11 ms·

Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

223 points by atomatica 11y ago

programminggeek 11y ago
At one point in time an extensive road system is a competitive advantage. At another, it makes less sense. The same thing happened with Railroads during their heyday. I remember seeing an old railroad map with stops at all these small towns in Nebraska. Now, railroads are almost entirely commercial with very few passenger stops in small towns. It makes sense that at some point you just don't have the need for so many roads. If more people move to urban or even suburban city centers, things like public transportation, ride sharing, Uber, and even self-driving vehicles start to make a lot of sense and cut down a lot on driving volume and the need for roads.
- angersock 11y ago
  Well, to be fair, the history of railroads in the US is kinda crackheaded.
  - Yhippa 11y ago
    What do you mean by that?
    - angersock 11y ago
      See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Pre-Amtrak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Pre-Amtrak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_t... Basically, an ongoing waterfall of corruption, regulation, NIMBYism, unfair (arguably) competition from other sectors, and a lot else. It's not quite accurate to just say "Well, passenger rail is dead" as though it was some natural progression of things--especially when you look at it working in other nations.
      - Aloha 11y ago
        Show me another nation /of our geographical size/ with active well used long distance passenger rail outside of a few highly dense corridors - a hint, it doesn't exist - people will nearly always choose speed. There are very few passenger rail systems with higher than 90% farebox recovery - and none in a country of our geographical size. That said, I'm in favor of keeping amtrak for strategic reasons (a trained pool of operating talent for national emergencies).
        CamTin 11y ago
        What kind of emergencies? Ones where we suddenly have to run a lot of passenger trains?
        Aloha 11y ago
        Ones where for a variety of reasons airspace is closed - WWII would not have been possible for us without railroads - the railroads moves huge numbers of men and materiel cross country faster than aircraft could - railroads also use much less fuel to do it than nearly any method of transport. While I cant think of a tactical situation where we couldn't airlift troops inside the continental US - the skills pool is worthwhile to keep for the 500 million a year is costs the country (a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the rest of the federal government).
        CamTin 11y ago
        WWII wasn't possible without the railroads because the interstate highways hadn't been built yet. They are now, and as a result our rail network has become useless for personnel and troop transport. Sure, we can press our amazing freight network into service for logistics, but there's no reason to prop up Amtrak to keep those skills and infrastructure around, since the freight carriers show no signs of being in danger of extinction anytime soon. But that's freight. If there's really a situation where we need to move vast numbers of /people/ around the country, the few dozen passenger consists that Amtrak owns or leases are just not gonna do the job. It would need to be the highways (probably pressing transit and school buses into service) or nothing. It's possible that the NE corridor services could be helpful in an emergency, but for the vast majority of the country, the idea that Amtrak could be pressed into service as anything other than a minor sideline during a major evacuation or emergency is a just a weird fantasy.
    - rpcope1 11y ago
      For starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... A lot of the removal of rail capacity has been short-sighted, and often for the gain of automobile manufacturers.
      - Aloha 11y ago
        Don't conflate streetcars and interurban's with all passenger rail.
mholt 11y ago
I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than deteriorated pavement and have much lower maintenance costs. I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch, but I agree that, outside of cities, most routes don't need to be paved - you can safely travel 50 mph on a flat, straight gravel road. Of course the main arteries - Hwy 52, Hwy 20, I-80, and many others need to stay maintained. But there are so many small roads that, although quaint and a pleasure to drive, are probably unnecessary from a utilitarian/practical point of view.
- markbnj 11y ago
  My first thought on reading the post was to ask whether an analysis of roads strictly in terms of aggregate capacity even makes sense? It seems to me you have to ask where people are, where they need to go and why. Between any two travel points you can perform a capacity analysis, but doing so in the aggregate would, I think, shortchange a lot of smaller places.
  - remarkEon 11y ago
    Another Midwesterner, here (Minnesota, with family in Iowa and South Dakota). I think you're correct on the potential to shortchange a lot of the smaller towns. For example, the high school my dad went to (a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away) has since been consolidated with 2 other school districts, so some of the demand for roads has shifted to more of the main highways instead of a lot of the smaller, more rural roadways. Same thing happened to the school districts my cousins went to in South Dakota. Now, for the most part, they travel on I90 and I29 to Sioux Falls. I think the gp is correct in saying that "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a hyperbole. But I'd be curious to see what their DOT's plans are for collecting data on that capacity usage, and how it will play out, politically, if there are serious proposals to start to rein in spending on rural road upkeep in low usages places.
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- jsonne 11y ago
  The article is referring to Iowa not Kansas.
kylec 11y ago
Per capita driving may have peaked, but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road. As long as those drivers can afford the tax burden to maintain the aging infrastructure, sure.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Transportation infrastructure spending at the federal level is currently 3%.[1] You could always argue that is low due to a lack of investment, but it pales in comparison to federal entitlement spending (59%). I'd be much more worried about the tax burden due to entitlement spending than I would about transportation infrastructure. [1]http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-fede...
