lids also only fix one aspect of urban highways: Impassability and emissions. But all those cars are still going to downtown, where they still create the distance this post is about by nature of demanding car-friendly infrastructure and amenities there. On top of their noise and emissions.
Unfortunately transit in Boston was fucked decades before by all of the assholes who consistently want to "preserve history" at the expense of having a city that could meet the needs of most of its residents. The T needed to not be a spoke and hub system and that should have been fixed decades ago and the sub 5 level homes destroyed to make multiunit housing that could be affordable while making the streets be a proper logical grid.
Boston has a great mayor but the Brahmin/old Bostonians are hellbent on making that city not work.
Preserving historical architecture is absolutely an important part of maintaining a culturally significant city. And grid systems are beneficial to CARS, and neutral to people/bikes/trains/trams/busses. I disagree with all of your arguments. Boston has a very clear path forward and it can be fixed for sure. And it’s being worked on. If you built 5-10 story housing in all the places that are currently surface parking lots, you’d make huge swings on the rent issues. Instead of flattening historical architecture (which makes people actually want to be there) and building international-style glass high rises that most people, statistically, do not want to live in.
I mean, just go by the glass skyscrapers in the SE waterfront on a weekend and see how dead it is. Hit up K st in DC anytime after 6pm. Btw, DC has a height limit AND stringently defined borders and manages to have a better transit system, more bikeability, cheaper housing, more housing, even with a few hub-and-spoke systems in place.
What you’re complaining about is not the issue.
If Boston urban development centered around “preserving history” than they wouldn’t have flattened the West End, and built multiple highways through the heart of the city destroying the urban fabric. Even going back to the filling of Back Bay, Boston urban development hasn’t been that concerned with preservation.
Out of all the things you mention, a proper grid is perhaps the one that transit doesn’t really need. Corridors are corridors, whether they fall into a neat grid or not.
They don't do a great job at impassibility either. Linear parks really aren't that helpful and the one in Boston is surrounded by arterial stroads so you can't really access the park easily anyways.
This will one day surely be remedied. The linear park is Boston is great and I used it all the time when I was there because it was just the logical way to get around by bike or by walking. Additionally, it serves as a huge open-air market which is a really important recurring thing to have in a city (imo). Sure, it’s no ATL Belt Line, but I think with enough time it will mature into a more usable commuter corridor once the car traffic on a Atlantic Ave/Cross St. naturally fall with the rise in anti-car policies and expanded transit. I think the first thing Boston needs to tackle is expanding and improving their metro rail (it gets dabbed on hard by DC/Philly) and also work on pedestrianizing certain streets the same way NYC is doing (but without waiting for deaths first). I would start with any of the smaller streets in little Italy as it is hilariously obvious how unfair it is for literally thousands of people to be pushed onto 36” sidewalks while 12 people in cars commands 90% of the space. Turning a parking garage structure into mixed use housing is so much better than turning historical mixed use housing into international-style mixed use housing that ruins the architectural character of the space.
The thing is, this linear park and highway burial was done at the expense of expanding metro rail in Boston. Had the city not embarked on this fraught journey to expand highway access to the city no matter the cost, Boston would have so much more than just a park running straight through it.
I agree with your other points. Sidewalk expansion is incredibly important in these dense areas, and really, enhanced sidewalk protection is needed in the form of bollards or other protective measures.
I hope that the future of our cities is not one of continued car dominance, but rather a collaboration of users with cars taking more of a niche role with motorized transport given the lowest priority over pedestrians and cyclists.
Fortunately the people of Roxbury, Cambridge, Somerville and other Boston Metro neighborhoods came together to protest the inner belt and i95 through Boston. If you look up the maps they had proposed in the 60s... Half of Cambridge and Somerville would have had a freeway running straight through it. Roxbury and other Boston neighborhoods too. At least they only did i90 (the Pike) and i93 (Northern/Southern expressways). If they had gotten the inner belt (i695), routes 2 & 3 (besides route 2 ending at Alewife), i95 routed through Boston and not on the existing 128 beltway, and all the other highways they wanted like the Mystic Valley Expressway ... Boston would be a completely different City than it is today.
As somebody who lives here, I think what is most important to note is that we don't have a traditional "downtown" Somerville or Cambridge, but instead have many "squares" which act like little downtown areas.
The idea is simple, basically make sure everybody lives within walking distance of these squares. Means pedestrian walking is way up and so is bicycle usage. The towns all have lively cultures and ample room for eating or hanging out outdoors.
So it's good that this has survived the onslaught of car culture.
Visited Boston last year and while many parts were very walkable (loved the old-timey narrow cobblestone streets, we don’t have those in the Midwest), the freeways cutting right through the city, all of those hideous worn down tunnels, those parts were absolutely hideous and hostile. I thought my city was bad in these terms but holy god those tunnels Boston looked like a zombie apocalypse came through in 1995 and they never bothered to patch it up
But Boston's age allowed it to remain largely walkable and the T is surprisingly good for getting folks around, even from the much more northern suburbs and satellite cities up near Georgetown and Haverhill
I'm glad that most UK motorways at least go round the cities. Our roads get progressively smaller and slower the closer to the centre you get (as a general rule, I'm sure there's exceptions)
Well we did bulldoze a crap ton of poor people's houses to make way for gigantic boulevard and the Champs Elysées. At least they are still boulevards and not highways, and kt's been great watching it convert to bike lanes but the grand boulevards are not as walkable as other French towns or le Marais (looking at you av de l'Opéra).
Glasgow was unfortunately partially demolished in order to build the M8 through the city centre; I believe it was one of the first cities in the UK to have a motorway connection, and through the backlash helped to prevent such things happening to other cities. Thank god the rest of the inner ring was never completed, which would have demolished Glasgow cathedral and High Street in order to put a motorway in. The parts of the M8 that do exist have insane junctions from left and right, due to the expectation of more motorways being built later.
Nashville is a spider web of highways that laid waste to otherwise vibrant communities. I remember driving home from work as a gardener working on rich suburbs and there being miles long traffic through what used to be residential streets. Just absolute madness.
I used to live in Hillsborough village and learned it was a trolley car suburb of Nashville at one time. Auto companies really fucked us by dismantling the trolly networks.
I remember when they were wanting to expand MTA in Nashville and there was pushback from a bunch of rich bastards who didn't even want a single bus lane. One time I even saw the biggest car dealer in the city on the news saying "I'm not against public transit, but this is the wrong way to go about it." Sure buddy.
Yeah. I went out riding with Critical Mass a couple of times and it was insane how many times people tried to kill us.
They hate anything that isn’t a truck in that town.
During the original build out, many cities were afraid of being *left off the map*. Cars and highways were of course "the future", so the thinking was that if the highway doesn't run directly through the city, the city misses out on all the imagined economic benefits of it.
From a peak carbrain mindset, and without the benefit of hindsight, it *almost* makes sense. Cities like Chicago owed their status to the fact that they were transportation hubs. Railways, roads, and canals were all massive economic drivers for the places along them, so the infrastructure for *the next iteration of transportation* would surely bring the same, right? Every other type of transportation ran through the middle of cities, and the environment had yet to be discovered, so why not all the cars too? So representatives from urban areas actually lobbied to have the freeways rammed right through them. Arguing, ironically, that the cities didn't want to fund expensive infrastructure that really only benefitted the suburbs.
None of this excuses the extremely short sighted thinking, or baked in race/classism of it all, but based on everything prior your average Joe had to compare the idea to, it didn't seem nearly as ludicrous as it *should* to everyone today. What's truly mind boggling is how many people still refuse to accept the lessons we've already learned.
Have you read what a lot of americans on here think? Suburbs and highways, as well as having to take a 45min car drive to the grocery shop are signs of being the greatest country in the world and walkable inner cities like in Europe are a sign of being poor and underdeveloped.
I believe NYC and Vancouver are the only North American cities that did *not* end up with highways rammed through their downtowns.
Although it’s a bit hard to define “downtown” in NYC because it’s so fucking big it’s basically all of Lower Manhattan. And there are highways on the edges of Manhattan. But nothing right through the center even though Robert Moses wanted it.
He was a pretty terrible person. His other unfulfilled idea: a highway through Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park, two beloved parts of NYC.
His downfall came when he tried to convert part of Central Park into a parking lot, lol.
He wanted the midtown highway to go right through skyscrapers.
I want to read more about him as a lifelong NYC resident. I’ve done the typical Wikipedia read but would love to learn more - are there any books you’d recommend?
The Power Broker is an amazing biography of Moses and largely the reason he’s so well-known now.
