Guess what’s the biggest building project in the stimulus – or should I say “economic recovery” – plan? Highways, which are slated for a cool $27 billion. Writing in the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell shows why we need to undo the Interstate Highway Act if we want the economy to recover.
The Highway Act probably has more defenders than detractors. But Mr Obama should be among the latter. The act, which budgeted $25bn in federal money to build 41,000 miles of motorway, exacerbated the very problems Mr Obama has been most eager to solve – spoliation of the environment, dependence on foreign oil, overburdening of state and local budgets, abandonment of the inner-city poor and reckless speculation in real-estate development, to name a few …
In 1958, the great journalist William Whyte coined the term “sprawl”, in an article for Fortune. He noted with horror that, a mere two years after the Highway Act, “already huge patches of once green countryside have been turned into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb, nor country.” Developments were concentrated in random political no-man’s-lands near interchanges and exits. Road lobbyists and real estate developers colluded against meaningful regulation and planning, with the result, Whyte wrote, that “development is being left almost entirely in the hands of the speculative builder”. …
The result was a distorted market and tax system. Just as today’s internet businesses get more favourable tax treatment than bricks-and-mortar shops, highways were effectively subsidised. Sales taxes on autos were made tax deductible. Gasoline taxes were specially earmarked to road building (as they still are).
The Act speeded up the erosion of public transportation infrastructure, which the federal government is now spending dearly to revive. Freight trains had to compete against trucks that sped along taxpayer-funded roads. Highways marred the landscape. Some of the prettiest neighbourhoods in the US – Mt Adams in Cincinnati, the North End of Boston – were effectively walled off from the cities they once belonged to, and the encirclement of Detroit’s neighbourhoods by highways is often cited as a primary cause of its decline. Plans for a superhighway to be laid right through the heart of San Francisco were blocked only due to massive local protests.
Whyte warned that sprawl was not just bad aesthetics but bad economics. A subtler and more serious problem than blight was that, for local authorities, the cost of providing utilities and other services was exorbitant. “There is not only the cost of running sewers and water mains and storm drains out to Happy Acres,” Whyte wrote, “but much more road, per family served, has to be paved and maintained.” The infrastructure network that came out of the Highway Act had higher overheads than the one it replaced. It became a bottomless pit of spending …
The US has big economic problems. But they have been made worse, and harder to resolve, by a half-century in which, at federal urging, the country was misbuilt.
There is an inherent bias in favour of government projects. The successes can be mythologised through commemoration, goading future generations to imitate them. The failures are fixable only through equally extensive projects to undo them. This makes it easy to forget that there is no social or economic problem so big that a poorly targeted government intervention cannot make it worse.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Your article is just showing up everywhere!
http://www.marco.org/82577055
Discussed it last week with a professor (History of International Financial and Monetary Crises… its a doozie)- great piece, really enjoyed it.
March 1st, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Agree. That $27 billion should be given to light rail.
March 1st, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Connecting communities is a critical part of sustainable and economically responsible development. Roads need to be considered for improvement as part of any comprehensive transit strategy. Improving road conditions and streetscapes will foster better communities. Do we need an interchange at every county road that crosses a major highway in suburbia? Clearly the country could use less sprawl and more efficient land-use; however, connecting urban centres soley through public transportation is unrealistic and could backfire in the near future while we wean ourselves off of petro dependence. 5% gas tax here in Canada towards municipal public transportation is a good example for reforming the Act, but we also need to remove barriers between places. Burying major highways that cut through downtown areas and improving street-grids in dense areas will minimize urban islands and help to reinvigorate urban slums. Highway improvements (as well as public transportation) between creative urban centres will accelerate collaboration between areas with geographic comparative advantage (ie connecting Toronto’s financial pulse to the technological hub of Waterloo) but please leave-out the highway to nowhere.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:08 pm
If we were burying freeways, as Boston has done, and Seattle plans to do, yes, indeed please bring it on.
But just constantly widening freeways to 8 to 10 lanes seems counterproductive, as they have been doing in Houston.
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 am
More big digs?? I love the results, but wasn’t that one the biggest public boondoggles ever??
Agreed, light and high-speed rail should be the priorities. And my urban gondolas!!! Those would be super-cool if a bit of a stretch financially.
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:49 am
Hayden,
You may be interested to read about the proposed cable car over the Thames in London, if you’re into urban gondolas…
Basically, the new Mayor of London trashed proposals of the previous Mayor for a new bridge over the Thames to connect deprived parts of East London. The Green Party proposed a cable car as a low cost alternative. The idea has had favourable press response and the Mayor is looking into it, I read recently.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Richard, I also read the article and could not agree more. We need to get people to start thinking not about how to apply lessons from the past that got us here but how to move us forward into the next age.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I’m a professional transportation engineer. This article is totally wrong. I support a balanced transportation system, with good highways, good mass transit, and high speed rail. Like it or not, roadways will be in use as long as humans live on this planet.
Highways are the most important and heaviest used transportation mode. Mass transit does not get your bread and milk to your local grocery store, and never will! America’s highways have been neglected and are in disrepair. There are many corridors between important cities which are not served by interstate highways- for example, between Fort Wayne and Toledo, US 24 is a dangerous two-lane highway! Sure, you could build a high-speed rail line between Fort Wayne and Toledo, but the need for a highway between these cities will never be totally supplanted by the existence of a high speed rail line.
Better zoning and land use control is what is needed to reduce sprawl.
Sprawl has occurred in cities that are barely served by freeways, so you can not blame it all on freeways.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Steven: Good points, and I largely agree with what you say. I would point out though that land-use control and zoning are subject to municipal politics and pressure from private interests, more so than highway planning. Land speculators often buy large parcels of green space around future highway interchanges, outside of urban centres, and then apply pressure through political and planning mechanisms to re-classify that green-space for low-density development.
If I were confident in politicians’ ability to stand up to green-field development than I would largely agree with you that land-use control is what is needed to reduce sprawl. Unfortunately, the reality is that politicians often bend to the will of the developer in order to see the short-term development charges and tax base. In turn the city’s planners often are slaves to the politicians’ and approve irresponsible development. It would be rediculous to say that highways are the cause of the flaws in the system or the root cause of sprawl, but highway design is part of the overall problem and so reform is needed in that sector as well in order to reduce green-field land speculation. Road improvements are needed for sustainable economic growth, but building interchanges to nowhere will pave a highway to suburban hell.