    - superuser2 11y ago
      The social good supported by entitlement spending is sick people not dying and poor people not starving or being homeless. The social "good" supported by highways is geographical separation between the middle class and the poor (which largely means the white and everyone else.)
      - CamperBob2 11y ago
        Wow.
      - kps 11y ago
        > which largely means the white and everyone else. Ah, that explains why highways only exist in the United States.
w1ntermute 11y ago
Charles Marohn of Strong Towns (http://www.strongtowns.org/ http://www.strongtowns.org/), who is quoted in the article, did a great podcast interview a while back on "how the post-World War II approach to town and city planning has led to debt problems and wasteful infrastructure investments": http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html
cjslep 11y ago
"The [Iowa] primary highway system makes up over 9,000 miles (14,000 km), a mere 8 percent of the U.S. state of Iowa's public road system." [0] So while laudable, it would be very nice if North Carolina followed suit with its ~79,000 miles of maintained roads (largest of any state) [1]. But I doubt that would happen, my friend at NCDOT says the culture emphasizes building new roads (or the ones that get wiped out by hurricanes out on the outer banks), and change intersections in a manner that borders on the whimsical. We like to build roads in challenging places, it seems [2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Primary_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Primary_Highway_System [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_12
- gtCameron 11y ago
  North Carolina does not have the most maintained roads of any state, they have "largest state maintained highway network in the United States." This is a function of them choosing to maintain roads at the state level instead of the county level. If you look at road miles by state [0] regardless of the actual entity that maintains them, they are 16th. [0] http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/ http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/
  - amyjess 11y ago
    Their highway network is still pretty large, though. Texas also has an all-state-maintained system (except for toll roads, which are private, but the free service roads are still state-maintained... and Texas tends to favor adding service roads wherever possible), and their road network is the second-largest state-maintained highway network in the US. When you compare the physical size of the two states, NC really comes off as having an excessive amount of roads.
    - gtCameron 11y ago
      Texas as roughly 5x the size of NC by landmass, and has approximately 3x the number of road miles. However, NC is more densely populated than TX. If you look at it by road mile per person they are almost identical.
AcerbicZero 11y ago
A bit old, but still relevant - http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that if heavily loaded trucks are causing a disproportionate amount of damage they should be taxed at a rate which allows for proper maintenance of those roads.
- innguest 11y ago
  Yes, and women should pay more for health insurance since they go to the doctor more often. However neither of those things will happen because common sense and communism are polar opposites despite their shared etymological roots. EDIT: sophists can downvote but what they can't do is cope, or they would engage my arguments. EDIT 2: for the slow, the argument is that it is natural to want those who use a resource the most to pay the most, but people had rather not see this obvious truth when you replace trucks with women. To want trucks to pay more (I bet many leftists would agree with that after all "truck are driving for profit" and profit is bad in the eyes of leftists) for using the same roads because they use it more, and then to not want women to pay more towards health insurance because she uses doctors more, is the sort of contradiction that you can only find in a leftist's brain. EDIT 3: Men and women both profit from going to the doctor. Otherwise they would not go, it would be a waste of their time. There's a cost to opportunity and the fact that a person chooses to go to a doctor over doing something else means, praxeologically speaking, that they stand to profit more from going to the doctor than doing anything else, including not going to the doctor. EDIT 4: Hi jordan, thanks for your comment. The solution to the hitch is to break the healthcare monopoly. Trucks now, if roads were too expensive for them, would have no choice but to exit the market as you said; but if there were competition in roads then they could strike a deal with a competitor road provider and switch over, as I can do if Apple doesn't want my app, I can sell it to Android users. Of course I'm not suggesting women should "exit the market" because that would be the end of people. But we're not far off from the end of people if healthcare is a monopoly either. Competition in healthcare would allow for entrepreneurs to come up with ways to cut down on costs for women-related care. P.S.: link for you: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10718692 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10718692 -> "Studies have shown that women use more health care services than men."
darkstar999 11y ago
So how do you let roads "deteriorate and go away"? Wouldn't there be huge unsafe potholes in the transition? What kind of roads would they abandon? I didn't click through to all the references, but this article doesn't give any solutions.
- sophacles 11y ago
  Huge chunks of the midwest are a paved checkerboard of roads spaced at 1 mile intervals. Many of these get 3-5 cars passing a day, if that. There is no need for a lot of these to be paved, as they serve as field access roads. The houses off these roads are farm houses, and most of the farmers I know don't mind either way if it's a gravel or paved road. Some actually prefer gravel, as in the winter, when it is icy, the gravel can provide better traction, and the county doesn't do a good job plowing.
