Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 5: The Politics of Traffic Engineering

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

In this episode we (@aliceavizandum, @donoteat1, @oldmananders0n, and guest @DA_banks) critically examine the whole field of traffic engineering, and how efforts to make streets and highways safer and more functional have achieved directly the opposite. also we talk about digging a hole to combat sea level rise Slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc Check out David's podcast: https://ironweeds.podbean.com/ and his work at Real Life Magainze: https://reallifemag.com/ and also Trashfuture: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/

Okay. So I guess I'll start. Hi, welcome to another episode of Well, There's Your Problem, which podcasts about engineering disasters and things which are related to engineering disasters. I'm Justin Rosniak. I run this YouTube channel, Do Not Eat. I do another series about urban planning, using city skylines. I do a whole bunch of, you know, history, urban planning, stuff like that. My pronouns are he and him. And, right, we need to do more introductions. Okay, I'll jump in then. Alice called Will Kelly. I'm on a podcast called Trash Future as well as doing this. And my pronouns are she and her. I guess I'll go next. Hi, Liam Anderson. I'm mostly just a dick on Twitter. I also get real mad in our YouTube comment section for

people who misgender Alice. Don't fucking do that. Please just watch another video. It truly is not that hard, people. My pronouns are he, him. Also, I work doing bullshit data analysis because as Alice has indicated, the future is trash. And I'm David Banks, DA underscore banks on Twitter. And I wear a bunch of hats. I'm, I write a column at Real Life magazine called Building to Code, where I, you know, say some stuff about culture and cities and technology. And I'm also a co-host on Ironweeds, which Justin was nice enough to come on a couple of weeks. My pronouns are he, him. I just want to point out, Roz, that I was looking for your Patreon today. And so I searched do not eat. And two of the things that come up are age and face, which living with you is probably two of the more

horrifying Google searches I've come across. And I just want to know where, where these people are that so badly. It's like, it's age, face and single. I have all of the above. Take the express lane to your DM. Look on Google images, and it's just a bunch of packets of silica gel. That's how I'm hoping to keep it. Yeah. I am eagerly awaiting the do not eat a one erotic fan art category. So if you want to DM them first, so I can put them on our walls, get out. Yeah, do some fan art for the show. What's like a what's like a furry, but it's a train. Oh, yeah, like a train owner. All right, so let's do the episode. So today's episode is a little different from some of the other engineering disasters we did, because we're going to talk about the whole field of traffic engineering, right? So, you know, not

all engineering disasters are concrete, visible events. Some are, you know, caused by sheer institutional momentum, you know, causing just institutional right, which is widespread. And in this case really affects the built environment almost everywhere. So just to be clear, we are we are saying that traffic engineering itself as a field is the disaster, right? Yeah, we're going to sort of talk about the social and political ideology of the field of traffic engineering, and, and the economic and political conditions that allowed it to be as influential as it is. Right, because we usually think, especially if you were educated in engineering, you know, engineering is non ideological, right? Yeah, it's just math, you add two big numbers together. In the most trivial

sense, it is non ideological, right? You know, if I'm doing calculations under a capitalist system, it's going to be the same as doing calculations under a communist system, right, the numbers are going to, you know, turn out the same. You know, at the moment of inertia of like, wide flange beam doesn't change. If I'm doing it in the Soviet Union, or if I'm doing it in America, other than the units change. Well, that under socialism two plus two is five. And we're all living in the most socialist number 1984. Well, that is a nice thing about socialism is you get a bonus number, right? If I have two things, and I put them with another two things bonus thing, not a lot of people talk about that factor of socialism. Well, it's because right now under capitalism, like, Jeff Bezos has

all of the extra things, and we have to take those things and redistribute them to needy fours to turn them into fives. Yes. Engineering tends to cultivate a mode of thinking which, you know, discourages criticisms of social and economic systems that control what engineers are allowed in paid to create, right? And traffic engineering is really a number one where you really see this occurring. Folks are paid to create very expensive, very complex systems, which cause the problems they're designed to alleviate. One thing I will say about engineering as a mode of thinking is that that is also something that is true under, quote unquote, socialism, state capitalism, whatever, as it is in our more familiar form of capitalism, like, the whole premise of Chernobyl, the show

is about this is that you don't necessarily think about building a nuclear reactor any more than you think about building a highway as a political act, right? Absolutely. And I think there's also the, you know, where the the individual engineer sees his or her agency or like where that begins and ends because if you build something and it falls apart and it breaks, then that's on you, right? And like you can go to jail for that or lose whatever licensure you have in your country. But if you build something to spec and it still destroys society, you have technically still done the right thing. You're still a good engineer. There's very few instances where you can say, like, I did everything as I was told, and it was still wrong. You know, and there's a growing

amount, but still not enough, I think, like, parts of engineering education where we train people to get ready to deal with that and navigate that sort of problem. I mean, ethics and engineering is when you, like, take a giant flask of whiskey onto the job site or you, I don't know, add two and two together and get six instead of four or five, right? It's when you spell boobs on the calculator. You have to design a bomb that works for the client so they can blow up an orphanage. Yeah, I mean, I think at places, especially, obviously, I live in Philadelphia, and in any part of the United States, you know, defense contracting is a huge part of the economy. But the people I know who work at Lockheed Martin are the Boeing. For them, it's, you know,