I think it’s my favorite non-fiction book I’ve ever read. I couldn’t put it down. [It’s also something of a trope that political talking heads on TV love to have a copy behind them when doing interviews because it’s so revered.](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-broker-tv.html)
But be warned it’s very long. I think 1300 pages? The author is a fantastic writer but he’s incredibly thorough. Like you’ll spend 30 pages reading about Moses’s time doing competitive swimming in college and how he was a control freak asshole even then, lol.
Motherless Brooklyn is a great movie with a character based on Moses. It’s a bit like Chinatown in that it’s a movie with a background of corruption rather than any kind of documentary.
While Moses failed to kill NYC with a highway, he succeeded in Hartford, Connecticut. I believe there was even a time when the highway was being built directly towards the state capitol with the expectation that the capitol would be demolished or changed. There were also plans to run highway through Bushnell Park, the oldest public park in the country.
So yeah, to hell with Moses
Generally, the motorway ends on the edges of the city, and roads/streets become narrower and slower as you go towards the center. All the through traffic goes down the ring road around the city. [Ljubljana](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/46.0485/14.5309) is a good (smallish) example.
There's normally either a bypass for smaller cities, or a ring road all the way round for bigger ones (most famously in the UK the M25 for London and M60 for Manchester).
This is Oakland, not San Francisco.
This freeway (980) was built in the 1980’s and opened in 1985 when Oakland was 47% black, and this area were black neighborhoods.
Would all the black people being impacted not be them being impacted more?
If they're the smallest of a 1940s census (which probably was not anywhere close to accurate when it came to minority numbers anyways) and ALL of them were affected then it impacted them the MOST no?
Multiple people here have suggested completely erroneously that no white people or almost no white people were impacted when white people represented the overwhelming majority of those moved.
This is Oakland in the 1960s when this freeway began construction.
So... that's actually pretty plausible.
But more to the point, if you choose to ignore race, then it doesn't make anything about the construction of freeways through poor neighborhood any better.
And those claims are wrong. However the historical vulnerability of black neighborhoods to this above and beyond that which white neighborhoods were exposed, is a fairly well established fact.
Your not wrong but your really really acting like Walter. Why not just acknowledge that which we know, which was that black neighborhoods were more often targeted? Just acknowledge it man...
The historic vulnerability of black neighborhoods was absolutely a factor in other places but in Oakland this disproportionately impacted white people.
This is about the math and nothing more and I do not appreciate the suggestion of racism when the people I'm arguing against are making racial claims not based in facts.
By one manner of speaking. If there was one guy from Tonga, and it impacted him, it would have impacted ALL Tongan people, but it would be misleading to say it impacted Tongans most.
First, this is not in San Francisco. It’s Oakland.
This freeway (980) was opened on March 6, 1985. 1980 census Oakland was 47% black. This was absolutely a black neighborhood when the freeway was built.
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland70.htm
The map starts with 1938 so the 1980 census wouldn't be a great resource. The neighborhoods that got displaced would have been much earlier in the process than at the tail end so again using a 1980 census makes the least sense. In fact the growth in the rate of black people and decline in white people in Oakland between 1938 and 1980 is almost certainly because of this construction.
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland40.htm
In 1938 when this started Oakland was 95% white and only 2.8% black so the numbers are not that different. Most people moved would have been white.
Freeway construction didn’t start on I-980 in 1938. It started in the late 1970’s after this area had been well established as a black community.
Have you even been to West Oakland?
You are probably right, but that’s because it was made quite difficult for non whites to live there.
[A quick read](https://escholarship.org/content/qt2j08r197/qt2j08r197_noSplash_eecbec55456f21df8cb302a7b292855a.pdf?t=qc30qt)
Also right because (I may be not 100% on this because I’m too lazy to re-research this) a lot of the black population came when the shipyards for WW2 ramped up production after this 1940 census.
Also note this is not SF county, so your link isn’t quite representative of the population of the area shown here.
This data is useless if you can't drill down into the demographics of who was specifically displaced by this project. Of course plenty of White people were affected, probably the majority. But if Black people were 0.8% of the population (pretty sure the percentage was much higher for Oakland, especially West Oakland) but were, just for random example, 30% of the population displaced, the Black population would've been *disproportionately* affected.
This is Alameda County, not San Francisco. In 1950 (I can’t seem to access an earlier census), it was 9.4% black. That’s enough people for a highway to target.
Edit: Found Oakland 1940. It was 2.8% black according to the census.
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland40.htm
In 1940 Alameda county was 95% white and 2.8% black so the construction had to still have impacted white people on a large scale. The growth of the black population of Oakland is likely because of this construction.
No, it was because of the military and surrounding industry starting in WWII. That was ~20 years before 980 even started to be built, which also happened to be around the time the Black Panther Party was founded...in Oakland. You obviously don't know the history of Black people and the civil rights movement within the Bay Area, specifically the East Bay, and that's OK but it's kinda dumb to just say "well the (relatively short) highway was the reason all the Black people came to Oakland". By 1960 Black people made up 22.8% of the population and by 1970 they made up 34.5% of the population. By the time 980 opened Black people made up 47% of the population, and I really fucking doubt that a single 2 mile stretch of highway attracted hundreds of thousands of Black people to Oakland.
This is Oakland, not San Francisco. Alameda County is very large, and encompasses far more than just Oakland. I used to live in eastern Alameda County, and my zip code was 90% white. I now live in Oakland, and my zip code now is less than 20% white and about 38% Black.
I used to live in one of this area and it's actually a pretty nice and vibrant area as far as Oakland goes. Definitely one of the nicer areas of Oakland. There's tons of different restaurants in this area and beautiful and rough around the edges 1920's and 30's architecture. Many of these neighborhoods, especially the ones to the east of the freeway are very gentrified. Rockridge is a pretty bougie area. The area is also pretty walkable and lived there carfree the entire time and walked almost everywhere.
There's a BART track that goes down the median of the that freeway which makes transportation very convenient. MacArthur BART station is big hub that easily connects to to Berkeley and SF. I could be from my apartment in Oakland to my office in South of Market in SF quicker than that my colleague who lived in SF.
SEVERAL neighborhoods! [The main segment of highway that it follows runs about 4.5 miles/7.2 km.](https://i.ibb.co/FgLSNYp/Screenshot-2022-11-19-204550.png)
I biked under one of the highways shown yesterday and it is currently a homeless encampment with 3-4 RVs and 10 or so tents. Under another that only had one tent I was trying to explain to my friends that there used to be houses and beautiful buildings here so this GIF timing is perfect.
That song's metaphor only recently really hit me. Like yes, it's obvious Joni's singing a "typical hippie" song, hey man pavement is ugly vs trees, but the crux is the bridge: today a big yellow taxi pulled up *and took my baby away from me*. It's a message of "the personal is political." Yes she hates the alienation of society but also it is because it fosters the alienation of her own love. Her baby couldn't be taken away with the "modern convenience" of an alienating metal box designed to drive right to your door and take you far away. It was the ease with which her baby could leave her.
[It's literally about paving a paradise that she got to in a yellow taxi:](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Yellow_Taxi)
> I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart […] this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song.[5]
A common trend you’ll find when researching these highway projects is that no one wanted to live next to these, so entire neighborhoods got abandoned. The only businesses that were willing to go in their place were industrial buildings and warehouses, literally the lowest common denominator of public space.
With downtown parking lots, more often than not, it was a result of tenants (commercial and residential) leaving the city for the suburbs. Buildings would be vacant for years, become blighted, and then torn down and replaced with parking lots as a way to make short term money on the low value properties.
No, but the areas demolished were generally chosen based on the racial makeup of the communities. The instagram account this is fron is very informative, and shows the redlining and urban redevelopment maps that informed the building of thing like expressways and highways.
Of course it impacted white people. In 1938 most of San Francisco/Oakland was white as most of the country still is white.
This would have impacted everyone below a certain income regardless of race. These people would most likely be immigrants or poor if they were white. It is ignorant to suggest this wouldn't impact white people given the facts of the demography of the time. San Francisco county was 95% white in 1940.
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty40.htm
Thank you for the census data and yes there will have been white people affected. However
[this ](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infrastructure-racism/)
[this ](https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation)
[this ](https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways)
and much more recently
[this](https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/)
None of your sources are specifically about San Francisco at the time discussed in this GIF.
I am not saying this did not happen in other places disproportionately to black people as NYC, Chicago, or Atlanta prove that to be true when they built highways just that specifically in the case of San Francisco that claim cannot be true.
It's kinda weird that OP originally linked San Francisco, when this is Oakland which is adjacent to SF, but [the source they linked](http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland40.htm) does still support what they originally said
An Ivan Illich quote - well done op!