  - computmaxer 11y ago
    That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are definitely roads checkerboarded at 1 mile intervals, but most are gravel in between some paved ones.
    - sophacles 11y ago
      This may vary state to state. I know that in IL it seems that well over half of them are paved, or tarred gravel. The southern end of IL has less of this tho... but the amount paved is increasing. When I was a kid visiting relatives, I learned to drive on a lot of gravel roads, but heading down there for a funeral not long ago, most of the gravel I learned to drive on is paved now.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Paving rate varies but can be quite high. The one mile grid though is quite prevalent.
- ocschwar 11y ago
  It's not so much the roads as the BRIDGES. Iowa's road map was drawn from afar, before any surveyors could look at it, so there are a lot of bridges keeping the road grid continuous over rivers, creeks and dry streambeds.
raldi 11y ago
The article has a map showing which states have already hit peak traffic; does anyone know of a per-municipality or per-county list? I'm really curious about whether this has happened in San Francisco.
- vl 11y ago
  Yep, it's unclear how it's measured and if the metric applied correctly. For example, in Seattle traffic jams get only worse over years. Clearly it hasn't "peaked". Yet map from the article shows that it peaked in the Washington state as a whole.
  - nulltype 11y ago
    Hilariously, the graph in the article is "Vehicle Miles Travelled" not "Hours spent in vehicle" which could be increasing while the other decreases.
    - tsotha 11y ago
      Yeah, something like "average highway speed" would be a better metric.
ashmud 11y ago
One thing I learned, whether accurate or not, from the original SimCity is road maintenance is expensive. I almost invariably ended up peaking city size as the roads entered a constant state of disrepair.
closetnerd 11y ago
This may make sense in Iowa but it makes no sense in California. Gravel roads would would slow the effective max speed down to a crawl which would further exasperate traffic. If anything we need a higher driving speeds.
- CalRobert 11y ago
  Higher speeds generally increase traffic rather than decrease it, as following distance increases (or, if it doesn't, traffic due to wrecks will slow you down anyway). That being said, I live in CA and would love a model much like Germany, with unrestricted freeways in the rural areas and speed limits around 15-20 mph in towns and cities. Going down I-5 to socal? Sure, do 150. Driving in a town where there could be people walking, cyclists, vehicles stopping often, etc,? Maybe 15 makes more sense. Of course, not giving a license to just anyone with a pulse would be a start. My grandmother (lovely woman, but 91 and clearly past her driving years) failed her written driving test a few weeks ago. What did the DMV do? They _extended_ her license another two months, for reasons that escape me. "You can continue to drive despite a demonstrated ignorance of driving law" is pretty much what we're saying there. Also, California is big. A lot of it probably resembles Iowa more than SF in terms of road infrastructure - ever head out to the more remote parts?
  - hn9780470248775 11y ago
    The German Autobahn (equivalent to Interstate highways here) is entirely limited-access, high-speed (minimum speed limit 100 km/h; often no speed limit). The German Bundesstrasse (equivalent to U.S. or state highways?) does have highly variable speed limits, as you describe, and I found them correspondingly maddening to drive on, due to the incessant need to accelerate or decelerate.
    - CalRobert 11y ago
      Indeed - in my view this correlates to one of the best places in the world to drive. Variable limits seem more logical than assuming one speed can always be the best for current conditions. Road throughput (vehicle-miles per hour) can be maximized at a lower speed when traffic is heavy, so limits are reduced. Conversely, when traffic is light the minimization of individual travel time can be prioritized, so limits can be raised.
mark-r 11y ago
I've always thought that total vehicle miles are capped by the availability of gas. Since fracking has expanded that supply, at least in the short term, I'd expect those mileage charts to start upticking again.
- cossatot 11y ago
  Gasoline usage is pretty inelastic in the US: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19191 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19191
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Total vehicle miles are goverened by both oil prices and demographics. You're seeing a huge shift in demographics currently in the US, which will drive down vehicle miles. http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2015/03/dot-vehicle-miles-driven-increased-49.html http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2015/03/dot-vehicle-miles-... > However gasoline prices are just part of the story. The lack of growth in miles driven over the last 7 years was probably also due to the lingering effects of the great recession (lack of wage growth), the aging of the overall population (over 55 drivers drive fewer miles) and changing driving habits of young drivers.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Related: I need to confirm the trend held, but as of a year or two ago, US FAA RITA data showed peak aviation fuel in 2000. Total departures and passenger miles have been higher since, but due to smaller and more fully loaded aircraft. By 2010- 2012 or so, actual fuel use was ~50% of year 2000 forecast estimates.
dataker 11y ago
I briefly studied in South Dakota and Iowa without a car and it was a living nightmare. Relying on friends and "taxis", I had to go through negative temperatures to get a simple can of soda. After that, I could never complain about BART.
- bkjelden 11y ago
  Cars are pretty much a requirement in a rural area like that. But on the plus side, cars are a lot easier to own in those areas. Parking is usually free/cheap. Traffic is very low, etc.
gremlinsinc 11y ago
I think the a lot of places should focus on expanding major roads/thoroughfares, and cities.. But look into bricks/dirt/gravel for country/side roads. would be nice if after self-driving cars, comes self-flying aerocars, cause then we won't need roads at all except in the city where air traffic would get super bogged down.