I'm not seeing the effects of the bomb or engineering. I'm not seeing the effects of, you know, an AC-130 gunship mowing down a village in Yevon, and I think that just as a profession, maybe more so than others, you just think, well, all I'm doing is designing the bolts that are going into an F-35. I'm not seeing the effects of, like, what it looks like when whatever, depleted uranium munitions kill a whole bunch of people, because it's just not something you ever think about. I mean, in fairness, if you're designing bolts for the F-35, you are doing praxis because you're probably going to kill more pilots than Yemeni civilians. It's true. It can't fly outside down $1.4 trillion, everybody. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. All right, we're 10 minutes in,

and we're on the first slide. Let's get going. So I want to start by talking about sort of the history of traffic engineering here, right? How did this field start out? So we start back in, like, the 1900s and the 1910s, right? So back in the day, it was only rich assholes who had cars, right? I mean, someone had to invent the car, and then obviously you can't just give cars to everybody. You have to make them expensive. Yeah. And then they were pretty crappy cars. You know, they were like Stanley steamers. You had to stop every 10 miles to let them, you know, build up ahead of steam. But then you could go pretty fast. I mean, they'd do 40 miles an hour. And so folks complained about joy riding, right? If you didn't own a car and you were walking on the street,

you know, you were complaining about these people driving their cars down the road real fast, and they're running over kids constantly, they're running over old people. That really, that really takes a lot out of the great Gatsby to know that it was like a social phenomenon. It's like including the fucking knockout game in the great American novel. And that is, that's not too far off from the truth, I don't think. Yeah, like, yeah, I think, you know, people reading that, the great Gatsby, like, like when it came out would totally recognize that scene as like, as that unknown quantum. Yeah, like this rich asshole just does mow as a kid down with this car. Yeah. They're like, we're waiting for that to happen.

Happen like constantly. Yeah. Before we had the car, we used to think of streets as like a public place of congregation, as well as a place for transportation to occur, right? And it's usually safe for most pedestrians and users of the street. So as long as you were staying out of the street car tracks, which you know, you generally knew where the street car was going to go, because it's on tracks. Harder to get run down by a horse, also. Also true. Yeah, the horse, the horse has a bit of sense to it. Not much sense. Horses are pretty dumb. Car good train, I mean, car bad train goods at horse dubious. We'll read that this later. Okay, I like neutral. Pretty much. When people are still trying to figure out what to do with

movie cameras, with film cameras, and there's like throwing them on things and like, you know, setting them in front of a factory door and just like watching people come out and they're like, that's a movie. They were also putting them on street cars and you can like go on YouTube, you know, definitely don't pause this and go to another one wait till afterward. But you know, you can go and find like videos of like San Francisco's Market Street before the mass adoption of cars and everything's just yeah, moving like you can step out of the way of everything on the street. Yeah, it's moving pretty, pretty slow, except for the cars which sometimes like dart out. And you just like imagine as you know, more and more people buy them and

it's only in the span of like 40 years that we go from the first electric street car to mass adoption of automobiles in the United States that you know, it's only like 40 years. And in that timeframe, you have, you know, the street changes completely. And it starts with like 30,000 people a year getting mowed down by cars and it only went up. And now it's back down to like what it used to be at like 35 to 40,000 people just dead every year in the United States alone, just the United States because a car accident. Yeah, and folks were, you know, they pretty early on we've realized that like these cars, they're like bad news, right? So folks tried to limit the speed and use of the automobile through, you know, local ordinances. Like I think Cleveland tried to get governors

installed on cars to limit them to 25 miles an hour, like in the 19 teens or so. The English equivalent was to make, to mandate a guy walking in front of the car with a big red flag. That is also still law in Pennsylvania, not very well enforced. Drivers start, you know, these things called auto clubs, right? And they want to encourage legislation that allows for more widespread use of the automobile, right? So one of the things they did was they invented the concept of jaywalking, right? And jaywalking is like you're not crossing the street at the appointed locations, which was also a new concept. And they sort of solidified the idea of, you know, the street as a place for transportation, not for public congregation.