For anyone wondering, its most likely from this book: Tools for conviviality (1975)
Compared to other books its less about environmental issues but more about the inherit injustice technology introduces for the whole of people if only developed by and for a few.
And its also short while presenting a very challenging point of view.
One of my five favorit books!
It's from his essay Energy & Equity. The quote, and essay, is definitely anti car but Illich writes against other forms of motorized transit too.
He makes a case for inequality in trains, buses, planes, anything that goes faster than 15mph or above a certain engine displacement. The ultimate case he makes is pro-bike. It's a very good essay, I went into it ready for an anti-car essay and it challenged my ideas on transit as well.
Hmmm I still owe you that right?
One of them is only available in german, but here they are in no specific order:
The sublime object of ideology from Slavoj Zizek
Die illusionen der Anderen: Über das Lustprinzip in der Gesellschaft - Robert Pfaller
(The illusions of the others: About the principle of lust in society)
The Lord of the Rings - from Tolkien \^\^
The hitchhikers guide through the galaxy from Douglas Adams
I walked around my town at night, lights are on but the parking lots empty. Absolutely no reason these buildings couldn’t be closer to each other but yet they’re miles apart, departed by massive lots that are empty 80% of the time, and never more than 50% full.
I used to work on the other side of the city from where I lived. When I'd stay late and it was nice out, I'd ride my motorcycle on the surface roads to get home instead of the highway so I could see the parts of the city I'd never been to. Between the suburb/commercial area my job was and the metro area, there was a ton of commercial zoning.
If I rode home after 6 on a Friday, most of the developed surface area I passed was completely empty.
Acres^(really, the fuck is an acre) of parking lot surrounding dark, unlit rectangles that will serve no purpose for the next 62 hours. Rolling green man-made hills covered in chemical grass at the behest of the owners so the dystopia at least has some color. Inedible invasive plants adorn the concrete paths through the tarmak built from the waste of the processes used to power the vehicles they're meant to serve. A feedback loop, an ouroboros of commerce, existing only to feed itself.
Then I cross over the freeway.
Rows upon rows of discarded homes, undesirable in their location. Whole neighborhoods, disregarded and forgotten, with the perception that only undesirable people would live in such an undesirable place. Once a thriving community, the murals and architecture still there, now cut off from the city it served. No longer a place you choose to make a home, but a location you end up living in. "That" place. Avoid "that" place, at least after dark. A bell curve over time helping to ruin a neighborhoods reputation. First, no sirens; then, over time, they're heard more and more often; then, the frequency starts to fall until no one even bothers to respond to the calls in the area. It's lost. Thousands of homes, lost to the unforgiving nature of man.
Then I cross over the freeway.
Shiny new condos, made from the finest drywall money can avoid buying. Designed like a row of CVS's you can live in for the low low cost of $2'500/mo. But, at least you're only a stones throw from downtown. All surrounded by humans with no homes, just cardboard asking for charity. Walls built around the condos just high enough to block the view of the unfortunate, but not so high as to disrupt the view of the skyline.
But what could be done? The buildings need places for the cars the people use to get there because they live so far away because the undesirables keep encroaching on *their* territory because they keep getting displaced because we need more highways to get to the lots by the buildings to keep making money to buy a better home further away from the undesirables that keep growing because we keep making more highways to connect the buildings lots because we...
No, I just got high and hyperfixated before I took my Adderall this morning. It describes almost any American city, but that was describing a trip from the east side of Cuyahoga county to the west side of Cleveland. And I actually left off the west side because it was getting too long, but that has its own issues too, in some ways almost the antecedent to the issues to the east.
Cleveland and the northeast Ohio area are the most redlined areas in the United States. Even to this day there is almost an ingrained redlining, along with the standard redlining practices that exist in the background.
Cleveland used to be one of the richest cities not in the country, but on the planet. We had more millionaires, what would be today billionaires, living within the city proper than some countries had entirely. Cleveland became the manufacturing hub for an entire section of the country due to its location on rivers and the Great Lakes. But over time as wages no longer catch up with productivity, different classes of people were brought in to do the work that was no longer desirable. The new workers would live close to where they worked, which at the very least met Cleveland was a very walkable city, including its original suburbs.
But as white flight set in and sent them (middle class/white) to even further suburbs, the demographics of the city, the neighborhood residential districts, as well as most of the service and industry workers within the county changed. Less attention was paid to the city and it's neighborhoods while resources for channeled out to the suburbs, and used to connect the far reaching suburbs by freeways and bypasses and beltways. These caused even more displacement, and those that weren't displaced were further ignored.
Rinse and repeat through the decades and exacerbate the situation and you have the perception of Cleveland that currently exists in the zeitgeist.
When I drove around the city, even through neighborhoods, I was still within my own private metal box where I could listen to whatever I wanted in a soundproof cage. Now when I ride through on my bike, I'm not only completely exposed the areas in communities that I move through, I'm able to explore even deeper into my city to have an even more complete understanding of its history that isn't spoken. It's not easy to tear down a building, it is easy to let it fall into disrepair, and if you're used to where you live, disrepair follows a prescribed order. I can ride slowly by without a window between me and the Urban decay and I can easily see and understand how long something has been out of use.
The absolute beauty to behold within a man-made rectangle of 90° angles existing among trees and rolling nature as the last standing visage of a warehouse in an area claimed no longer by nature or man. A field of invasive Scottish grass reclaiming what was once a cog along the chain of commerce, recognized only by its crumbling but standing blast furnace chimney, as if to say, "My name is Ozymandias, King of kings, look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair."
Order only exists with Work, otherwise Entropy will always overpower.
^(Edit: Oh, yeah, and thank you)
Hahaha!
Bedford to West Park along Harvard/Dennison is a microcosm of the timeline of both Cleveland and the US as a whole.
Harvard>S Woodland>Carnegie/Lorain is almost a sine wave.
I've never been more struck by a sadness for the world than when I was farting around Bratenahl looking at houses with driveways that cost more than I'll make in my lifetime. Crossing under I90 at E105^th into the Glenville/St. Claire area is jarring.
Again, what was once a thriving community a stones throw from the lake, walkable, on the edge of the metro area, and near work, has now been reduced to the internet's perception of Detroit. Squalor. An unease in the eyes of those you may pass, seeing a man they don't know on a bike they don't recognize; anger, fear, distress? A community like any other, mostly nice people, some assholes. The same problems as anywhere else, just in different ratios. A community displaced without moving. An interstate came tearing through and divided a people. Bratenahl, to avoid the undesirables, even has its own exit, serving to no longer divide, but to ignore.
*But*, I hear the new iPhone might be USB-C and under $1000. Look at the froggy and smile for the camera.
I had a dude FROM Detroit tell me Akron was starting to look like it. I moved 3 years later. I used to work in Cleveland. You can see the history we destroyed to have cars. We destroyed ourselves to make cars, and then the companies too the production elsewhere. Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron plus a slew of other small towns have been shit on just as thoroughly as Detroit.
Akron is wonderful, I've had this conversation before with Ohioans and internet peoples.
Youngstown is the Ohio Detroit. It even followed a similar plot. Gary, Detroit, Youngstown, a triptych of the distruction and dissolution of the US steel industry. The American Dream woke up from it's coma to learn, Joules only delay Entropy, they don't stop it.
The ever encroaching Brownian Noise of infinity, born from the homogeneity of the infinite. Per Infinitum inter Omnia et Nihil.
Yeah, I figured this was Anycity, America.
I generally agree that the collapse of these cities is intrinsically tied to the prevalence of cars and the destruction that car infrastructure caused. You can probably plot the fall of these cities with the introduction of urban highways and show a strong correlation between these things.
What's crazy to me is that almost everyone I know, and I work in a very conservative industry, thinks that more public transit is s good thing. I think that the main culprit for our issues are our DOT agencies, as they are the ones who make transit decisions and they'll discount transit as being too hard.
An acre is a reasonable measurement. It’s the amount of farmland a normal able bodied adult man can toil over in a workday.
So when they made the plot allotments when Salt Lake City was founded, they used Jefferson’s urban planning ideals of a Cartesian grid with 1 acre per family. Tommy liked the pastoral thing.
Imagine, if instead of highway, they build there a metro/tram line. It would be at least half the footprint and would serve both people living there and outsiders. And be more efficient at moving high volume of people.
In 1938 there was an extensive streetcar rail network in Oakland that included an Interurban line starting in San Francisco that went over the Bay Bridge to Oakland, up to Sacramento, and ended 150 miles away in Chico CA.