223 points by atomatica 11y ago

At one point in time an extensive road system is a competitive advantage. At another, it makes less sense. The same thing happened with Railroads during their heyday. I remember seeing an old railroad map with stops at all these small towns in Nebraska. Now, railroads are almost entirely commercial with very few passenger stops in small towns. It makes sense that at some point you just don't have the need for so many roads. If more people move to urban or even suburban city centers, things like public transportation, ride sharing, Uber, and even self-driving vehicles start to make a lot of sense and cut down a lot on driving volume and the need for roads.

angersock 11y ago
Well, to be fair, the history of railroads in the US is kinda crackheaded.
- Yhippa 11y ago
  What do you mean by that?
  - angersock 11y ago
    See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Pre-Amtrak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Pre-Amtrak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_t... Basically, an ongoing waterfall of corruption, regulation, NIMBYism, unfair (arguably) competition from other sectors, and a lot else. It's not quite accurate to just say "Well, passenger rail is dead" as though it was some natural progression of things--especially when you look at it working in other nations.
    - Aloha 11y ago
      Show me another nation /of our geographical size/ with active well used long distance passenger rail outside of a few highly dense corridors - a hint, it doesn't exist - people will nearly always choose speed. There are very few passenger rail systems with higher than 90% farebox recovery - and none in a country of our geographical size. That said, I'm in favor of keeping amtrak for strategic reasons (a trained pool of operating talent for national emergencies).
      - CamTin 11y ago
        What kind of emergencies? Ones where we suddenly have to run a lot of passenger trains?
        Aloha 11y ago
        Ones where for a variety of reasons airspace is closed - WWII would not have been possible for us without railroads - the railroads moves huge numbers of men and materiel cross country faster than aircraft could - railroads also use much less fuel to do it than nearly any method of transport. While I cant think of a tactical situation where we couldn't airlift troops inside the continental US - the skills pool is worthwhile to keep for the 500 million a year is costs the country (a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the rest of the federal government).
        CamTin 11y ago
        WWII wasn't possible without the railroads because the interstate highways hadn't been built yet. They are now, and as a result our rail network has become useless for personnel and troop transport. Sure, we can press our amazing freight network into service for logistics, but there's no reason to prop up Amtrak to keep those skills and infrastructure around, since the freight carriers show no signs of being in danger of extinction anytime soon. But that's freight. If there's really a situation where we need to move vast numbers of /people/ around the country, the few dozen passenger consists that Amtrak owns or leases are just not gonna do the job. It would need to be the highways (probably pressing transit and school buses into service) or nothing. It's possible that the NE corridor services could be helpful in an emergency, but for the vast majority of the country, the idea that Amtrak could be pressed into service as anything other than a minor sideline during a major evacuation or emergency is a just a weird fantasy.
  - rpcope1 11y ago
    For starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... A lot of the removal of rail capacity has been short-sighted, and often for the gain of automobile manufacturers.
    - Aloha 11y ago
      Don't conflate streetcars and interurban's with all passenger rail.

