This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals. Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?
That’s probably a reductive take. This bill is massive, over 2000 pages. It has funding for all kinds of transportation, green, energy and digital infrastructure. Roads are a part of that because once they are built, they need to be maintained or else people will die. There are several examples of bridges and overpasses collapsing and leading to deaths and badly maintained road surface leads to fatal accidents as well. Also, talking about this bill in terms of what it does for roads and bridges is going to be the best way to talk to the public as that is the thing they experience every day. Talking about the esoterics of the energy grid isn’t going to land for most people.
An area that I didn’t see talk about was investment in pedestrian and bicycle safety infrastructure. That’s generally a much smaller investment with significant gains in reducing car travel, to the GP’s point.
I would have liked to see spending on bike and pedestrian safety projects as a percentage of any money spend on car infrastructure.
I live in a fairly rural, but affluent, part of Michigan now, and at one of the township board meetings, they were discussing a proposed bike lane. The reason they didn't want it? Only one person (on the board) really said anything at all, and his reasoning was that he imagined a scenario in which there would be some sort of biking event where lots of people would be biking the trail, and his driveway could somehow end up getting blocked. Keep in mind, this is a rural area where most properties sit on 5-10+ acres at least, and the driveways are very far apart generally.
It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I just got the impression that for whatever reason, they were deeply opposed to the idea of people being able to safely bike down country roads. After living in San Francisco and Indianapolis in the years before, it was definitely weird seeing people being opposed to bike paths, especially when it would not interfere with their country life almost at all. Maybe they thought it would start them down a path of changing their way of life? I don't know.
> Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?
Roads are still needed inside cities and between them. The Ancient Romans (famously) had roads.
Roads used to be for people:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers."
> In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
Roads act more like veins transporting resources to parts of civilization. Decrease efficiency, increase emissions. But the critical thing is infrastructure being in disrepair can and has killed people.
I read that piece too and it is not surprising. I imagine the 18 wheelers going through cities aren’t doing a lot of good either. I drive one of those trucks and trying to get out of the cycle.
The US is huge, and people are already migrating to the cities (a bad move in the light of COVID). The remaining cities still need to be connected by roads, even if you’re closing down small communities.
You can also improve public transport, build bikelanes and sidewalk, while updating roads to help the parts of the community that will inevitable live outside the inner city limits.
I dont have the data but it seems transportation is something that exponentially gets harder to solve the more resources you have.
Anecdotally, I live in a suburban area in a "developing" country. It was definitely not designed for people to live in - there are no small shops just a huge big chain store, barely any sidewalks and I havent seen any people just walking about. Every house seems to have about two cars. Outside the suburbs its the complete opposite. Roads are full of people milling about and kids playing cricket or soccer. Cars are second class citizens on the townships. First class citizens in the suburbs. Crazy.
Hasn’t the trend been the opposite during covid, people have actually been moving out of large city centers? I think generally people like to have the space, especially with a family, and it’s just cheaper in the suburbs.
> This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals.
It is compatible with our goal of getting from point A to point B safely. Climate goals are not the only goals, and if you look at this bill carefully, you'll see that they are quite secondary to other goals, which reflects the underlying political reality.
You'd still need most of the roads for logistical reasons. Cities need food, a whole lot of food, and it has to come from somewhere it can actually be grown.
I’m confused what you mean with the scare quotes. It seems from the article at least what they passed has a lot of money for roads and stuff. Or do you mean that money will just sort of evaporate with nothing getting done?
