile" occuring by truck, and at the same time you wouldn't be penalizing owners of diesel passenger vehicles for their fuel choice, and the result would be higher efficiency in all vehicles. (There's a reason why diesel vehicles are more popular than gas in other countries; it's only because of our tax structure and lingering public opinion that they aren't here.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Screw the space elevator, I'm walking.
I will forever be a student.
The structural steel could ... meet nearly half of the annual requirements of the American auto industry.
The sad part is when you look at it the other way: The American auto industry would only survive six months on all the steel in all the Interstate highways in the entire United States. Do we really need that many cars?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
A better question may be, do we need that many bottle caps? More steel is used in the US to make bottle caps than auto bodies. http://www.skygaze.com/content/facts/manufacturing .shtml s ting_facts.htm s ode/780563/summary.html
http://www.berro.com/entertainment/general_intere
http://www.tv.com/modern-marvels/heavy-metals/epi
The Autobahn is built differently. The biggest difference is that the road surface throughout the Autobahn system is somewhere around 27 inches thick. Most interstates, by comparison, are only 16-18 inches thick. The extra durability makes for a road that's consistently in better condition, which is why it's no big deal to do 100+ mph with a properly-maintained car over there. OTOH, they're more expensive to build. If the interstates were built to the same spec as the Autobahn, the system wouldn't be nearly as extensive as it is.
This page has some interesting Autobahn info.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
As someone who lives in Raleigh, you are entirely correct.
Before our light-rail system got de-funded by the federal government, there weren't any plans to run a line to the airport, because the airport authority didn't want it there. It turns out they make a ton of money from parking fees, so adding a mass-transit link would have cost them money, despite making things significantly easier for their hundreds-of-thousands of yearly patrons.
I'm surprised you didn't comment on the poor quality of the rail line between Raleigh and Washington. I rode it earlier this year, and it was a most un-impressive trip. Not only was the train an hour late arriving into Raleigh, it was an additional 30 minutes late getting into Union Station. The trip back was worse -- it took 8 hours instead of the scheduled 6. I won't get into the cackling witch seated two rows behind me who did not shut up for the entire trip, despite being in the quiet car. [rolleyes]
Compare that to the ICE trains in Germany, which (while crowded) run like clockwork. There are plans to bring high-speed rail to the southeast, but they're running into the usual pork-barrel project problems -- every little town wants a stop, which negates the purpose.
Chip H.
Exactly. The autobahn also has variable speeds to better accomodate traffic.
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You would think with us being the country that depends on cars more than anyone else we would have at least gotten this right
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Sign, burning two mod points on this (both +funny, whatever), but it's an issue that comes up whenever I talk with Europeans about mass transit, and how they can't understand why we don't have a rail system.
The fundamental problem is that Europeans cannot fully grasp the difference in scale invoved in America, especially in the American West. (It's big. It is really really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it is long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Texas.) I travel rather often from San Diego, through Los Angeles, and to the Bay Area / San Francisco (these are the three major cities in California, incidentally). The trip takes 8-10 hours to complete, depending on traffic passing through Los Angeles. There is a single rail line that runs down the coast. Once per day it travels between SF and SD, and you have to get up at 5AM to catch it. It takes 11 hours.
San Francisco and San Diego are 500 miles apart.
By comparison, Amsterdam to Paris is 500 *km* apart. The distance from San Diego to San Francisco would span the breadth of England (London to Inverness was 8 hours by train, and is about 550 miles, as is Paris to Nice). When I was in Europe, I was constantly surprised about how little time it took to travel from one city to the next while I was on a train. When you live in the American West, you get used to 6 hour drives at 75-80 miles per hour where you literally see no living human beings outside of the gas stations and rest stops. And maybe some farms.