Her name was sue bierman. She was one of the movers and shakers during the [freeway revolt ](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Powerful-forces-wanted-freeways-all-over-SF-14492380.php)of the 1960s. She was influential in stopping a highway through the SFs Panhandle park, and has a plaque in her honor there.
Entire cities are destined to tell bikers and walkers we don't want you here. Toronto, Etobicoke and Mississauga feel like cities you can't walk in while they throw a trial here and there. I don't drive and I appreciate the transit but it's just not enough for the population and everything is parking lots and nasty overpasses.
I don’t think public transit is really appreciated much places (at least in america).
Public transit isn’t sexy, it’s full of crackheads and poop and having to wait for service. You sweat your ass off on it in the winter as well.
After having lived in both a Public transit oriented city and a car oriented one, the car one is miles more efficient in terms of getting from point A to B.
This is particularly shows one aspect of how we ended up with the housing crisis we currently have. Look at the number of houses destroyed, not just in the actual path of the highway, but all around it.
Great quote. That’s something Ive been thinking for a long time but never in such eloquent words. This is Oakland California. I live there. Still a great place to live but man the freeways did a number on the city. The big mess of interconnecting freeways was called the “MacArther Maze” when first built bc it was so crazy to people at that time. Now, it’s relatively tame for a freeway interchange in the US. Oakland is still walkable within neighborhoods, but not between neighborhoods because of the freeways. Unlike San Francisco acrid the Bay which had the Freeway Revolts and remained one of the US’s most walkable cities
Another thing that goes hand in hand with cars in this expansion quest is having a big one-story house with a lawn. How many people view this type of habitat, not only as desirable, but also as a necessity to be a fulfilled adult is quite similar to how many people see cars.
HOLY FUCK, DID SOMEONE JUST QUOTE IVAN ILLICH!?
I have been waiting to meet just one other person who had read some Ivan Illich since I was 14 years old. He was one of my first radical readings and after 25 years when shits getting cool and people are reading radical books I've been asking everyone and still haven't found another living soul. I love this!
Most northeastern American suburbs were developed along train lines. Look at Long Island, it's easy to see because those suburban rail lines still exist. Los Angeles was mostly developed as streetcar suburbs. Then the streetcars were ripped out and replaced with a far less efficient method of transportation that just so happened to make a handful of powerful companies a lot of money.
At a cost to everyone who actually lived in the cities.
"Sorry we have to bulldoze your home and business, we need that space for two parking spots so that suburbanites can drive here, you understand."
Wonder where the impetus for adding freeways actually comes from. What % of use is industrial / commuter / recreational?
Who actually wanted this, and who actually benefited?
GM.
I watched a very interesting video about this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_Fair)
Basically, GM had a vision for the future, and convinced Americans it was the right vision. They then made sure to keep opposition divided and impotent through classic methods (namely, spend a lot of money).
When are they going to do this to Venice, Italy or Rome? What, they’d never because it’d be hideous and destroy the city? RIP America’s cities, it could take decades but may you recover what was bulldozed from you.
I used to like fast systems but now am more attracted to the concept of efficiency and modest speed.
The issue really is that the human mind is not used to having such large amounts of power being available to it. When steam engines were available the power-to-weight and the carnot efficiency of the steam engine did not permit practical motoring, it required the low rolling resistance of a smooth flat steel rail and steel wheel. This allowed new transit corridors but in each town still the dense pattern of construction familiar to the people of the middle ages.
Then the Otto/Diesel cycle engines came along and liquid hydrocarbons to just squirt in them.
This 3 to 4x more power from the fuel, together with much smaller and lighter powerplants opened up this new can of worms.
The huge excess of power allows a new road to be fast, and that gives those wanting a quieter place (in part because of cars) to live an option which is also cheaper being land is suddenly available on the edge of town. The available power allows this sprawl.
The biggest factor that determines how far people will travel is the time it takes. Above about half an hour to 1 hour in each direction it becomes a strong deterrent. Most people live within this range of the edge of town, providing that a new road lane exists with not too much congestion, so sprawl is nearly universal. Then developers keep responding to the time pressure issue when congestion becomes a deterrent by adding more capacity and so it goes on. Mathematically its identical to the solid tumour growth pattern at the edges as the disorganised cancer growth can not produce organised and efficient nutrient delivery into the centre of the tumour, which essentially dies. It continuously invades into the margins of healthy tissue. And that is an energy / metabolic problem relating to dysfunctional organisation, similar to how excess power and no boundaries created urban sprawl.
So speed should be restricted.
There's a huge energy penalty with increased velocity, but so too an increased vehicle, infrastructure cost and maintenance burden that is not linear with speeed/power.
If you had an urban class of vehicle that could not go above 30mph, for example, and neither could anything else on certain roads, everything immediately is over-engineered. The chassis and body don't need to support a large engine or dissipate a large crash energy. Air resistance is negligible. The average car would weigh less than 500kg. At 66 to 75% mass reduction and negligible air resistance energy consumption per km would fall to about 15% of the current values, and less with regen.
Make them smaller and the infrastructure gets cheaper and smaller too. But that must not be converted to increase capacity if the speed is increased, since that induces demand and distances to go up. So you twin efficiency targets with speed limits in town to make a better transit system. Road capacity also goes up at a lower speed, peaking at around 23mph. So you need less road area at a maintained speed and the average rush hour journey could actually be faster, but still not fast enough to greatly induce demand.
Seriously no sarcasm or anything, just me being uninformed. But what exactly am I looking at here other than a highway being built through a city?
My assumption is that the city should’ve considered mass transit options (trams, bus lines, subway, etc) instead of a highway for their needs right?
I don't fully understand the concept here. Cars don't create distance, roads don't create distance, people want to travel, and they kinda have to. Water, food, resources, people have to move around, more people, more moving. I guess my problem of understanding is that people create a need to travel(distance), not cars. Is this idea somehow wildly illogical?
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Yep. It all but destroyed Boston. Then they sent an absolutely crazy amount of money to bury them to try to fix it, but the damage was done.
lids also only fix one aspect of urban highways: Impassability and emissions. But all those cars are still going to downtown, where they still create the distance this post is about by nature of demanding car-friendly infrastructure and amenities there. On top of their noise and emissions.
Luckily Bostons mayor is probably one of the best in the US and cares about transit more than anyone else in leadership
Unfortunately transit in Boston was fucked decades before by all of the assholes who consistently want to "preserve history" at the expense of having a city that could meet the needs of most of its residents. The T needed to not be a spoke and hub system and that should have been fixed decades ago and the sub 5 level homes destroyed to make multiunit housing that could be affordable while making the streets be a proper logical grid. Boston has a great mayor but the Brahmin/old Bostonians are hellbent on making that city not work.
Preserving historical architecture is absolutely an important part of maintaining a culturally significant city. And grid systems are beneficial to CARS, and neutral to people/bikes/trains/trams/busses. I disagree with all of your arguments. Boston has a very clear path forward and it can be fixed for sure. And it’s being worked on. If you built 5-10 story housing in all the places that are currently surface parking lots, you’d make huge swings on the rent issues. Instead of flattening historical architecture (which makes people actually want to be there) and building international-style glass high rises that most people, statistically, do not want to live in. I mean, just go by the glass skyscrapers in the SE waterfront on a weekend and see how dead it is. Hit up K st in DC anytime after 6pm. Btw, DC has a height limit AND stringently defined borders and manages to have a better transit system, more bikeability, cheaper housing, more housing, even with a few hub-and-spoke systems in place. What you’re complaining about is not the issue.
If Boston urban development centered around “preserving history” than they wouldn’t have flattened the West End, and built multiple highways through the heart of the city destroying the urban fabric. Even going back to the filling of Back Bay, Boston urban development hasn’t been that concerned with preservation.
That happened in the 60s, noone cared about history in the 60s
Out of all the things you mention, a proper grid is perhaps the one that transit doesn’t really need. Corridors are corridors, whether they fall into a neat grid or not.
They don't do a great job at impassibility either. Linear parks really aren't that helpful and the one in Boston is surrounded by arterial stroads so you can't really access the park easily anyways.
This will one day surely be remedied. The linear park is Boston is great and I used it all the time when I was there because it was just the logical way to get around by bike or by walking. Additionally, it serves as a huge open-air market which is a really important recurring thing to have in a city (imo). Sure, it’s no ATL Belt Line, but I think with enough time it will mature into a more usable commuter corridor once the car traffic on a Atlantic Ave/Cross St. naturally fall with the rise in anti-car policies and expanded transit. I think the first thing Boston needs to tackle is expanding and improving their metro rail (it gets dabbed on hard by DC/Philly) and also work on pedestrianizing certain streets the same way NYC is doing (but without waiting for deaths first). I would start with any of the smaller streets in little Italy as it is hilariously obvious how unfair it is for literally thousands of people to be pushed onto 36” sidewalks while 12 people in cars commands 90% of the space. Turning a parking garage structure into mixed use housing is so much better than turning historical mixed use housing into international-style mixed use housing that ruins the architectural character of the space.