Yeah, it's always great to think of how, you know, like being called a jay was like being like a country bumpkin, and you're like just like staring up at the at the big towers with your mouth open, and then to like enshrine that into law. It was just like, you know, you're like, you're an asshole. It was like getting a ticket for being an asshole. It was like kind of, kind of remarkable. It's a remarkable feat of public relations turned turned law. Not to say this about every single issue, but boy, I hope this isn't enforced in a deeply racialized and class based way. No, that was never happened. Yeah, that didn't happen. I think it's worth noting here that 200,000, 210,000 Americans, half of whom were under 18,

were killed in traffic accidents from 1920 to 1929, which is a four fold increase over the death toll of the previous decade. And keep in mind, like, I think, along with what you were saying about class, you had to consider that like the Model T by the 20s cost, I think the equivalent of like 20 ish thousand dollars. No, it was below like 8,000 dollars. So you have all these people who in their lifetimes went from not having a car or not ever seeing one to just like, it's really hard to teach people like in less than a generation like, Oh, yeah, these death machines, you have to look out for these now. It's just wild. That's why you never had a Bolshevik revolution in the States is same sort of timeframe 1920s. And just all of the angry poor young men,

which is who you need for a revolution, just get mowed down by cars instead. Yes. It is actually interesting to look at when people got like, or people in which camp, which political camp cared about which transportation technology. So like today, you know, socialists love trains and more people to the right like cars. But it was, you could almost see it reversed in the turn of the 20th century, because you had like a Soviet de urbanists that one that saw the city as nothing but capitalist and you couldn't save it. So you want to like spread everything out, following sort of like a Frank Lloyd Wright sort of model. And then, and then whereas trains were obviously like the capitalist technology, right? Because

that's what all the like I'm right. Yeah, right. Yeah, who just like love love that trains could like kill teachers and public defenders. Yeah, you just route the train line through the union hall and then the big locomotive just fucking takes it all out in one go. Very convenient. As part of the lobbying efforts, I actually just found this out. The Packard Motor Car Company as part of the PR campaign against J walkers, went so far as to construct tombstones in gate in grade with a name Mr. J Walker, public shaming all that. So again, you're going from in 20 years, just from like, Oh, people belong on streets to only cars belong on streets. And you will literally like be murdered and shamed if you dare to change that. Yeah. And this was,

you know, a lot of the advocacy first was from the industry. But another part of it was from, you know, auto clubs taking the initiative, right? So, you know, these are mostly composed initially of the rich assholes driving cars, right, advocating and lobbying for better and safer road infrastructure. And they just go out and install like signage and lane markings on public streets. You know, like, this is, as you can see, this is a diamond shaped stop sign from Los Angeles, right? Which, you know, they just went out and they use their own money to install the stop sign. So the thing is that this the safety infrastructure that they're installing, you know, which is put in in the name of the safety of all road users is, you know, being

put in by the auto clubs. So it pretty quickly establishes the dominance of the car over the entire, you know, public street, right? Yeah, but you're not going to be the asshole who like questions, you know, it's a safety measure. What's your problem? Well, also, like the guy that is like at your local auto club is probably your landlord. Also true. Yeah. Boy Scouts handed out cars to handed out cards to pedestrians warning them against the practice of jaywalking, like mock trials and all that stuff too. So a lot of what feels like just kind of collective pressure, even if it wasn't like the automobile companies themselves, which is wild. There was a mock trial with Boy Scouts. I don't know if it involved the Boy Scouts, but the but like there were mock

trials conducted in public settings to shame or ridicule offenders. I am unknown as to whether or not the Boy Scouts were some sort of weird kangaroo corks just being like if you jaywalk, you help the Kaiser. Yeah, waiting for it. So as as long distance trucking becomes a thing, the federal highway aid act sort of improves highways, not not to the extent that the interstate highway system would, but improves it better. And with the introduction of the Model T Ford, which let, you know, more and more, not especially rich people start using cars. And to start buying Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent newspaper, which was virulently anti Semitic. Oh, yes, they also did that. Yes. Like they put it in the dealerships. Every Model T Ford

came with the copy of, you know, like the protocols of the elders. I just think about how insane that is. That's like buying like, I don't know, like a pickup truck now and it comes with a QAnon thing in like the glove box. I mean, it is kind of I remember that like that Hummer commercial back in like 2006 or something, where it was like a beta cuck puts a carrot on the the the the checkout counter at the grocery store. And then someone behind him has like a big pile of meat. And the guy with the carrot is like, Oh, no, my masculinity. And then like, they go out into the parking lot and he gets into a Prius and the meat guy goes into a Hummer. And then the Prius guy is like, Oh, my dick's falling off or something. And he has to like run to the Hummer dealership

to get like to re secure his masculinity. Like that's a commercial. It's like, it's like that, except the tagline is something like Hillary Clinton was secretly arrested and executing in Guantanamo. Yeah, pretty much. Henry Ford invented American anti Semitism and also the Model T and square dancing. Like no shit, he was a huge pusher of square dancing in schools on the basis that it would displace jazz music, which was to degenerate forgot about having to be I was taught square dancing in school. I know we're going to talk about Robert Moses later, but I feel like Henry Ford is the other guy along with Robert Moses, who you can kind of trace all of the bad things back to for some reason. Car dealerships, you know, they have this uninterrupted very rich

culture. This is like completely unchanged since for 100 years. It's just nothing but but shit lords peddling conspiracy theories and toxic masculinity. It's a Well, you know why you need the undercoasing is because Obama was born in Kenya and the all weather mats really keep the blood out of your car when you've been you've been curbstomping, you know, it's really you're going to need those mats when Jade Helm comes off and the black helicopters like come over. Yeah, Trump space for all your AK 47s. So this thing called AASHTO was formed. It's the Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. It was called ASHO when it was founded because they didn't include the transportation part.