Europe is very heavily built up. It's dense. Rail networks make a lot more sense in dense networks than in sparse ones. That same rail line that runs to Oxford (60 miles from London) can be used to connect to Warwick, or Stratford-upon-Avon (if my memory serves). The rail network in California is essentially a 3-node graph with a line between SF, LA, and SD. With two mountain ranges in between, to boot. The train company loses money on the line pretty consistently. There's literally nothing in between to make the run profitable. San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz are nice places, don't get me wrong, but they simply aren't volume destinations. And because it's not profitable, there won't be any more private infrastructure development. The State of California has been toying with the notion of building a high speed line from SF to SD for a while now, but, hell, I ran the numbers myself. Japan wouldn't have built a high speed rail line if their cities were all 500 miles apart. It's too costly. The main island of Japan is about 600 miles long, total.
It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.
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This isn't an America-is-bigger-is-better argument. In fact, I can pretty firmly say that I would greatly prefer being able to travel to another city in an hour or two. I lose an entire day whenever I make the trip. A drive to Phoenix, first major city east of San Diego (Yuma doesn't count) is 6 hours (@75 MPH) through almost nothing but desert. To the average San Diegan or San Franciscan, the other city is akin to a vacation destination. Road Trips are boring as hell unless you find a way to entertain yourself -- I personally go through audiobooks like water.
Rail Networks simply don't work when the graphs are so sparse. Out in the middle of the desert, a car moves faster than a train, and costs less, so why bother going to the hassle of parking your car in long term parking (unless you have a garage of your own), and paying more money to travel slower? I'd do it just for the scenic-ness of it, except you have to board at 5AM to get in
Bingo. All of Germany is about the size of Wyoming. Extending the Autobahn to the former East Germany, roughly a third the size of the former West, is a work in progress.
Also, keeping right except to pass is not uniformly followed even in Germany. There's a great billboard showing nearly all the cars in the left lane with the caption "und Sie?" (and You?). But going 220 kph (~ 132 mph) is a kick, even when others overtake! Absolute Hell on the fuel efficiency, however.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
I normally wouldn't have been so harsh I am just so damn sick that everytime the topic of US car usage comes up Europeans have to say how they are so superior since they can ride public transportation everywhere, "who needs a car?" they say. They bring up how they are so great since they can walk to the local grocery store often as well which is not an option for many Americans either. It comes up EVERYTIME and it is great that they have those options available to them but over here in America there are still large amounts of areas that are sparsely populated and a lot of places that still even have dirt roads so mass transit is way out of the picture. Unless a person lives in a pretty urban area mass transit is usually non-existant. I live in the northern suburbs of Chicago and we actually have a really good bus and train system which I use almost everyday but this is far from the norm.
"People in sensible countries just take a walk down the street to a local shop, or at most, hop on a bus or train to the city centre, market, or supermarket for a couple of bags of food."
That is NOT a poor choice of words, that is directly saying "I am better than you" and I am sick of it. Non-American's love to say how American's always act like they are better than non-American's yet they love to do the same exact thing, how is that right?
"You people have bread that lasts more than a few days... that's just not right. Most of the stuff in the shops in the US is atrocious "long life" processed rubbish."
That was another line that just spews "I am better than you". We have A LOT more people to feed over here and we do have local bakeries available for people who prefer freshly baked bread but with the amount of mouths we have to feed I think having bread that doesn't spoil quickly (and other foods too) is better since less will be wasted. Of course, having a diet that consists ONLY of processed food is a bad idea but just having it available is not "atrocious", we have plenty of fresh foods available as well.
"And if a beating is Chicago's response to criticism of American food-shopping habits, it doesn't exactly project the image of a sensible country."
No that doesn't project the image of a sensible country and I was going overboard since I was pissed off, but what do people do when you continually pick on them? They retaliate, and sometimes harshly. It might not seem like a big deal this one time but thats just it, it wasn't this one time, it is over and over and over again.
In closing I want Europeans to stop bringing up the above things I mentioned since it is tired, old, and for the most part baseless when put into perspective of the real situation over here in America.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.