mholt 11y ago

I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than deteriorated pavement and have much lower maintenance costs. I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch, but I agree that, outside of cities, most routes don't need to be paved - you can safely travel 50 mph on a flat, straight gravel road. Of course the main arteries - Hwy 52, Hwy 20, I-80, and many others need to stay maintained. But there are so many small roads that, although quaint and a pleasure to drive, are probably unnecessary from a utilitarian/practical point of view.

markbnj 11y ago
My first thought on reading the post was to ask whether an analysis of roads strictly in terms of aggregate capacity even makes sense? It seems to me you have to ask where people are, where they need to go and why. Between any two travel points you can perform a capacity analysis, but doing so in the aggregate would, I think, shortchange a lot of smaller places.
- remarkEon 11y ago
  Another Midwesterner, here (Minnesota, with family in Iowa and South Dakota). I think you're correct on the potential to shortchange a lot of the smaller towns. For example, the high school my dad went to (a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away) has since been consolidated with 2 other school districts, so some of the demand for roads has shifted to more of the main highways instead of a lot of the smaller, more rural roadways. Same thing happened to the school districts my cousins went to in South Dakota. Now, for the most part, they travel on I90 and I29 to Sioux Falls. I think the gp is correct in saying that "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a hyperbole. But I'd be curious to see what their DOT's plans are for collecting data on that capacity usage, and how it will play out, politically, if there are serious proposals to start to rein in spending on rural road upkeep in low usages places.
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jsonne 11y ago
The article is referring to Iowa not Kansas.

kylec 11y ago

Per capita driving may have peaked, but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road. As long as those drivers can afford the tax burden to maintain the aging infrastructure, sure.
- refurb 11y ago
  Transportation infrastructure spending at the federal level is currently 3%.[1] You could always argue that is low due to a lack of investment, but it pales in comparison to federal entitlement spending (59%). I'd be much more worried about the tax burden due to entitlement spending than I would about transportation infrastructure. [1]http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-fede...
  - superuser2 11y ago
    The social good supported by entitlement spending is sick people not dying and poor people not starving or being homeless. The social "good" supported by highways is geographical separation between the middle class and the poor (which largely means the white and everyone else.)
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Wow.
    - kps 11y ago
      > which largely means the white and everyone else. Ah, that explains why highways only exist in the United States.

w1ntermute 11y ago

Charles Marohn of Strong Towns (http://www.strongtowns.org/ http://www.strongtowns.org/), who is quoted in the article, did a great podcast interview a while back on "how the post-World War II approach to town and city planning has led to debt problems and wasteful infrastructure investments": http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

cjslep 11y ago

"The [Iowa] primary highway system makes up over 9,000 miles (14,000 km), a mere 8 percent of the U.S. state of Iowa's public road system." [0] So while laudable, it would be very nice if North Carolina followed suit with its ~79,000 miles of maintained roads (largest of any state) [1]. But I doubt that would happen, my friend at NCDOT says the culture emphasizes building new roads (or the ones that get wiped out by hurricanes out on the outer banks), and change intersections in a manner that borders on the whimsical. We like to build roads in challenging places, it seems [2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Primary_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Primary_Highway_System [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_12