This was founded in 1914. It's a private nonprofit which developed a road and highway standards so that drivers, you know, could drive everywhere without like being confused by local auto club like road signs because they were different everywhere, right? You turn the street into a different like a different neighborhood and all of a sudden the stop signs are purple. Yes. And then cursive for some reason. Oh, yeah, I too have to take you back. To give you a sense of how bad that could be when I was working as a carny in Florida and you'd go do an event at a private like rich person like golf club thing, they would have signs that say drive leisurely in cursive. Oh my god. So you could just imagine like every city with like the

worst people in it deciding what the signs look like. Yeah, it's a small thing but almost every London borough has a slightly different kind of street sign. So the name of the street is going to be like in a different font and color and shape and size every time. That's helpful. It's yeah, it's great. Ashtow published the first manual on uniform traffic control devices and that standardized a bunch of road signs, right? And that's where we got the stop sign from, for example, which used to be yellow. Now it's red. Huh, why did they change it? It ripened. Yeah, it was like a limited edition like lemon lime stop sign. Around this time, in the 1920s, we come to this concept of the parkway, right? So the parkway, the idea is we have a limited access

road, right? So you can only access it via ramps, which is free of trucks and commercial vehicles. And, you know, you can use it for like a scenic leisurely drive as opposed to driving through the center of town. It's sort of envisioned as like, you know, a park amenity, or it's like, you know, you do this for leisure. But in practice, almost immediately became like a high speed commuter route, right? Well, largely because they could never figure out why you park on the driveway and drive on the parkway. It's true. What's up with that? I just love the idea that you go to say New Jersey, you know, for, you know, for vacation and you bring back a postcard of the Garden State Parkway. Well, it's also the giant congestion just because everybody's in their shifty fords,

leaning out of the windows, shouting the drive on the parkway joke to each other constantly. Oh, for what it's worth, stop signs were yellow because they couldn't find red pigments that wouldn't feed until like the fifties. And then they just painted them all in lead. Awesome. And asbestos. You know, some of the most famous parkways that were originally built were like the northern and southern state parkways in Long Island. Those are Robert Moses built those and, you know, everyone knows he built the bridges deliberately too low for buses. But like other parkways that had been built previous to that were, you know, also like they excluded commercial vehicles. It was only for cars, right? Which included buses, of course. And that's a practice

which continues till this day. A lot of parkways do not allow buses, including those which are, you know, explicitly designed for transportation, like say the Baltimore Washington Parkway. Although I think Megabus uses it anyway, they just haven't gotten caught yet. Yeah. So if you're watching this niche on Megabus, it's interstate transportation called the FBI. It's the only time it's ever justified to like rat somebody out to the feds is, yeah. It's probably wire fraud. Probably counts as wire fraud too. Yeah. What isn't wire fraud? This podcast is probably wire fraud. I'm going to make it wire fraud. The bus has Wi-Fi that makes it wire fraud.

Yeah, there you go. Even to this day, the National Park Service is the second largest operator of highways in the United States. You're getting pulled over by a park ranger. Amazing experience. Those guys are scary. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, they are not here. Yeah, I got like reamed out by a freshly minted pair of park rangers who like my wife and I were on our anniversary in Bahaba. And we were just drinking and these like two dudes just started talking to us and we just chatting. And it just so happens that they're like these state troopers and they just like, we just like just the slightest pushback about cops, which we can't not do. And they just like stuck just stood up and started shouting.

And like, it was wild. Yeah, those people are awesome. That's that that's the temperament that you want on your public servants. Yeah, I've I've I've had interactions with park rangers uh in Pennsylvania. And the the pace at which they go from zero to just like, I'm going to burn your whole family is fucking insane. Like, what are you mad about? You spend all day in a nice forest doing fucking nothing mad because only you can prevent forest fires. Well, good to know. You can steal as much weed as you want. Like, yeah, from from everyone that comes into the park. You can run your car all the time. You're just constantly idling. So it's not it's never too hot or too cold. You know, you're basically playing Firewatch. It's awesome. Yeah. Like,

