The Wired article he linked raised congestion pricing as the only viable solution, which seems like a good theory, but I’m unclear how it could actually be implemented efficiently without being sharply at odds with American culture. Mail a bill to each vehicle the way Colorado’s E470 does? Toll booths all over the city? Mandatory tracking devices in all vehicles? Americans generally don’t like the idea of having to pay simply to drive.
Perhaps someone who’s lived in one of the cities that uses congestion pricing can explain.
I’m trying to do the most appropriate comparison here…
Scenario 1 (actually happened): They built a new road. It alleviated traffic in other parts of the city for a while. They the area got developed, and traffic slowed down to the point where it was no longer a useful bypass, so the city was no better off than it had been previously.
Scenario 2 (counterfactual): No new road. Traffic initially stayed as-is. New development occurred in another part of the city, where traffic inevitably got worse, probably with spillover effects elsewhere.
Ignoring the costs of the road, Scenario 1 seems better than Scenario 2. But I’m sure there are numerous variables I’m missing.
Thanks! I can see how that works for London. It seems to require all motorists to register before driving in the area. I don’t think that would go over well in the US, if some random municipality on an interstate drive-through route did the same thing.
Can you describe the argument in favor of that light rail? I mean, on the theoretical side, not the empirical side where they put it in the plans and it survived a referendum? Is it expected to relieve traffic congestion? Improve mobility for poor people? Make certain new development feasible?
The general argument: a lot of people live and work within a few mile radius of downtown, and most are heavily car dependent due to the poor reach of current transit system. The beltline was designed to add more transit and spur dense adjacent development near the city, leading to increased transit usage and fewer cars on the road. Zoning for beltline adjacent areas was greatly increased compared to nearby areas to allow mid rise and higher development in anticipation of rail.
I think they want everyone to register, I’m not sure it’s a requirement.
I don’t live in Illinois, but I drove on an Illinois toll road last year. It happens to be the most eastern 8 miles on I-80.
No toll booths and I didn’t register in advance (I could have registered online). A month later, I got a bill in the mail for my toll, including an extra charge for mail billing. I assume they got my address from my state’s car registration data using my license plate number.
I don’t know what they would have done if I had just blown it off. I assume that if I lived in Illinois and made it a habit of driving on that road while not paying the toll, they would have eventually found a way to collect.
(I drove the same road once a year earlier and they did not charge me for that trip. I don’t know how many cars their equipment misses.)
I had a similar experience driving a rental car in Florida about 10 years ago.
I know for moving violations states generally reciprocate to where eventually you will run into a problem in your home state renewing your driver’s license and registering your vehicle. But they generally don’t for parking violations.
I would guess that toll violations would be more similar to moving violations than parking violations but I don’t actually know. I’ve never not paid a toll.
Yeah, that seems similar to how Colorado does it. I’m skeptical how efficiently congestion tolls could be collected, when it’s every vehicle that enters a city in a given day, as opposed to a single limited-access highway.
I would say right here in Louisville we added a second bridge across the Ohio for I-65 to take it from 6 lanes total to 12 lanes total. They also built a new crossing east of the city where a lot of development had occurred on both sides of the river. This made traffic flow much better all over the city.
I expect that people don’t (usually) abandon houses closer in and move further out. The additional houses built at greater distances are the result of a growing population.
Yep, that’s why I included the word “usually” in my post.
The house I grew up in is abandoned. Most of the houses on that block are either gone or boarded up.
But, just two blocks east, houses are still occupied and look okay. They are just slightly bigger and they have brick facades. They sell for less than $100k. My folks house was the minimum you could build in 1940 and get an FHA loan. Nobody wants something that basic today.
Detroit’s population peaked in 1970. What would Detroit look like if they had quit building freeways then? Detroit was never a financial center – it was a factory town. None of the auto companies headquarters were downtown - GM was 3 miles north, Chrysler 5 miles north, and Ford 9 miles west. GM moved downtown in 1977 to the “Renaissance Center”, the name says a lot. It’s hard for me to picture high density, walkable urban neighborhoods in Detroit after they started building cars. There wasn’t much city there before.
There was a homeless encampment in the next city over (Waterloo), right at a main intersection downtown. Tents, then drugs and fires and tales of sexual exploitation of minors, etc etc. Plus, like, it was RIGHT THERE.
They built a bunch of tiny homes beside the dump. Nobody’s complained lol.
They did during the 1950s & 1960s but to your point I think that shift has already happened and now it’s mostly just growing population. Sure, some individuals move further out while out-of-towners move into the city. But in aggregate mostly just cities growing.
A growing city’s development is like putting icing on cake. The new layers make the whole thing a bit thicker throughout and a little wider edge to edge.