gtCameron 11y ago
North Carolina does not have the most maintained roads of any state, they have "largest state maintained highway network in the United States." This is a function of them choosing to maintain roads at the state level instead of the county level. If you look at road miles by state [0] regardless of the actual entity that maintains them, they are 16th. [0] http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/ http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/
- amyjess 11y ago
  Their highway network is still pretty large, though. Texas also has an all-state-maintained system (except for toll roads, which are private, but the free service roads are still state-maintained... and Texas tends to favor adding service roads wherever possible), and their road network is the second-largest state-maintained highway network in the US. When you compare the physical size of the two states, NC really comes off as having an excessive amount of roads.
  - gtCameron 11y ago
    Texas as roughly 5x the size of NC by landmass, and has approximately 3x the number of road miles. However, NC is more densely populated than TX. If you look at it by road mile per person they are almost identical.

AcerbicZero 11y ago

A bit old, but still relevant - http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that if heavily loaded trucks are causing a disproportionate amount of damage they should be taxed at a rate which allows for proper maintenance of those roads.

innguest 11y ago
Yes, and women should pay more for health insurance since they go to the doctor more often. However neither of those things will happen because common sense and communism are polar opposites despite their shared etymological roots. EDIT: sophists can downvote but what they can't do is cope, or they would engage my arguments. EDIT 2: for the slow, the argument is that it is natural to want those who use a resource the most to pay the most, but people had rather not see this obvious truth when you replace trucks with women. To want trucks to pay more (I bet many leftists would agree with that after all "truck are driving for profit" and profit is bad in the eyes of leftists) for using the same roads because they use it more, and then to not want women to pay more towards health insurance because she uses doctors more, is the sort of contradiction that you can only find in a leftist's brain. EDIT 3: Men and women both profit from going to the doctor. Otherwise they would not go, it would be a waste of their time. There's a cost to opportunity and the fact that a person chooses to go to a doctor over doing something else means, praxeologically speaking, that they stand to profit more from going to the doctor than doing anything else, including not going to the doctor. EDIT 4: Hi jordan, thanks for your comment. The solution to the hitch is to break the healthcare monopoly. Trucks now, if roads were too expensive for them, would have no choice but to exit the market as you said; but if there were competition in roads then they could strike a deal with a competitor road provider and switch over, as I can do if Apple doesn't want my app, I can sell it to Android users. Of course I'm not suggesting women should "exit the market" because that would be the end of people. But we're not far off from the end of people if healthcare is a monopoly either. Competition in healthcare would allow for entrepreneurs to come up with ways to cut down on costs for women-related care. P.S.: link for you: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10718692 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10718692 -> "Studies have shown that women use more health care services than men."

darkstar999 11y ago

So how do you let roads "deteriorate and go away"? Wouldn't there be huge unsafe potholes in the transition? What kind of roads would they abandon? I didn't click through to all the references, but this article doesn't give any solutions.

sophacles 11y ago
Huge chunks of the midwest are a paved checkerboard of roads spaced at 1 mile intervals. Many of these get 3-5 cars passing a day, if that. There is no need for a lot of these to be paved, as they serve as field access roads. The houses off these roads are farm houses, and most of the farmers I know don't mind either way if it's a gravel or paved road. Some actually prefer gravel, as in the winter, when it is icy, the gravel can provide better traction, and the county doesn't do a good job plowing.
- computmaxer 11y ago
  That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are definitely roads checkerboarded at 1 mile intervals, but most are gravel in between some paved ones.
  - sophacles 11y ago
    This may vary state to state. I know that in IL it seems that well over half of them are paved, or tarred gravel. The southern end of IL has less of this tho... but the amount paved is increasing. When I was a kid visiting relatives, I learned to drive on a lot of gravel roads, but heading down there for a funeral not long ago, most of the gravel I learned to drive on is paved now.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Paving rate varies but can be quite high. The one mile grid though is quite prevalent.
ocschwar 11y ago
It's not so much the roads as the BRIDGES. Iowa's road map was drawn from afar, before any surveyors could look at it, so there are a lot of bridges keeping the road grid continuous over rivers, creeks and dry streambeds.

raldi 11y ago

The article has a map showing which states have already hit peak traffic; does anyone know of a per-municipality or per-county list? I'm really curious about whether this has happened in San Francisco.

