Highways to Hell

National Review ^ | September 27, 2005 | Wendell Cox

[logician2u]

Highways to Hell
Investing in our safety.

By Wendell Cox

New Orleans and Houston have raised serious questions about the nation's ability to evacuate effectively major urban areas in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. The more recent Houston evacuation is rightly viewed as the more successful, as 2.5 million people managed to get out of the area by car. Things could have been better. In the future, freeways need to be made one-way much earlier, and there should be preexisting fuel-contingency plans. The biggest tragedy was in New Orleans where many households were without cars, and no serious attempt was made to use the hundreds of buses that were available before the hurricane and subsequent flood.

Houston is as good as it is likely to get. The city is unique in having a very effective freeway system that has been expanded so much that traffic congestion is little worse than it was 20 years ago, according to the annual Texas Transportation Institute mobility data. Imagine how much worse it would have been if the roadway system had been swamped by the more than twice as many cars as would have been trying to escape Houston if its population per square mile were as high as that of Los Angeles or San Francisco. On the other hand if Houston, like Portland had smugly refused to build new freeway capacity seeking (hopelessly) to socially engineer people into transit, not nearly so many people could have been evacuated.

An estimated 2.5 million people were able to evacuate from Houston because they had cars and because the roadway system has been upgraded to handle the rising population.

For nearly two decades, urban planners and environment interest groups have sought by every means possible to prevent the building of new highway capacity. The justification was a belief that building new highways created more traffic, which is akin to believing that building more maternity wards would increase the birthrate.

In most urban areas, traffic congestion has become much worse because road capacity has not kept up with growth. This means more than just a longer trip to work: It means that it will take more time than we have to complete major evacuations if they should be necessary.

The same interests have promoted so-called "smart growth" strategies that try to increase urban densities. A favorite tactic is to draw an urban-growth boundary outside of which development is not allowed. Such strategies have been widely shown to drive up the price of housing, which will lead to lower rates of home ownership and a less vibrant economy. But there is another toll. By definition, acts of terrorism affect a particular geographic area. If the affected area has a higher density, there will be more casualties. The worst part of it is that there is no good reason for urban densification. According to the 2000 Census, less than three percent of the nation's land area is urbanized. Moreover, improved agricultural productivity has taken so much land out of production that the human footprint is now smaller than it was in 1950 by a land mass equivalent in size to Texas and Oklahoma, combined

It is time to pull the plug on the densification and anti-highway programs that promise to make the nation's urban areas less safe and secure.

-- Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public-policy firm in metropolitan St. Louis. He also serves as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris (a national university).

[logician2u]

Once the finger-pointing about Katrina ends, let's hope our political leadership begins to realize that you cannot rapidly evacuate a major city if the highways leading from it are not up to the task.

For all the billions in earmarks to build bike paths and bridges to nowhere in the new transportation bill, where is it clearly stated that a national priority is to assure a safe and rapid exit from the nation's large cities in an emergency?

I know, I know -- it's too late to revisit the six-year bill that's already two years late getting signed into law.

But really, if Congress doesn't re-examine their priorities, they will eventually have to answer for their misjudgements.

[logician2u]

And . . I almost forgot to add . . those big-city mayors of both parties who have been banging the drum for "smart growth" and high-density housing and "sustainable transportation" with the hope that these policies will save money on infrastructure and lasso more tax revenues for the municipality are putting their constituents at enormous risk.

Whether it's nature or terrorists doing the deed, high concentrations of people without the means of getting out of Dodge are a sitting-duck target. Cities need to grow horizontally as well as vertically, with road and highway infrastructure sized to the increase in population, not to some urban planner's dream that we'll all be riding trains and buses.

[magellan]

All this stuff about using only one lane of the interstate outbound of Houston is surprising.

On I-16 out of Savannah Georgia, the eastbound lane has gates on every exit which can close off access to the eastbound lane. Closer to the coast, every few miles there are crossovers built into the median (with gates) to distribute westbound traffic onto the eastbound lane.

My guess is the Georgia State Highway Patrol would close the gates to access the eastbound lanes, and once the lanes are confirmed clear, open the crossovers.

As the Interstate highways are a federally funded project, you would think they would have similar setups from all coastal areas.

[logician2u]

Federally funded, yes. But I believe local authorities (MPOs and state DOTs) have considerable say in the final design of Interstate Highways.

When there's extra money to spend, some areas will put it in landscaping or bike paths. Others, apparently yours in Georgia, look into actually spending it on something useful.