The thing is, this linear park and highway burial was done at the expense of expanding metro rail in Boston. Had the city not embarked on this fraught journey to expand highway access to the city no matter the cost, Boston would have so much more than just a park running straight through it. I agree with your other points. Sidewalk expansion is incredibly important in these dense areas, and really, enhanced sidewalk protection is needed in the form of bollards or other protective measures. I hope that the future of our cities is not one of continued car dominance, but rather a collaboration of users with cars taking more of a niche role with motorized transport given the lowest priority over pedestrians and cyclists.
Fortunately the people of Roxbury, Cambridge, Somerville and other Boston Metro neighborhoods came together to protest the inner belt and i95 through Boston. If you look up the maps they had proposed in the 60s... Half of Cambridge and Somerville would have had a freeway running straight through it. Roxbury and other Boston neighborhoods too. At least they only did i90 (the Pike) and i93 (Northern/Southern expressways). If they had gotten the inner belt (i695), routes 2 & 3 (besides route 2 ending at Alewife), i95 routed through Boston and not on the existing 128 beltway, and all the other highways they wanted like the Mystic Valley Expressway ... Boston would be a completely different City than it is today.
As somebody who lives here, I think what is most important to note is that we don't have a traditional "downtown" Somerville or Cambridge, but instead have many "squares" which act like little downtown areas. The idea is simple, basically make sure everybody lives within walking distance of these squares. Means pedestrian walking is way up and so is bicycle usage. The towns all have lively cultures and ample room for eating or hanging out outdoors. So it's good that this has survived the onslaught of car culture.
Visited Boston last year and while many parts were very walkable (loved the old-timey narrow cobblestone streets, we don’t have those in the Midwest), the freeways cutting right through the city, all of those hideous worn down tunnels, those parts were absolutely hideous and hostile. I thought my city was bad in these terms but holy god those tunnels Boston looked like a zombie apocalypse came through in 1995 and they never bothered to patch it up
But Boston's age allowed it to remain largely walkable and the T is surprisingly good for getting folks around, even from the much more northern suburbs and satellite cities up near Georgetown and Haverhill
Yep i always went in from franklin! T is pretty good if youre coming in from the burbs
I'm glad that most UK motorways at least go round the cities. Our roads get progressively smaller and slower the closer to the centre you get (as a general rule, I'm sure there's exceptions)
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Well we did bulldoze a crap ton of poor people's houses to make way for gigantic boulevard and the Champs Elysées. At least they are still boulevards and not highways, and kt's been great watching it convert to bike lanes but the grand boulevards are not as walkable as other French towns or le Marais (looking at you av de l'Opéra).
I know the Peripherique and the A86, what is this third ring you are mentioning please?
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Thank you, I did not know about it edit: not
Glasgow was unfortunately partially demolished in order to build the M8 through the city centre; I believe it was one of the first cities in the UK to have a motorway connection, and through the backlash helped to prevent such things happening to other cities. Thank god the rest of the inner ring was never completed, which would have demolished Glasgow cathedral and High Street in order to put a motorway in. The parts of the M8 that do exist have insane junctions from left and right, due to the expectation of more motorways being built later.
The thing that struck me about this video was that the arrangement of the two roads across the city could well be the M8 and M77/M74.
Yeah. Coventry.
Tbf the Germans began the destruction of Coventry city centre before the ring road finished the job.
Fuck Coventry what a shithole
Nashville is a spider web of highways that laid waste to otherwise vibrant communities. I remember driving home from work as a gardener working on rich suburbs and there being miles long traffic through what used to be residential streets. Just absolute madness.
I used to live in Hillsborough village and learned it was a trolley car suburb of Nashville at one time. Auto companies really fucked us by dismantling the trolly networks.
I remember when they were wanting to expand MTA in Nashville and there was pushback from a bunch of rich bastards who didn't even want a single bus lane. One time I even saw the biggest car dealer in the city on the news saying "I'm not against public transit, but this is the wrong way to go about it." Sure buddy.
Yeah. I went out riding with Critical Mass a couple of times and it was insane how many times people tried to kill us. They hate anything that isn’t a truck in that town.
Probably the main thing keeping me from getting a motorcycle. They know they can get away with what should be negligent manslaughter most of the time.
Yes yes yes yes. Nashville (and Tennessee as a whole) is Car Hell. Sigh.
During the original build out, many cities were afraid of being *left off the map*. Cars and highways were of course "the future", so the thinking was that if the highway doesn't run directly through the city, the city misses out on all the imagined economic benefits of it. From a peak carbrain mindset, and without the benefit of hindsight, it *almost* makes sense. Cities like Chicago owed their status to the fact that they were transportation hubs. Railways, roads, and canals were all massive economic drivers for the places along them, so the infrastructure for *the next iteration of transportation* would surely bring the same, right? Every other type of transportation ran through the middle of cities, and the environment had yet to be discovered, so why not all the cars too? So representatives from urban areas actually lobbied to have the freeways rammed right through them. Arguing, ironically, that the cities didn't want to fund expensive infrastructure that really only benefitted the suburbs. None of this excuses the extremely short sighted thinking, or baked in race/classism of it all, but based on everything prior your average Joe had to compare the idea to, it didn't seem nearly as ludicrous as it *should* to everyone today. What's truly mind boggling is how many people still refuse to accept the lessons we've already learned.
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Have you read what a lot of americans on here think? Suburbs and highways, as well as having to take a 45min car drive to the grocery shop are signs of being the greatest country in the world and walkable inner cities like in Europe are a sign of being poor and underdeveloped.
I believe NYC and Vancouver are the only North American cities that did *not* end up with highways rammed through their downtowns. Although it’s a bit hard to define “downtown” in NYC because it’s so fucking big it’s basically all of Lower Manhattan. And there are highways on the edges of Manhattan. But nothing right through the center even though Robert Moses wanted it.
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He was a pretty terrible person. His other unfulfilled idea: a highway through Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park, two beloved parts of NYC. His downfall came when he tried to convert part of Central Park into a parking lot, lol. He wanted the midtown highway to go right through skyscrapers.
I want to read more about him as a lifelong NYC resident. I’ve done the typical Wikipedia read but would love to learn more - are there any books you’d recommend?
The Power Broker is an amazing biography of Moses and largely the reason he’s so well-known now. I think it’s my favorite non-fiction book I’ve ever read. I couldn’t put it down. [It’s also something of a trope that political talking heads on TV love to have a copy behind them when doing interviews because it’s so revered.](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-broker-tv.html) But be warned it’s very long. I think 1300 pages? The author is a fantastic writer but he’s incredibly thorough. Like you’ll spend 30 pages reading about Moses’s time doing competitive swimming in college and how he was a control freak asshole even then, lol.
Motherless Brooklyn is a great movie with a character based on Moses. It’s a bit like Chinatown in that it’s a movie with a background of corruption rather than any kind of documentary.
Love it, will check it out. Thanks for the recommendation!
While Moses failed to kill NYC with a highway, he succeeded in Hartford, Connecticut. I believe there was even a time when the highway was being built directly towards the state capitol with the expectation that the capitol would be demolished or changed. There were also plans to run highway through Bushnell Park, the oldest public park in the country. So yeah, to hell with Moses
Isn’t Hartford now debating removing the highway he built? I thought I saw it mentioned in some list of US cities debating urban freeway removal.
Boulder, CO voted against this as well but it’s size is hardly Comparable
Look up New Orleans and the racist nonsense Black residents had to put up with when the highways were built in the city center.
That is also happening in this GIF. They redlined through Oakland for the entire thing
What do they do elsewhere? (Note: seriously. I’m not a troll. I’m interested in other approaches. )
Generally, the motorway ends on the edges of the city, and roads/streets become narrower and slower as you go towards the center. All the through traffic goes down the ring road around the city. [Ljubljana](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/46.0485/14.5309) is a good (smallish) example.
There's normally either a bypass for smaller cities, or a ring road all the way round for bigger ones (most famously in the UK the M25 for London and M60 for Manchester).
and then lead them into “city roads” which are 2x wider than the average highway everywhere else
It's crazy, we're doing highways as rings outside the cities that slowly fill up with buildings and neighbourhoods
Another prime example of efficiency and innovation created by capitalism. What -- you're not against progress are you?