what's the problem? You get a cool hat? I think the hat's cool. Is that weird? I think Canadians have a better hat. Okay, yeah, we're gonna need to call you in on that. After after parkways would come up with we come up with this idea, which is pioneered by the Pennsylvania Turnpike of, you know, just the the straight up. This is just a highway, right? You know, it's a limited access highway. It goes, you know, you can drive very fast on it. It has a direct route. And you can also have trucks and buses on it, right? Pennsylvania Turnpike was, of course, a toll road. It still is to this day. And the way the Pennsylvania Turnpike was designed was it gave a wide berth to, you know, cities, it got close to them, but it didn't go into them,

right? So it's it's an autobahn, then. I mean, this is 30s, right? Yeah. So we're thoroughly into the period of like ripping off that guy in Germany who had a bunch of like weird ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, he was like a vegan. He didn't like smoking. It's all weird. This is in DSA. But also the autobahn, they weren't using cut and fill techniques. So you could like go, you could go airborne, like hitting a, hitting a peak or something. And this is somewhat, I think this is mostly true with, with railroads in the UK also is that you are, you have a lot of labor, but not a lot of resources. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing with, with like national service in Germany in the like 30s was you just get a bunch of unemployed guys with

shovels. Right. And that's it. And you just build the highway. Whereas in the United States, it's the opposite. And so you can, you don't have a lot of it. So it's one guy with a bunch of shovels. Well, you can, you can, well, you build like around obstacles a lot of the time. So you get these big wide turns instead of like cutting through something or, or going up and over it, like, like the, the original autobahn, which I think is largely ripped up now. The, the autobahns were also, if I recall correctly, they were, they were built under the social democrats in Weimar Germany as opposed to, you know, we attributed it to the Nazis. But once again, the Nazis were, you know, stupid, incompetent people. And, you know, they just took credit for everything

that social democrats did. They did invent having the like rest stops and like gas stations having a little kitsch sort of local style. So we wouldn't have had that without the rise of fascism. It's weird because the Pennsylvania Turnpike was just like this weird homologation up between like the old Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike, which was completed in like 1794. And then like a railroad, which was never built. So between like Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, it's all shitty and meaningless. And you just go through, we would have gone through all these like switchbacks and very dangerous curves. So now you can still do that. But you could do it at 75 miles an hour. I highly recommend it. We don't have Nazis officially. You got to go like two miles

off the Turnpike. And then you'll be in near in your county. And you can say hi to both my parents and some pretty convenient. And yeah, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which gave the world Charles Bronson. The next time I go to Chesapeake House on I-95, I'll remember the Nazis gave us this little kitschy roadside stuff. You like Chesapeake House. Also fun fact, the word Turnpike comes from the toll where you have a pike in the ground and you turn it to let people pass. That's it. That's why it's why toll roads are called Turnpikes. So the Pennsylvania Turnpike, as well as of course the Autobahn is immensely influential on Dwight D. Eisenhower was part of a an infamous trip across the United States by a road convoy, which took a month and was just a disaster, right? Well,

I like the idea that he got the like he was just riding a tank or a staff car across the like bombed out ruins of an Autobahn and was like, you know, this is not a bad idea in principle. Eisenhower's administration managed to pass the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. And the intention was to build more highways like the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which, you know, avoided urban areas entirely, sort of allowed for travel between them, but not, you know, directly into the Sintery Center. But a guy named Robert Moses intervened on that, of course. And you got to remember, of course, also these were defense highways. Yeah, it was the code wall. Everything had to be like defensive.

When Eisenhower was still considering the highway system, they named it after him, so that's sweet in the pot. But one thing is also that it was like, oh, what a coincidence. It's got the same name as me. I might as well pass this. No, but it was also the committee was headed by a General Motors board member. So it was pretty clear what the answer was going to be. David sent me this earlier today. And he's like, I think it's from the New York Times. New interstate highway system will help troops seize communist neighborhoods. And one mile in every five is straight, so you can use it as an airstrip. Then we realized it was from the onion. Yeah, which also I enjoyed the thing at the bottom left

as a juxtaposition or residents of New Mexico, given cardboard 3D glasses for protection against atomic radiation. Like I was ready to believe that all of that was true. Like we're just like, I mean, that's that's basically the truth. Honestly, if you look at some of the testimony, it's just like dudes being like, yeah, we weren't really told that standing under an atomic bomb blast was bad for us. The government was like, you should have known. What are you mad about? There was there was the guy who lit a cigarette off of Castle Bravo by like focusing a mirror and like holding the cigarette up to it and like lighting it off the nuke. All right, but sounds dope. I want to do that. Yeah, that's way cooler than like quoting the

