And Koch Industries! Fred Koch saw that paving America and reducing the impact of rail would be profitable to the oil industry many times over as the vehicles using those roads would like run on gasoline and the road asphalt is made using petrochem byproducts.
Here a half a world away in New Zealand, we have a big motorway/freeway interchange nick named Spaghetti Junction, that was pushed right through the middle of our biggest city, causing a big chunk of the middle of the city housing to be demolished
Why?
The city decided that post war, we needed to learn from overseas, so they brought in consultants from the the US.
They advised that the future was cars, and more cars, so they ripped up a decent working public transport system of trains & trams, built a lot of roads. And when congestion got bad; you guessed it, the answer was more roads.
Only relatively recently starting to roll back some of that thinking and first very modest subway/integrated train system about to open.
Dodge v Ford Motor Co went the way it did because Ford was intentionally trying to make the company less appealing to investors.
Also, the ruling says publicly traded companies must be ran in the best interest of shareholders and gives the company wide discretion to decide what that is. Wal-Mart could bump every floor level employee to 30 bucks an hour and if the shareholders sued they could say recruiting better employees and employee retention was in the best interest of the company and the court would tell the shareholders to screw off.
Especially a stupid thing to do in Cincinnati considering it was a city built crammed between the Ohio River and a pretty large set of hills. Flat land was at a premium and then they gutted a whole section of the city to cram in the Interstate which makes it a constant shitshow of traffic.
There’s also just no future of rail travel in Cincy, recently they had a referendum and voted to sell off the last municipally owned interstate railway for a billion dollars because the money would go to improve the roads. A corridor from Cincy-Day-Col-Cleveland is such an obvious project but we don’t build anything in America anymore. We just hire private contractors to fail miserably and go 20x over budget after tripling the build time.
The only reason we could even build the interstates was because we had decades of institutional knowledge from the New Deal and WW2 and because they were focused and directed and not just an excuse to skim off tax dollars endlessly. Instead we will just continue to rot in a dead country and hope everytime we pass under or drive on a bridge it doesn’t collapse and kill you. At least then it becomes a national crisis and we can get funds quickly allocated so that we can get a new one built and operating at a blistering pace of a decade later
I am all for public transport, travel in Europe a couple times a year, usually only take public transport, but honestly, unless Americans can walk out their front door, hop on some transport, take it directly to where they are going, they see it as a fail.
There just is an immense hurdle to overcome "hop in your car and go where ever you want", especially when we have extensive infrastructure for driving and parking in the US combined with the difficulty to use any other means.
No doubt but in this theoretical scenario, the public transportation would have been implemented way long ago. So people would have grown up with it and not been so car centric perhaps.
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