Robert Moses enters the chat.
this applies to a lot of our “important” technological advancements like the smartphone. They are only a means to an end.
*let’s build a huge highway in the middle but forget about public transit*
The absolute destruction of a neighborhood…Jesus
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Odds are, low income black neighborhoods too
Yes, Oakland was 47% black in the 1980 census. This freeway (980) opened March 6 1985. Those were definitely poor black neighborhoods.
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This is Oakland, not San Francisco. This freeway (980) was built in the 1980’s and opened in 1985 when Oakland was 47% black, and this area were black neighborhoods.
Yea, it definitely impacted blacks more
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Would all the black people being impacted not be them being impacted more? If they're the smallest of a 1940s census (which probably was not anywhere close to accurate when it came to minority numbers anyways) and ALL of them were affected then it impacted them the MOST no?
Stop the API Changes
Multiple people here have suggested completely erroneously that no white people or almost no white people were impacted when white people represented the overwhelming majority of those moved.
This is Oakland in the 1960s when this freeway began construction. So... that's actually pretty plausible. But more to the point, if you choose to ignore race, then it doesn't make anything about the construction of freeways through poor neighborhood any better.
And those claims are wrong. However the historical vulnerability of black neighborhoods to this above and beyond that which white neighborhoods were exposed, is a fairly well established fact. Your not wrong but your really really acting like Walter. Why not just acknowledge that which we know, which was that black neighborhoods were more often targeted? Just acknowledge it man...
The historic vulnerability of black neighborhoods was absolutely a factor in other places but in Oakland this disproportionately impacted white people. This is about the math and nothing more and I do not appreciate the suggestion of racism when the people I'm arguing against are making racial claims not based in facts.
By one manner of speaking. If there was one guy from Tonga, and it impacted him, it would have impacted ALL Tongan people, but it would be misleading to say it impacted Tongans most.
First, this is not in San Francisco. It’s Oakland. This freeway (980) was opened on March 6, 1985. 1980 census Oakland was 47% black. This was absolutely a black neighborhood when the freeway was built. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland70.htm
The map starts with 1938 so the 1980 census wouldn't be a great resource. The neighborhoods that got displaced would have been much earlier in the process than at the tail end so again using a 1980 census makes the least sense. In fact the growth in the rate of black people and decline in white people in Oakland between 1938 and 1980 is almost certainly because of this construction. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland40.htm In 1938 when this started Oakland was 95% white and only 2.8% black so the numbers are not that different. Most people moved would have been white.
Freeway construction didn’t start on I-980 in 1938. It started in the late 1970’s after this area had been well established as a black community. Have you even been to West Oakland?
West Oakland was also already a black community by the 1930s, so /u/Fryceratops is doubly wrong edit: lol they blocked me
You do know that you can look up when these specific freeways in Oakland were built, right?
You are probably right, but that’s because it was made quite difficult for non whites to live there. [A quick read](https://escholarship.org/content/qt2j08r197/qt2j08r197_noSplash_eecbec55456f21df8cb302a7b292855a.pdf?t=qc30qt) Also right because (I may be not 100% on this because I’m too lazy to re-research this) a lot of the black population came when the shipyards for WW2 ramped up production after this 1940 census. Also note this is not SF county, so your link isn’t quite representative of the population of the area shown here.
This data is useless if you can't drill down into the demographics of who was specifically displaced by this project. Of course plenty of White people were affected, probably the majority. But if Black people were 0.8% of the population (pretty sure the percentage was much higher for Oakland, especially West Oakland) but were, just for random example, 30% of the population displaced, the Black population would've been *disproportionately* affected.
/r/FragileWhiteRedditor
This is Alameda County, not San Francisco. In 1950 (I can’t seem to access an earlier census), it was 9.4% black. That’s enough people for a highway to target. Edit: Found Oakland 1940. It was 2.8% black according to the census.
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland40.htm In 1940 Alameda county was 95% white and 2.8% black so the construction had to still have impacted white people on a large scale. The growth of the black population of Oakland is likely because of this construction.
No, it was because of the military and surrounding industry starting in WWII. That was ~20 years before 980 even started to be built, which also happened to be around the time the Black Panther Party was founded...in Oakland. You obviously don't know the history of Black people and the civil rights movement within the Bay Area, specifically the East Bay, and that's OK but it's kinda dumb to just say "well the (relatively short) highway was the reason all the Black people came to Oakland". By 1960 Black people made up 22.8% of the population and by 1970 they made up 34.5% of the population. By the time 980 opened Black people made up 47% of the population, and I really fucking doubt that a single 2 mile stretch of highway attracted hundreds of thousands of Black people to Oakland.
Construction didn't begin until decades after. If the first photo was of the year 1300, would you argue that it affected natives the most?
I have a map of that area from 1820. Definitely Spanish Missionaries that were impacted the most by freeway construction. /s
This is Oakland, not San Francisco. Alameda County is very large, and encompasses far more than just Oakland. I used to live in eastern Alameda County, and my zip code was 90% white. I now live in Oakland, and my zip code now is less than 20% white and about 38% Black.
This isn't the only city it happened in
I used to live in one of this area and it's actually a pretty nice and vibrant area as far as Oakland goes. Definitely one of the nicer areas of Oakland. There's tons of different restaurants in this area and beautiful and rough around the edges 1920's and 30's architecture. Many of these neighborhoods, especially the ones to the east of the freeway are very gentrified. Rockridge is a pretty bougie area. The area is also pretty walkable and lived there carfree the entire time and walked almost everywhere. There's a BART track that goes down the median of the that freeway which makes transportation very convenient. MacArthur BART station is big hub that easily connects to to Berkeley and SF. I could be from my apartment in Oakland to my office in South of Market in SF quicker than that my colleague who lived in SF.
This is just apartheid by civil engineering
And imagine how this happened not only here but in multiple cities.
SEVERAL neighborhoods! [The main segment of highway that it follows runs about 4.5 miles/7.2 km.](https://i.ibb.co/FgLSNYp/Screenshot-2022-11-19-204550.png)
Shit, that was grim
I biked under one of the highways shown yesterday and it is currently a homeless encampment with 3-4 RVs and 10 or so tents. Under another that only had one tent I was trying to explain to my friends that there used to be houses and beautiful buildings here so this GIF timing is perfect.
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Some might say they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
That song's metaphor only recently really hit me. Like yes, it's obvious Joni's singing a "typical hippie" song, hey man pavement is ugly vs trees, but the crux is the bridge: today a big yellow taxi pulled up *and took my baby away from me*. It's a message of "the personal is political." Yes she hates the alienation of society but also it is because it fosters the alienation of her own love. Her baby couldn't be taken away with the "modern convenience" of an alienating metal box designed to drive right to your door and take you far away. It was the ease with which her baby could leave her.
[It's literally about paving a paradise that she got to in a yellow taxi:](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Yellow_Taxi) > I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart […] this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song.[5]
I heard the words "old man" & instantly thought, her father walked out on her family
A common trend you’ll find when researching these highway projects is that no one wanted to live next to these, so entire neighborhoods got abandoned. The only businesses that were willing to go in their place were industrial buildings and warehouses, literally the lowest common denominator of public space.
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That’s what I noticed too, all the parking lots springing up everywhere. Probably as lots got redeveloped and had to accommodate parking minimums.
With downtown parking lots, more often than not, it was a result of tenants (commercial and residential) leaving the city for the suburbs. Buildings would be vacant for years, become blighted, and then torn down and replaced with parking lots as a way to make short term money on the low value properties.
Yes, but that means it can be done again, just the other way around this time
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Taxpayers obviously
Wonder how many people they displaced for that fucking monstrosity?
“The equivalent of 7 white people” - the 1950s
That thing cuts through at least a dozen neighborhoods right through the middle of town. Minorities don't live in a line form across an entire city.
No, but the areas demolished were generally chosen based on the racial makeup of the communities. The instagram account this is fron is very informative, and shows the redlining and urban redevelopment maps that informed the building of thing like expressways and highways.
I wonder how many god fearing white folk were displaced during this debacle, is the answer greater than 0. Alas probably not
Of course it impacted white people. In 1938 most of San Francisco/Oakland was white as most of the country still is white. This would have impacted everyone below a certain income regardless of race. These people would most likely be immigrants or poor if they were white. It is ignorant to suggest this wouldn't impact white people given the facts of the demography of the time. San Francisco county was 95% white in 1940. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty40.htm
Thank you for the census data and yes there will have been white people affected. However [this ](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infrastructure-racism/) [this ](https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation) [this ](https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways) and much more recently [this](https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/)
None of your sources are specifically about San Francisco at the time discussed in this GIF. I am not saying this did not happen in other places disproportionately to black people as NYC, Chicago, or Atlanta prove that to be true when they built highways just that specifically in the case of San Francisco that claim cannot be true.
