Gregory's ServerThat said - I wish the government would stop wasting so much money on roads.
There should be 0 freeways. What an ungodly waste of taxpayer dollars.
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@oliphant @Hawkwinter They also placed them deliberately to destroy Black neighborhoods using eminent domain and called it "urban renewal"! Fun history. @theheck @oliphant @Hawkwinter well, a lot of "them" was local powers directing the federal funding. While the feds were anything but innocent, I still lay a slight majority of the blame on municipal and state-level power brokers.  @theheck @Hawkwinter That is very much true about North Minneapolis. A thriving black community, now cut off from the rest of the city when they put a highway right through it. Appalling. Mastodon *REALLY* needs to start to support xKey emoji reactions. A star is too ambiguous. @Hawkwinter It is but I just treat it like either an agreement or acknowledgement of what someone said @oliphant @Hawkwinter  Actually by the time Eisenhower was president and passed the national highways acts, the war was over. Furthermore most of the war traffic, machines and troops was moved by rail, not by road. Freeways were a give-away to the oil, rubber & steel industries. You know what else could transport all those things? Train tracks. Save a ton of money in maintenance every year. Need to move your car somewhere far away? pay a fee to load it on a train car, sit in your car until you arrive at the destination, enjoy the view. I'm not saying national infrastructure is bad. I just think freeways are bad national infrastructure. |
@Hawkwinter You know what I learned recently?
Freeways were created in the US primarily so that the US military could quickly move equipment from one side of the country to the other.
Also, they wanted high speed networks created for communication purposes and at least one point in the 80s there was talk of laying fiber-optic cable down the median of the interstate to link everything together.
(Not sure if that ever happened, but it would make sense.)
You essentially have nationalized infrastructure, arteries that connect everything and while it has advantages for commerce, etc, my understanding is that the primary purpose was military logistics.
@Hawkwinter You know what I learned recently?
Freeways were created in the US primarily so that the US military could quickly move equipment from one side of the country to the other.
Also, they wanted high speed networks created for communication purposes and at least one point in the 80s there was talk of laying fiber-optic cable down the median of the interstate to link everything together.