Bhagavad Gita or whatever as just like fucking lighting an unfiltered Marlboro off of a nuclear explosion. I think men don't do that anymore because it can't cancel culture, I guess, right? Is that the idea? Yeah, that's what we play now. We're too busy. We're too busy checking each other's pronouns. Yeah. To detonate nuclear weapons to use them as cigarette lights. Yeah. Meanwhile, gender reveal parties are like literally killing people. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Didn't they just have like the second gender reveal fatality? Yeah, you deserve that. You deserve it. Like you deserve it. It's also worth noting that so two reasons it's got defense of the name. Some of the original cost was diverted from

defense funds and most U.S. Air Force bases have like a direct link to the interstates. So in the event you had to mobilize your shitty ass F4 just to get ripped apart by some fucking big at least you could do that. Like and now that's used by a bunch of enlisted airmen in Mustangs that they have on like payments and like on variable term mortgages and shit just backed up one against the other for hours commuting. Awesome. And the reason for that is of course Robert Moses. Robert Moses pioneered the concept of the urban freeway, right? But the urban freeway more specifically as a tool of urban redevelopment and social engineering, right? Are those just two different ways of saying racism? Yes. Funny how that works. Robert Moses

mostly worked in New York City, but he consulted on urban highway projects and plans across the country. If your city has a highway that cuts directly through, you know, and they demolished a bunch of neighborhoods to build it, the chances are Robert Moses was a consultant at least on that plan. And Robert Moses worked with Eisenhower's aides to draft the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act. And basically that changed the requirements from what Eisenhower had envisioned or at least from, you know, a Pennsylvania Turnpike style thing that went around urban areas to something that went straight downtown and just wrecked all the buildings and neighborhoods. And that ultimately resulted in interstate highway system, which is, you know,

worse and less functional than it should be, right? Yeah, but it was very good at the racism though. So you can't like buy its own policy goals, you know, it's fine. But it's very bad at moving people, right? The main leg of Interstate 95 goes straight through Center City, Philadelphia, you know, I-90 goes through downtown Cleveland. There's four interstates that converge in downtown St. Louis. I-5 goes straight through Portland, Oregon. You know, your interstate traffic has to commiserate with local traffic. So you know, any like freight or like, you know, folks driving from one city through another city to another city are delayed by commuters, right? And this is all because Robert Moses wanted to do racism and also anti-Semitism. He really liked

driving freeways through Jewish neighborhoods, which is strange because he was Jewish himself. Sort of. He was raised as a secular jail. It's worth noting that I, as a Jewish man, do not endorse this if they could blow up the freeways. At the very least, we'll find out which one Jimmy Hoffa is part of the foundation of. Just a skeleton just falling out of one. And then this massive influx of traffic into downtown's results and, you know, the need for mass car storage, you know, we invent parking minimums, that whole thing. And parking minimums, of course, can be a whole another episode. Taking us way back to episode one of Franklin, wasn't it? Oh, no. Park policy, yeah.

Yeah. And then there's also cities that, or the reverse happens where you build a highway and then cities grow around them, mostly in the south. And like, from, you know, where 95 starts in Miami all the way up, pretty much all the way up the the east coast of Florida is like one continuous urban highway. You've got to put those tanning salons and like people scamming each other into buying moth-eaten leggings that say, go boss on somewhere. And then if you connect, what's interesting is that there's like 75 on the west coast and 95 on the east coast. And then when you connect them east-west via like I-4 or 595, those are somehow like always full of carnage. Like it's something about crossing the streams that like there used to be this billboard on I-4

which starts in Tampa and ends in Daytona and goes through Orlando. And it was just a billboard that just said stay alive. I don't know. There's something like deepened a cult about this. Like they're built on lay lines or something. Absolutely. Like the energy intersects. All right. So during this same sort of era, we're talking early the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, we start to develop the tools of the trade, a traffic engineering, right? So our friends, AASHTO, remember any private organization, they developed the red book for urban highways and the blue book for rural highways, right? And that's the geometric design of highways and streets or for both conditions. The green book replaced both. That's what we're looking at here.

That was a shitty movie. I would also say that this is definitely that the AASHTO red book is the worst red book. Yes. There's a little red book that's much better. Yeah, you should read that. Read that. It's littler. It sounds like my dad. It has some principles on the design of highways that are a lot more practical, mostly involving how, again, you construct the foundations out of landlords. The blue book and the red book were combined into the green book. Should have been the purple book. It depends on if you're dealing with light or if you're dealing with pigments, I believe. Which color space does AASHTO operate in as the question? Is it RGB or CMYK? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Read now. AASHTO publishes this that has policy on

sight lines, safety, how to design the highways and streets, how much safety runoff area needs to be provided, drivers lose control at speed. They also like to determine what should be the speed limits that we're aiming for. They were making this stuff up as they went along. This was the 50s. Everybody was dying in six different ways of your car crashed. You just look at what was already built and say, that probably should be the standard. Although some freeways were built to higher standards before these documents were created. There's a curve in the town of Normal Illinois which was designed for 100 miles an hour because that's what they thought maybe that's what highway speeds would be in the future. It's future proof. Is that banked too? Or is it just