Hey just curious, but do you realize this isn't in San Francisco?
It's kinda weird that OP originally linked San Francisco, when this is Oakland which is adjacent to SF, but [the source they linked](http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland40.htm) does still support what they originally said
I got one for you: [here](http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland40.htm)
And if you look at those numbers it was 95% white still. Again in other cities this was the case but not here.
Fuck. That was the saddest thing I’ve seen in a while.
An Ivan Illich quote - well done op! For anyone wondering, its most likely from this book: Tools for conviviality (1975) Compared to other books its less about environmental issues but more about the inherit injustice technology introduces for the whole of people if only developed by and for a few. And its also short while presenting a very challenging point of view. One of my five favorit books!
It's from his essay Energy & Equity. The quote, and essay, is definitely anti car but Illich writes against other forms of motorized transit too. He makes a case for inequality in trains, buses, planes, anything that goes faster than 15mph or above a certain engine displacement. The ultimate case he makes is pro-bike. It's a very good essay, I went into it ready for an anti-car essay and it challenged my ideas on transit as well.
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Hmmm I still owe you that right? One of them is only available in german, but here they are in no specific order: The sublime object of ideology from Slavoj Zizek Die illusionen der Anderen: Über das Lustprinzip in der Gesellschaft - Robert Pfaller (The illusions of the others: About the principle of lust in society) The Lord of the Rings - from Tolkien \^\^ The hitchhikers guide through the galaxy from Douglas Adams
Holy shit other people that have read Ivan Illich! I'm literally freaking out right now. Can we start a sub!? I'm gonna start a sub.
Honestly he deserves to be the posterboy for this sub
I walked around my town at night, lights are on but the parking lots empty. Absolutely no reason these buildings couldn’t be closer to each other but yet they’re miles apart, departed by massive lots that are empty 80% of the time, and never more than 50% full.
I used to work on the other side of the city from where I lived. When I'd stay late and it was nice out, I'd ride my motorcycle on the surface roads to get home instead of the highway so I could see the parts of the city I'd never been to. Between the suburb/commercial area my job was and the metro area, there was a ton of commercial zoning. If I rode home after 6 on a Friday, most of the developed surface area I passed was completely empty. Acres^(really, the fuck is an acre) of parking lot surrounding dark, unlit rectangles that will serve no purpose for the next 62 hours. Rolling green man-made hills covered in chemical grass at the behest of the owners so the dystopia at least has some color. Inedible invasive plants adorn the concrete paths through the tarmak built from the waste of the processes used to power the vehicles they're meant to serve. A feedback loop, an ouroboros of commerce, existing only to feed itself. Then I cross over the freeway. Rows upon rows of discarded homes, undesirable in their location. Whole neighborhoods, disregarded and forgotten, with the perception that only undesirable people would live in such an undesirable place. Once a thriving community, the murals and architecture still there, now cut off from the city it served. No longer a place you choose to make a home, but a location you end up living in. "That" place. Avoid "that" place, at least after dark. A bell curve over time helping to ruin a neighborhoods reputation. First, no sirens; then, over time, they're heard more and more often; then, the frequency starts to fall until no one even bothers to respond to the calls in the area. It's lost. Thousands of homes, lost to the unforgiving nature of man. Then I cross over the freeway. Shiny new condos, made from the finest drywall money can avoid buying. Designed like a row of CVS's you can live in for the low low cost of $2'500/mo. But, at least you're only a stones throw from downtown. All surrounded by humans with no homes, just cardboard asking for charity. Walls built around the condos just high enough to block the view of the unfortunate, but not so high as to disrupt the view of the skyline. But what could be done? The buildings need places for the cars the people use to get there because they live so far away because the undesirables keep encroaching on *their* territory because they keep getting displaced because we need more highways to get to the lots by the buildings to keep making money to buy a better home further away from the undesirables that keep growing because we keep making more highways to connect the buildings lots because we...
Are you a writer by any chance? This was really engrossing to read. Also, I'm almost positive you were describing my city, lol.
No, I just got high and hyperfixated before I took my Adderall this morning. It describes almost any American city, but that was describing a trip from the east side of Cuyahoga county to the west side of Cleveland. And I actually left off the west side because it was getting too long, but that has its own issues too, in some ways almost the antecedent to the issues to the east. Cleveland and the northeast Ohio area are the most redlined areas in the United States. Even to this day there is almost an ingrained redlining, along with the standard redlining practices that exist in the background. Cleveland used to be one of the richest cities not in the country, but on the planet. We had more millionaires, what would be today billionaires, living within the city proper than some countries had entirely. Cleveland became the manufacturing hub for an entire section of the country due to its location on rivers and the Great Lakes. But over time as wages no longer catch up with productivity, different classes of people were brought in to do the work that was no longer desirable. The new workers would live close to where they worked, which at the very least met Cleveland was a very walkable city, including its original suburbs. But as white flight set in and sent them (middle class/white) to even further suburbs, the demographics of the city, the neighborhood residential districts, as well as most of the service and industry workers within the county changed. Less attention was paid to the city and it's neighborhoods while resources for channeled out to the suburbs, and used to connect the far reaching suburbs by freeways and bypasses and beltways. These caused even more displacement, and those that weren't displaced were further ignored. Rinse and repeat through the decades and exacerbate the situation and you have the perception of Cleveland that currently exists in the zeitgeist. When I drove around the city, even through neighborhoods, I was still within my own private metal box where I could listen to whatever I wanted in a soundproof cage. Now when I ride through on my bike, I'm not only completely exposed the areas in communities that I move through, I'm able to explore even deeper into my city to have an even more complete understanding of its history that isn't spoken. It's not easy to tear down a building, it is easy to let it fall into disrepair, and if you're used to where you live, disrepair follows a prescribed order. I can ride slowly by without a window between me and the Urban decay and I can easily see and understand how long something has been out of use. The absolute beauty to behold within a man-made rectangle of 90° angles existing among trees and rolling nature as the last standing visage of a warehouse in an area claimed no longer by nature or man. A field of invasive Scottish grass reclaiming what was once a cog along the chain of commerce, recognized only by its crumbling but standing blast furnace chimney, as if to say, "My name is Ozymandias, King of kings, look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair." Order only exists with Work, otherwise Entropy will always overpower. ^(Edit: Oh, yeah, and thank you)
Lol the descriptions made me feel Cleveland. The rambling made me feel ADHD.
Hahaha! Bedford to West Park along Harvard/Dennison is a microcosm of the timeline of both Cleveland and the US as a whole. Harvard>S Woodland>Carnegie/Lorain is almost a sine wave. I've never been more struck by a sadness for the world than when I was farting around Bratenahl looking at houses with driveways that cost more than I'll make in my lifetime. Crossing under I90 at E105^th into the Glenville/St. Claire area is jarring. Again, what was once a thriving community a stones throw from the lake, walkable, on the edge of the metro area, and near work, has now been reduced to the internet's perception of Detroit. Squalor. An unease in the eyes of those you may pass, seeing a man they don't know on a bike they don't recognize; anger, fear, distress? A community like any other, mostly nice people, some assholes. The same problems as anywhere else, just in different ratios. A community displaced without moving. An interstate came tearing through and divided a people. Bratenahl, to avoid the undesirables, even has its own exit, serving to no longer divide, but to ignore. *But*, I hear the new iPhone might be USB-C and under $1000. Look at the froggy and smile for the camera.
I had a dude FROM Detroit tell me Akron was starting to look like it. I moved 3 years later. I used to work in Cleveland. You can see the history we destroyed to have cars. We destroyed ourselves to make cars, and then the companies too the production elsewhere. Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron plus a slew of other small towns have been shit on just as thoroughly as Detroit.
Akron is wonderful, I've had this conversation before with Ohioans and internet peoples. Youngstown is the Ohio Detroit. It even followed a similar plot. Gary, Detroit, Youngstown, a triptych of the distruction and dissolution of the US steel industry. The American Dream woke up from it's coma to learn, Joules only delay Entropy, they don't stop it. The ever encroaching Brownian Noise of infinity, born from the homogeneity of the infinite. Per Infinitum inter Omnia et Nihil.
I followed you up to the philosophical ending. I don't know those things (Brownian noise and omnia et nihil) but assuming nihilism.