vl 11y ago
Yep, it's unclear how it's measured and if the metric applied correctly. For example, in Seattle traffic jams get only worse over years. Clearly it hasn't "peaked". Yet map from the article shows that it peaked in the Washington state as a whole.
- nulltype 11y ago
  Hilariously, the graph in the article is "Vehicle Miles Travelled" not "Hours spent in vehicle" which could be increasing while the other decreases.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    Yeah, something like "average highway speed" would be a better metric.

ashmud 11y ago

One thing I learned, whether accurate or not, from the original SimCity is road maintenance is expensive. I almost invariably ended up peaking city size as the roads entered a constant state of disrepair.

closetnerd 11y ago

This may make sense in Iowa but it makes no sense in California. Gravel roads would would slow the effective max speed down to a crawl which would further exasperate traffic. If anything we need a higher driving speeds.

CalRobert 11y ago
Higher speeds generally increase traffic rather than decrease it, as following distance increases (or, if it doesn't, traffic due to wrecks will slow you down anyway). That being said, I live in CA and would love a model much like Germany, with unrestricted freeways in the rural areas and speed limits around 15-20 mph in towns and cities. Going down I-5 to socal? Sure, do 150. Driving in a town where there could be people walking, cyclists, vehicles stopping often, etc,? Maybe 15 makes more sense. Of course, not giving a license to just anyone with a pulse would be a start. My grandmother (lovely woman, but 91 and clearly past her driving years) failed her written driving test a few weeks ago. What did the DMV do? They _extended_ her license another two months, for reasons that escape me. "You can continue to drive despite a demonstrated ignorance of driving law" is pretty much what we're saying there. Also, California is big. A lot of it probably resembles Iowa more than SF in terms of road infrastructure - ever head out to the more remote parts?
- hn9780470248775 11y ago
  The German Autobahn (equivalent to Interstate highways here) is entirely limited-access, high-speed (minimum speed limit 100 km/h; often no speed limit). The German Bundesstrasse (equivalent to U.S. or state highways?) does have highly variable speed limits, as you describe, and I found them correspondingly maddening to drive on, due to the incessant need to accelerate or decelerate.
  - CalRobert 11y ago
    Indeed - in my view this correlates to one of the best places in the world to drive. Variable limits seem more logical than assuming one speed can always be the best for current conditions. Road throughput (vehicle-miles per hour) can be maximized at a lower speed when traffic is heavy, so limits are reduced. Conversely, when traffic is light the minimization of individual travel time can be prioritized, so limits can be raised.

mark-r 11y ago

I've always thought that total vehicle miles are capped by the availability of gas. Since fracking has expanded that supply, at least in the short term, I'd expect those mileage charts to start upticking again.

cossatot 11y ago
Gasoline usage is pretty inelastic in the US: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19191 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19191
toomuchtodo 11y ago
Total vehicle miles are goverened by both oil prices and demographics. You're seeing a huge shift in demographics currently in the US, which will drive down vehicle miles. http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2015/03/dot-vehicle-miles-driven-increased-49.html http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2015/03/dot-vehicle-miles-... > However gasoline prices are just part of the story. The lack of growth in miles driven over the last 7 years was probably also due to the lingering effects of the great recession (lack of wage growth), the aging of the overall population (over 55 drivers drive fewer miles) and changing driving habits of young drivers.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Related: I need to confirm the trend held, but as of a year or two ago, US FAA RITA data showed peak aviation fuel in 2000. Total departures and passenger miles have been higher since, but due to smaller and more fully loaded aircraft. By 2010- 2012 or so, actual fuel use was ~50% of year 2000 forecast estimates.

dataker 11y ago

I briefly studied in South Dakota and Iowa without a car and it was a living nightmare. Relying on friends and "taxis", I had to go through negative temperatures to get a simple can of soda. After that, I could never complain about BART.

bkjelden 11y ago
Cars are pretty much a requirement in a rural area like that. But on the plus side, cars are a lot easier to own in those areas. Parking is usually free/cheap. Traffic is very low, etc.

gremlinsinc 11y ago

I think the a lot of places should focus on expanding major roads/thoroughfares, and cities.. But look into bricks/dirt/gravel for country/side roads. would be nice if after self-driving cars, comes self-flying aerocars, cause then we won't need roads at all except in the city where air traffic would get super bogged down.