like a really gentle flat curve? It's just a really gentle flat curve. I hadn't figured out banking yet. Truly having a normal one. In the 1950s when these manuals start being published, there's this big pot of money from the Interstate Highway Act. They start getting the best and brightest engineers into various engineering firms to design highways. Because NASA wasn't a thing yet. It kind of was. It was still NACA then. That's not as cool a name. If you want to deal with dirt instead of rocket engines, dirt and asphalt, traffic engineering becomes a really specialized field. You no longer have engineers who can design a road but you can also design a railroad or you could design public transit. You can only design highways because it's such a specialized

field. In the early 1950s, we also get the highway capacity manual which is published, which introduced a new method of determining how well a road or intersection is performing called level of service. We're trying to objectively judge how roads or intersections are performing. Level of service is fairly intuitive. Roads are graded A through F. We have two kinds of levels of service. We have one for highways. That goes from free flow, which is like there's not many cars. You can go at speed to forced flow, which is you're in sort of stop and go traffic. For intersections, level of service A is determined on the delay. How many vehicles get through in a given light cycle or how long you're waiting at the intersection. Freeways were designed for

if it's rush hour, your grade B or C, and urban roads usually for C to E. Everything is F now though, right? Not to oversimplify. Everything was F almost immediately. Engineers used traffic forecasting methods, which were very complicated, to design for demand that they expected 20-30 years down the line as opposed to the immediate demand. We don't want to upgrade intersections every five years. We want to design for 20-30 years down the road. It's literally the only time the United States planned that far. But what was the quality of that planning? Were they like, 20 to 30 years, rocket cars, surely jets and shit. Everybody's going to be floating. The dog's going to wear a little space

helmet. Or was it more reasonable? It was more like, well, we'll have more cars. We should make it a little bit bigger. Oh, okay. That seems fine. Right. So one of the things that was a problem with forecasting traffic is this thing called induced demand, right? Is that as you increase the ease of travel, more people take more trips until some new equilibrium is reached. And that equilibrium is usually with similar congestion to what previously existed, right? And this was known very early on, right? Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker about Robert Moses during the last two or three years before the entrance of the United States into World War II, a few planners had begun to understand that without a balanced system of transportation, in this case, meaning

roads and mass transit, roads would not only not alleviate transportation congestion, but would aggravate it. Watching Moses open the Trivara Bridge to ease congestion on the Queensborough Bridge, then open the Bronx Whitestone Bridge to ease congestion on the Trivara Bridge, and then watching traffic counts on all three bridges mount until all three were as congested as one had been before, planners could hardly avoid the conclusion that traffic generation, traffic generation being the older word for induced demand, was no longer a theory but a proven fact. The more highways were built to alleviate traffic congestion, the more automobiles would pour into them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways, which would generate more traffic

and become congested in turn in an ever widening spiral that contained the most awesome implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas. Love an old timey, correct usage of the word awesome. Yes. But God, humans are so good at feedback loops, aren't we? Like just spiraling ever upwards. Yeah, it's fine. We're really good at like managing those intuitively. And we're all gonna die because of climate change because Robert Moses is building a bridge to build a bridge to build a bridge to you. Yeah, great. At least he could figure out how to make money off of it. Yeah, it wasn't even just in this field of highway engineering that you saw those effects happening, right? Because also at that time you have cybernetics and all these other

like kooky but groundbreaking fields opening up and all of them are just noticing these similar patterns of either induced demand or like system contained systems like finding equilibrium. Yeah, it was just like it was very predictable that this to come back to the hat to climate. Like this happened with capping and trading emissions was everyone just buys the maximum amount of emissions credits and then oh, great, you can actually pollute more. So it's like when Dale Gribble starts getting into the carbon offset business. He's just like, actually, I don't have to plant trees. I just keep selling these things. So yeah, I mean, the word that traffic engineers sometimes say, the more conscious ones is like widening roads is trying to cure

obesity by loosening your belt, right? I mean, I do be doing that. So do I. So I'll give you an example sort of of how these metrics have changed how streets looked. So this is Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia. This is the one over here is Broad and Spring Garden. And I'm not exactly sure where this was. This was in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And you might notice Spring Garden Street had a garden, right? And there's trees, there's a fountain, you know, it looks very nice. But traffic engineers got their hands on it, right? They needed to make room for cars 20 to 30 years in the future. So this is what it looks like today. Hmm. Yes. Yeah. I love to just stand in the median and just like inhale a bunch of like air

pollution. You should come to Philly. We can do that on a Saturday. I want to picnic on that median. Those the trees, you know, those are a collision hazard. You got to get rid of them. You add some slip lanes to increase vehicle flow. There's a concrete median that's, you know, for safety, right? Allow for higher speeds of traffic. They had left turn lanes, which requires reducing, you know, the garden space. Well, even on the most like aesthetic level, once you've done all of that shit, you have to like throw a bunch of paint all over it so people know where to drive and how to drive and where to cross. And you had like some quite nice cobblestones and stuff. And now it's just like a series of very visually confusing and kind of dazzling like contrasts. Yes.

