Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process)
The amount of displacement caused by a national rail system or bike lanes would be minuscule in comparison but have a similar impact. Politics nowadays seems too risk averse to pull large infra projects. Sometimes you have demolish some homes but nobody is brave enough to make these tough decisions anymore.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/ha...
It's important to note that the argument is not as simple as "highways or no highways", but more nuanced, as perhaps 10% harder to accomplish yields a 50% reduction in problems. Finding that sane middle ground is hard, but we should be careful not to reduce the problem to such simplicity that the many of the important parts of the solution are no longer even assessed.
I don't see improvements in the physical economy appreciably increasing inequality.
Most inequality seems to step from housing scarcity driving up housing costs. [1] (see Figure 3)
Improvements in transportation could even mitigate this sort of inequality by overcoming spatial misallocations caused by housing scarcity in the highest productivity zones. [2]
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...
Class and race had a lot to do with it in many cases. You've possibly heard of "the wrong side of the tracks". That statement could be considered even more accurate in many modern context if stated as "the wrong side of the highway". The interesting part is why it's apt though, which is what we're talking about.
For one take on this, see https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...
One blatant example of exclusionary infrastructure was Robert Moses building bridges in New York that were too low for busses to pass under, in order to discourage travel to his parks and beaches.
I can also recommend the Well There's Your Problem podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc
The interstates that linked up major cities certainly boosted investment. But Europe also built a network of such highways; the major difference is that they built their system to go mostly around cities, whereas the US just plowed them straight through cities. (The reasoning being that you don't really want to subject traffic passing through to high levels of commuter congestion, you want to minimize impacts to high concentrations of people and businesses, land acquisition is cheaper outside cities than inside, etc.) Because they did not impact nearly as many people to the same degree, Europe didn't experience the same overcorrection in terms of public process. (There is NIMBY-ism in Europe, to be sure, but they are definitely more successful at actually building things and keeping costs low compared to the US.)
There is also the subject of diminishing returns. Cutting travel time between the coasts from weeks to days is certainly a huge return on investment. Today most expansion projects look like "let's cut 30 seconds of waiting at this traffic light" at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars at times. The report you linked is from ASCE, which is not exactly a neutral party for infrastructure development. Here's a critique of an earlier report from the same organization:
> Consider the following from the report:
> ASCE estimated the "costs to households and businesses" from transportation deficiencies in 2010 to be $130 billion. (page 3)
> ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to businesses will be $430 billion by 2020. (page 5)
> ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to households will be $482 billion by 2020. (page 5)
> If you add these together, the total cost to households and businesses is $1.042 trillion. Well, ASCE states that to reach "minimum tolerable conditions" (a pretty sad standard) would take an investment of $220 billion annually. Over 10 years, that's $2.2 trillion. Yeah, you read that right. The American Society of Civil Engineers wrote a report suggesting that over the next decade we spend $2.2 trillion so we can save $1.0 trillion.
We're still suffering from these decisions today, with all manner of proposal to make the area walkable dead in the water due to the expense that would be entailed by rerouting or rebuilding highways.
There is no return on investment anyone got from this that couldn't have been gotten from highways moved another mile or two away into the purely industrial districts where they wouldn't have disrupted anybody.
I don't think the experiment is over.
The benefits of a highway-based society have been reaped during a period of 1) cheap fossil fuel energy and 2) cheap land. Both of these are becoming more scarce which threatens to tip the ROI negative. Strongtowns.org has done some research that most American cities and suburbs will be facing insolvency in coming years because their revenue is insufficient to cover the costs of a road-based infrastructure (including water and power lines) that scales quadratically.
To say that highways have been a good investment you would need to compare them with alternatives and examine their opportunity cost. A major problem with car transport is that it has worse scaling than most public transport: each household must personally invest in a car, garage, and fuel; private businesses must invest in parking, which drives up real estate prices; each car decreases the throughput of the roadway, requiring more roads to handle more cars--and when you run out of space for roadway then commute times increase. With most aspects of car transport you never get better than linear scaling.
So the real question is: if you took all the money that has been spent on cars, roadways, fuel, repairs, etc. would it have been better spent on trains, buses, or some hybrid system?
I think most folks know that 2-digit interstates with an even first digit are east-west, and with an odd first digit are north-south.
But 3-digit interstates exist too. An even first digit means it's a loop around a city (like I-475 around Flint), and an odd first digit means it's a spur into downtown. (I-375 into Detroit). These numbers can be reused, for instance there's another I-375 in Florida.
I think the argument here is that the _default_ should've been to loop around cities.
Wikipedia says I-280 was planned in 1955, and I think Silicon Valley was mostly still fruit orchards at the time. The silicon transistor would be invented one year later.
What happens after the fact isn‘t as important.
The bypasses are almost always faster to take if you're just moving on through to the other edge of town. These would have been totally sufficient in almost all cases w/o plowing the Interstate itself through/near the downtown cores in addition to the bypasses.
There's an argument to be made for cut and cover construction and then putting in a park or newer homes or something, but surface highways through cities are not a goal to strive for.
“connecting communities” only applies to some specific flavor of communities, and the ROI mostly benefited these specific groups as well.
I think with today's politicians it's more of an issue of credit. These projects take a very long time, piss off people until they're done, and there's a high chance a different politician will be in the office at that time and claim credit.
You're only guaranteed one for a defense, and even then public legal aid is barely keeping it together with the workload.
Absolutely. In fact, I'd like to take a moment and give a heartfelt "fuck you!" to Robert Moses[0]. I don't believe in an afterlife, but in his case, I hope he spends eternity in agony as repayment for all the suffering he caused.
What I'm saying, of course, is that you're obviously right but our problem isn't because anyone disagrees with your position, but because we can't agree on what constitutes a justifiable reason in individual cases.