Thanks for your input.

[meyer]

Georgia isn't the pinnacle of highway operation either. They love to take I-75 down to one lane in each direction during spring break week so that a couple of surveyors can wander around measuring in the median.

/pet peeve.

As to the Texas situation, I heard mention (and I don't have a source) that there was some construction upstream from Houston that created a massive bottleneck. I believe it given the problems that construction causes in normal traffic flows on our interstate highways.

At any rate, even without the construction and during normal conditions, the highway system is woefully inadequate near any major city.

[CommandoFrank]

We need more bike paths... That would help!

[logician2u]

Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Commando?

[Paleo Conservative]

But this was an evacuation using the existing highways in Texas. Governor Perry is proposing a very ambitious 50 year program to build a system of super tranportation corridors 1/4 mile wide throughout the state that would connect to the existing highway systems.

A map of possible alternatives for TTC-35.

Here are some links various Freepers have posted on other Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) threads on Free Republic

Paleo Conservative

Free Republic search on keyword "TTC"

Interview (Audio) NPR | February 8, 2005 A Superhighway for Texas?

Diddle E. Squat

Here's the website with more info and explanation:

http://www.keeptexasmoving.org/

Here's a list of meetings where you can ask questions(and I encourage everyone who can to attend and ask questions)

http://www.keeptexasmoving.org/pdfs/TTC-35_Public_Meetings.pdf

Here's a link to the map of the TTC-35 corridor alternatives, which are approximately 10 miles wide study areas (the actual selected single corridor will be at most 1/4 mile wide):

http://www.keeptexasmoving.org/pdfs/TTC- 35_Alternatives_Map.pdf

Ben Ficklin

The Oklahoma Extension

La Entrada al Pacifico

1990-2000 Population Growth of Border Metro Areas

Bidders for TTC contract

NHS High Priority Corridors

Texas Sets the Pace in Highway Finance

Ray Perryman's Economic Benefit Analysis Of TTC

maui_hawaii

Port of Houston teams up with Panama to draw a piece of Asia's massive trade away from West Coast

[CommandoFrank]

Who? Me?

[kublia khan]

I don't know how long we are going to let environmentalist destroy our nation. Environmentalism is one of the most destructive influences in our nation today. It effects our economy,our safety and our quality of life.

[zeugma]

I knew Perry and his cronies would jump on the evacuation of Houston as an excuse to boost their TTC boondoggle/retirement plan. These grifters are predictable, if nothing else.

[logician2u]

I hadn't seen that. Do you have a link?

[DannyTN]

Maybe we are underutilizing trains. Perhaps FEMA should coordinate being able to get trains to areas quickly for evacuations. Buses could then just be used for local transport to the train.

Also, weren't the Houston people told not to go west or east but only to go North? Makes sense when a Hurricane is just an hour or two away and can change directions on you. I got the impression this call was made too early. People could have gone east or west and then turned north. With Hurricanes a hundred miles more inland makes a Huge difference in how strong the storm is.

[Ben Ficklin]

Wendell Cox, the author of this article, is an excellent source of data.

As the blurb points out, one of his websites is "Demographia", which has reams of census data ranging from local to international.

His other website is "The Public Purpose", which well documents the failure of mass transit and the folly of Smart Growth in urban planning and transportation.

[logician2u]

Maybe we are underutilizing trains.

If you mean trains are underutilized, yes.

If you are suggestiong there need to be more passenger trains, no.

Passenger trains are a relic of the 19th Century and have no practical use except as tourist attractions and museum pieces.

But the governent is always a little slow to learn.

[logician2u]

Glad you pointed that out, Ben.

Unfortunatelhy, there are a whole lot of Republicans (office-holders, especially) who are completely unaware of the implications of Democrat-spawned programs such as "smart growth." If they spent an hour or two reading up on it, at Public Purpose or The Thoreau Institute or a number of other sites on the Web that expose the fallacies being promoted as Gospel Truth by so-called urban planners, they'd have some ammunition to use on their politial opponents.

But as the old saying goes . . you can lead a horse to water . . .

[DannyTN]

I meant, that passenger trains, or just boxcars might be an option to help evacuate a city. Load the people who don't have cars or are willing to leave the cars behind and ship them out on trains.

I'm not suggesting that we need more passenger trains. Just that maybe FEMA should be able to get some boxcars or passenger cars to a city quickly and use them to evacuate.

[logician2u]

I dunno.

Some people have bad memories of being taken places in box cars.

[DannyTN]

They can catch a bus.