Saturday, January 15, 2022

Highway to Hell

The highway cabal is alive and well in 2022. The highway growth machine is an antiquated giant that keeps chewing up transportation budgets while doing nothing to alleviate the congestion. The media is more than happy to continually produce content detailing how wonderful each new highway project will be. For example, I-94 project about progress, connection. Sadly, the results are never as promised.

Milwaukee has made major highway investments in the Plainfield Curve, the Marquette Interchange and the Zoo Interchange, among others, over the past few decades. All these resources and money have done nothing to alleviate traffic congestion or make commutes any smoother for drivers. In fact, it has made things much worse. The roads, and routes, are more complicated and congested than ever. Travel times have increased, not decreased.

The political power of the highway cabal is evidenced by the fact that induced demand is a well-known result of highway expansion, yet we keep expanding highways. As Benjamin Schneider states, "When traffic-clogged highways are expanded, new drivers quickly materialize to fill them." Or, as Adam Mann out it, "Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse."

As the report The Congestion Con details:
In an expensive effort to curb congestion in urban regions, we have overwhelmingly prioritized one strategy: we have spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars widening and building new highways. We added 30,511 new freeway lane-miles of road in the largest 100 urbanized areas between 1993 and 2017, an increase of 42 percent. That rate of freeway expansion significantly outstripped the 32 percent growth in population in those regions over the same time period. Yet this strategy has utterly failed to “solve” the problem at hand—delay is up in those urbanized areas by a staggering 144 percent.

Those new lane-miles haven’t come cheap and we are spending billions to widen roads and seeing unimpressive, unpredictable results in return. Further, the urbanized areas expanding their freeways more rapidly aren’t necessarily having more success curbing congestion—in fact, in many cases the opposite is true.
If we really want to improve transportation safety, access to jobs, and mobility, we should be simply repairing (making safer) the roads we have while improving our modes of public transportation. 

For Further Reading:

How Induced Demand Explains the Vicious Cycle of CongestionGenerated Traffic and Induced Travel

Screenshots of Wisdom




Thursday, January 13, 2022

Fetishizing Disposability

M. Nolan Gray, a planner and researcher at UCLA, scolds that America needs to Stop Fetishizing Old Homes. He lists several complaints to buttress his point.

For starters, before I go into a critique of Mr. Gray’s points, I do not believe all old homes are better than new homes. Just as I do not believe the opposite. Generalizations, as such, get us nowhere.

Gray makes some broad and overreaching statements to condemn, in general, old housing.

He begins by labeling old housing as “at best, subpar and, at worst, unsafe.” No doubt, some old housing surely is subpar and unsafe. However, so is some new housing.

He next takes a dig at “self-righteous” preservationists. Though some may be pompous or pretentious (which can be the case in many occupations), some older things are worth saving and equally attractive as their newer, supposed, replacements. He fails to mention the craftsmanship and materials in older, quality homes, which many newer (even well-built) homes don’t contain.

Gray claims we “fetishize” old homes. I would like to think some people just like to take care of well-built or well-crafted items. Maybe Gray just fetishizes disposability over maintenance. 

He states, “If we want to ensure universal access to decent housing, we should be building a lot more of it.” First, although a noble goal, I'm not sure Republicans want to ensure universal access to decent housing. Second, new housing and old housing are not mutually exclusive. We can have well-built, well-maintained older housing alongside newer construction.

Here I should point out I am not for saving every building simply because of old age or some sentimentalism. Some buildings are too far-gone and exorbitant investment just does not make sense. But Gray's overarching theme here that everything old stinks and everything new is wonderful is just an extreme oversimplification and wrong.

Gray then lists some regional differences in the age of homes. Some places have more new homes than others do and vice-versa. Rather than condemning, in general, old homes, it seems Gray’s issue is with dilapidated properties and zoning practices. If this is the case, we can agree. Older, dilapidated buildings should be allowed to be razed so that newer, denser construction (whatever the highest and best use of the site is) can replace it.

He then goes on to proclaim that new housing is “just plain nice to live in.” Yet, some newer housing is also cheap, poorly built crap. Gray had previously criticized fetishizing the old, but here he is fetishizing something for simply being new.

Gray then rattles off insulation, HVAC and windows as supposed reasoning for why newer is better. He also discusses room layout and closet sizes. Yet, retrofitting an older home for insulation, HVAC and windows is common. Considering the quality of some older homes, this is also more economical than completely new construction. Moreover, older, quality-built homes have larger closets and functional layouts. Cheap construction is cheap construction whether it is built in 1922 or 2022.

Sure, there are a lot of old crappy buildings out there that aren't worth saving. But that does not de facto conclude that anything newer is better. There is a lot of cheap, new stuff. So how about cities look for ways to build dense housing where needed along with respecting older, quality construction. We are a pretty innovative country (when we want to be), I think we can move forward and accomplish two goals simultaneously. 

Midweek Reading

The Continuing Phony Debate on “Free Trade”Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessaryNew Climate Maps Show a Transformed United StatesCould Being Cold Actually Be Good for You?Stop calling workers “low skill”Fauci Caught on Hot Mic Calling Republican Senator a ‘Moron’ After Heated ExchangeCannabis compounds can stop the virus that causes COVID-19 from entering human cells by binding to the spike protein and blocking it from infecting people