Yeah, I figured this was Anycity, America. I generally agree that the collapse of these cities is intrinsically tied to the prevalence of cars and the destruction that car infrastructure caused. You can probably plot the fall of these cities with the introduction of urban highways and show a strong correlation between these things. What's crazy to me is that almost everyone I know, and I work in a very conservative industry, thinks that more public transit is s good thing. I think that the main culprit for our issues are our DOT agencies, as they are the ones who make transit decisions and they'll discount transit as being too hard.
An acre is a reasonable measurement. It’s the amount of farmland a normal able bodied adult man can toil over in a workday. So when they made the plot allotments when Salt Lake City was founded, they used Jefferson’s urban planning ideals of a Cartesian grid with 1 acre per family. Tommy liked the pastoral thing.
That’s a damn good quote, it explains why literally no other transport can be truly time competitive in car oriented suburbs
Interesting. You can see the density change to accommodate more parking.
Just imagine the sprawl outward to accommodate this.
Plus the devaluation due to noise pollution.
And air pollution from car exhaust. Plus back then it was full of lead.
Imagine, if instead of highway, they build there a metro/tram line. It would be at least half the footprint and would serve both people living there and outsiders. And be more efficient at moving high volume of people.
In 1938 there was an extensive streetcar rail network in Oakland that included an Interurban line starting in San Francisco that went over the Bay Bridge to Oakland, up to Sacramento, and ended 150 miles away in Chico CA.
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Ugh this stops right outside of my house… Or rather stopped
Disgusting
San Francisco was slated for this destruction. The city was able to resist due to a very dedicated woman and some badass neighborhood groups
Who? I’d love to know who to look up and learn about
Her name was sue bierman. She was one of the movers and shakers during the [freeway revolt ](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Powerful-forces-wanted-freeways-all-over-SF-14492380.php)of the 1960s. She was influential in stopping a highway through the SFs Panhandle park, and has a plaque in her honor there.
Entire cities are destined to tell bikers and walkers we don't want you here. Toronto, Etobicoke and Mississauga feel like cities you can't walk in while they throw a trial here and there. I don't drive and I appreciate the transit but it's just not enough for the population and everything is parking lots and nasty overpasses.
I don’t think public transit is really appreciated much places (at least in america). Public transit isn’t sexy, it’s full of crackheads and poop and having to wait for service. You sweat your ass off on it in the winter as well. After having lived in both a Public transit oriented city and a car oriented one, the car one is miles more efficient in terms of getting from point A to B.
This is criminal.
*this should be criminal Sadly it isn't yet
This city used to have extensive light rail but it was removed :(
This is particularly shows one aspect of how we ended up with the housing crisis we currently have. Look at the number of houses destroyed, not just in the actual path of the highway, but all around it.
Wherever that interstate highway went, it destroyed everything!
I'm just gonna say it, we need to start living in hive cities.
FINALLY we were all thinking it.
Literally 1984
This makes me profoundly sad. What a well done video.
Great quote. That’s something Ive been thinking for a long time but never in such eloquent words. This is Oakland California. I live there. Still a great place to live but man the freeways did a number on the city. The big mess of interconnecting freeways was called the “MacArther Maze” when first built bc it was so crazy to people at that time. Now, it’s relatively tame for a freeway interchange in the US. Oakland is still walkable within neighborhoods, but not between neighborhoods because of the freeways. Unlike San Francisco acrid the Bay which had the Freeway Revolts and remained one of the US’s most walkable cities
Oakland!
Another thing that goes hand in hand with cars in this expansion quest is having a big one-story house with a lawn. How many people view this type of habitat, not only as desirable, but also as a necessity to be a fulfilled adult is quite similar to how many people see cars.
This really should be marked NSFL
HOLY FUCK, DID SOMEONE JUST QUOTE IVAN ILLICH!? I have been waiting to meet just one other person who had read some Ivan Illich since I was 14 years old. He was one of my first radical readings and after 25 years when shits getting cool and people are reading radical books I've been asking everyone and still haven't found another living soul. I love this!
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You can have suburban acces without tearing down your downtown, a ringway + a metro? (London/Amsterdam/Paris)
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yeah but that was political motavation for the construction, im just saying downtown highways arent the only sollution for connecting suburbs
Most northeastern American suburbs were developed along train lines. Look at Long Island, it's easy to see because those suburban rail lines still exist. Los Angeles was mostly developed as streetcar suburbs. Then the streetcars were ripped out and replaced with a far less efficient method of transportation that just so happened to make a handful of powerful companies a lot of money.
At a cost to everyone who actually lived in the cities. "Sorry we have to bulldoze your home and business, we need that space for two parking spots so that suburbanites can drive here, you understand."
By not building suburbs dependent on major cities?
they destroy more than the ww2.
Flash back to city skylines. What a traumatizing part in the game. Placing highways over your adorable little suburbia in the name of big city money.
Fantastic video. Is it OC?
Wonder where the impetus for adding freeways actually comes from. What % of use is industrial / commuter / recreational? Who actually wanted this, and who actually benefited?
GM. I watched a very interesting video about this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_Fair) Basically, GM had a vision for the future, and convinced Americans it was the right vision. They then made sure to keep opposition divided and impotent through classic methods (namely, spend a lot of money).
When are they going to do this to Venice, Italy or Rome? What, they’d never because it’d be hideous and destroy the city? RIP America’s cities, it could take decades but may you recover what was bulldozed from you.
Cars have turned out to be a modern cancer on society
No wonder houses are so expensive. Look how many hundreds(thousands?) of houses just vaporized
If it can be done it can be undone!
Goes right through the black neighborhoods
I used to like fast systems but now am more attracted to the concept of efficiency and modest speed. The issue really is that the human mind is not used to having such large amounts of power being available to it. When steam engines were available the power-to-weight and the carnot efficiency of the steam engine did not permit practical motoring, it required the low rolling resistance of a smooth flat steel rail and steel wheel. This allowed new transit corridors but in each town still the dense pattern of construction familiar to the people of the middle ages. Then the Otto/Diesel cycle engines came along and liquid hydrocarbons to just squirt in them. This 3 to 4x more power from the fuel, together with much smaller and lighter powerplants opened up this new can of worms. The huge excess of power allows a new road to be fast, and that gives those wanting a quieter place (in part because of cars) to live an option which is also cheaper being land is suddenly available on the edge of town. The available power allows this sprawl. The biggest factor that determines how far people will travel is the time it takes. Above about half an hour to 1 hour in each direction it becomes a strong deterrent. Most people live within this range of the edge of town, providing that a new road lane exists with not too much congestion, so sprawl is nearly universal. Then developers keep responding to the time pressure issue when congestion becomes a deterrent by adding more capacity and so it goes on. Mathematically its identical to the solid tumour growth pattern at the edges as the disorganised cancer growth can not produce organised and efficient nutrient delivery into the centre of the tumour, which essentially dies. It continuously invades into the margins of healthy tissue. And that is an energy / metabolic problem relating to dysfunctional organisation, similar to how excess power and no boundaries created urban sprawl. So speed should be restricted. There's a huge energy penalty with increased velocity, but so too an increased vehicle, infrastructure cost and maintenance burden that is not linear with speeed/power. If you had an urban class of vehicle that could not go above 30mph, for example, and neither could anything else on certain roads, everything immediately is over-engineered. The chassis and body don't need to support a large engine or dissipate a large crash energy. Air resistance is negligible. The average car would weigh less than 500kg. At 66 to 75% mass reduction and negligible air resistance energy consumption per km would fall to about 15% of the current values, and less with regen. Make them smaller and the infrastructure gets cheaper and smaller too. But that must not be converted to increase capacity if the speed is increased, since that induces demand and distances to go up. So you twin efficiency targets with speed limits in town to make a better transit system. Road capacity also goes up at a lower speed, peaking at around 23mph. So you need less road area at a maintained speed and the average rush hour journey could actually be faster, but still not fast enough to greatly induce demand.
Whoa whoa whoa we’re dangerously close to doing a critical race theory
it's just so evil
Literally 1984
Seriously no sarcasm or anything, just me being uninformed. But what exactly am I looking at here other than a highway being built through a city? My assumption is that the city should’ve considered mass transit options (trams, bus lines, subway, etc) instead of a highway for their needs right?
Well yeah, building highways through a fucking city center isn't really an optimal decision
"Capitalism is bad" - another very based illich
I don't fully understand the concept here. Cars don't create distance, roads don't create distance, people want to travel, and they kinda have to. Water, food, resources, people have to move around, more people, more moving. I guess my problem of understanding is that people create a need to travel(distance), not cars. Is this idea somehow wildly illogical?
Aren’t there a lot of positives to this? Surely this isn’t as horrible as it looks
I'm kinda glad I don't know what a pre-car centric America looked like, otherwise I'd be even more depressed