When you think of the world’s most famous infrastructure, you might consider China’s Great Wall or a train that runs along the Swiss Alps. Your mind might wander to the pyramids of Egypt, or Africa’s Cradle of Humanity. But when you think of America, you’re probably thinking of some big-ass highway.
It wasn’t always like this. At its peak in 1920, the railways in America were carrying 1.2 billion people a year. Many cities had competitive trolley car systems, and not just major metropolises, like LA – which once had the largest electric streetcar network in the world – but even sleepy little towns like Chattanooga, Tennessee, where one of the most popular tourist attractions is a bridge. Chattanooga is known for the song Chattanooga Choo Choo, about the train ride from NYC to Tennessee. Today there’s no more train and the Chattanooga station is now a… hotel. But, at least it’s called the Choo Choo.
But by 1929, 60% of American families owned a car. So why did highways overtake transit lines in America? Maybe it’s because they’re a beautiful showcase of America’s gorgeous geography?In the 30s and 40s, pretty much every place had street cars or trolley systems, and public transportation was fully normalized. And in a classic case of “don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” Cars seemed like the future. National and local governments wanted to EMBRACE the future, and at the time it seemed like a good idea. The same way that at one point, Oppenheimer probably thought the atomic bomb was a good idea. And so the Government continued to explore and invest in both.
Life became increasingly car-oriented. Drive-throughs were invented, allowing people to eat with one hand on the steering wheel, with a supersized coca-cola in the other, dripping sauce all over their laps, -- just as God intended. Cities began designing themselves around the car. Paving roads, clearing neighborhoods, ripping up street car tracks, and creating highways.
Today, every state has a D.O.T, or department of transportation. But when they were founded they were the Department of Highways. And that name seems fitting, because they mostly just built (and continue to just build) highways. In fact, some might say they’re addicted to it.“Highway Brain” or a “highway addiction” is the idea that a highway is necessary not only to move people, but to ease traffic congestion. When a city’s population grows, congestion increases, and every highway-addicted traffic engineer thinks “just one more lane, bro.” The addiction is real, and it ruins lives.
Instead of realizing they have a problem, traffic engineers often project their biases onto traffic modeling. They’ll look at current traffic data and more or less lay down a straight-line with a ruler to map future demand. “Travel Demand Forecastings” are the way engineers try to predict the future. But it would be impossible to predict with so many constantly changing factors. Think about all of the variables that go into you leaving your house for work and how you decide to get there. Snoozed alarm clocks, burnt toast, missing socks, car out of gas. And if you have KIDS?! Forget it. You haven’t left your house at a routine time since before they were born.
Now, if you’re new here, you might be wondering: why doesn’t widening highways ease traffic? And it’s because of a concept known as induced demand. When you add a lane to a highway, it encourages more people to drive. And it encourages developers to build more car-centric neighborhoods. For a more in-depth, but considerably less funny explanation of this motorway madness, my good friend Not Just Bikes has got you covered.
The fact is, making it easier to drive makes more cars. And more cars equals more traffic. And more traffic makes it harder to drive. That’s just the way it works. And so you get all the problems of traffic, like where you listen to too many podcasts and decide you’re a libertarian who needs a Blue Apron subscription.
This phenomenon has been observed for at least 100 years, and it’s been measured with increasingly advanced statistical methods since the ’70s and ’80s. Highways are like what cigarette smoking used to be: wildly popular, dangerous to national health, and okay to use in public. At least cigarette smoking encouraged cool things like meeting at cafes, hanging out in bed after sex, and chatting with strangers. The only time you get to do that on the highway is when you’ve rear-ended somebody. And not in the good way.
In every city in America, highways cut through neighborhoods, bisecting communities and causing long-lasting health problems and social issues.
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 brought 41,000 miles of interstates to the country. From 1957 to 1977, it displaced over 1 million people. These routes were originally built for military purposes, and were never meant to go through cities. But, like all well-intentioned plans from the American military, it totally blew up. Metaphorically, not the Oppenheimer way.
Because most DOTs began life as DOHs - those Departments of Highways - they’re designed to build highways. When your founding mission is to cover the country in asphalt, it can be hard to (excuse the pun) shift gears.
Traffic engineers are trained to build highways, so that’s what they do. Their jobs depend on more highways, more lanes, wider everything. And so every time, that’s their solution to congestion. As the famous saying goes, when all you have is an asphalt paver, a grader, and a couple of steamrollers, everything looks like a road widening project.
At many DOTs, the highway divisions don’t even talk to the six guys who are allowed to do stuff that’s not cars, so every project is in its own silo. That’s how you end up with nonsensical projects, like a metro line that isn’t near a place anyone would want to go to or a bike lane in the middle of the highway. Finally - an exercise option that might be worse for your lungs than just not exercising at all!And so the American traffic engineer suffers from the chronic condition of highway brain -- a ruthless addiction to expansion. And it makes sense: that’s what they’re taught. They might even think that they’re being original: that surely their widening project is different. But they have no idea that their path was laid out before them by decades of addiction to highway projects.
It’s been said that 99% of traffic engineers stop one lane before they fix traffic forever. The other 1% die stuck in traffic.
How do we course-correct traffic engineers who have been raised on a diet of asphalt and traffic cones? Is there a highway-rehab where they could sober up? Or maybe a foreign-exchange program with the Netherlands, where they can discover a world where they aren’t confined to six-lane highways where the average speed is 45 MPH.
If AA started a chapter for highway engineers, Highway Addicts Anonymous, it could change lives.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the highways I cannot build, the courage to build the mobility projects I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I really wish we could abolish urban freeways to the dumpster of history, tear them all out, and never build highways through cities again. Is there something you dislike so much that you wish it could be banned forever? Then you might enjoy Abolish Everything!, a hilarious new showdown where comedians argue to erase annoying things from existence.
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