Well, and also also like in the similar vein to like induced demand when you design for that sort of safety, that definition of safety, you also design for speed. So you're removing all of the things that drivers use to like tell how fast they're going without looking at the speedometer. So if like things are close to you as a driver, you feel like you're going faster or you can at least sense how fast you're going. And so as you remove collision hazards, as they're usually thought of, you know, you're widening things out, you lose sense of speed. And so you're actually making people go faster. It's very monotonous in a place that you wanted people to slow down. One of the things just kind of personal experience is that so where I used to live in

York, Pennsylvania, we live very close to a hospital. And so there's like what's ostensibly a like residential road. I mean, there are houses lining it. But because of the way it's built and because there's so much traffic from the hospital, you get people not just on that road going on like ungodly speeds, but also the roads through like my parents' neighborhood, which also has no sidewalks in the residential area. So we had a problem, you know, when I was a kid, you'd have these people who just couldn't comprehend that like you cannot do 40 because like six year olds live here. And the township just went absolutely bonkers because the hospital's like, well, it's not our fault. And it's like, yeah, maybe not. But like maybe design a system

where 700 cars aren't going through a neighborhood just that is not designed for it at all. And they couldn't understand it. It was bad. No, the yelling is good. The yelling is practice. That's what we're here for. Yeah. And I mean, there's sort of the monotony of it too. Like one street looks much like another street. Aside from like the obvious inconvenience of not necessarily knowing where you are, it kind of makes it very easy to lose your concentration, right? There's nothing sort of breaking up that visual information that you're getting while you're driving. They live in a neighborhood with trees and like where my girlfriend used to live. That's not even true. It's like the suburbs of Philly. And it's these very, very wide streets

and nothing to indicate, you know, that people live here. I think it really just fucks with your sense of perception. Well, I made a joke on the last one about, I don't remember which city it was. It was, oh, it was Kansas City about like merging across 27 lanes of like a mile long freeway. Yeah. Pretty much like, not to get too post-modern about it, but you also like you remove things that look like things that should make you slow down. And so then you replace them with signs that tell you to slow down, right? So instead of having cobblestones and trees that actually make you slow down, you put up a speed limit sign that tells you to slow down, but you can disobey a sign. Whereas like all these things that around

you make you slow down. It's a it's a worse. It's weirdly more authoritarian and also not. And also all of the information is going one way to drivers rather than to everybody. And it kind of kills the idea of having like a like perceptible neighborhood, which is great. Yeah. And I mean, like definitely like the signs are not good for, you know, enforcing safety as much as like the actual, you know, dangerous stuff we had to remove, right? And the safety, the way, you know, traffic engineering is structured is safety for who, right? So this is a street view of the Lincoln Drive and City Avenue and I-76 and Ridge Avenue intersection, which all become Kelly Drive, right? Traffic here is usually going around 40 to 50 miles an hour,

but the speed limit's 35, right? We can, you know, disobey signs because they're not caps, right? Not yet. Yeah. From now on, in the future, every sign is just a pair of absolutely psycho park service ranges. So, you know, the speed limit here is 35, but there's big interstate style signage, which is, I guess, behind the camera here. There's large broad curves, so on and so forth. At the left, we got the Skookle River Trail. And then further left is the Skookle River behind these trees, right? So, note the position of the guardrail here, right? Noted. Okay. So the idea here is we have the guardrail so cars don't fall in the Skookle River if the drivers lose control, we also have a safety runoff zone, right? In case you lose control of the vehicle,

so you don't damage your car too much, right? I see a figure. If you look to sort of midway between the car and the stop sign on the left, there's sort of a human-shaped figure in the runoff zone. Is that meant to happen? The runoff zone. That's Justin, actually. There you go. That's a picture of Justin. Yeah, just zoom in very, very close. Everyone stop googling. Face reveal, face reveal. That's the picture of me. You can be horny over it. Yeah. So the runoff zone is the Skookle River Trail, right? Which is very heavily used. It's a recreational trail, but it's also a commuter route between like Conchahawk and Philadelphia, right? I use this section of trail eight to ten times a week, and it's terrifying because everyone's going so goddamn

fast, and I know that I'm the safety zone, right? You are a crumple zone for the purposes of this. Yeah, I'm the crumple zone. But this is what the safety manual says is safest, and if you design like this, this is how you don't get sued. Because if somebody does end up in the river, like that's a lot of money and a lot of liability. Whereas if you the crumple zone become crumpled, let's say, that's not so much because you can bring out the the book and be like, yeah, no, it's built. It's built code. It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. You can't sue me. I just did what the book said. Either you were like crumpling irresponsibly or it's just bad luck. There's there's no politics conveniently. There's no design. It's just it's it's a naturally occurring

intersection. There's absolutely no politics going on here whatsoever. There's there's just an objective safety, which doesn't consider certain people, but those people are apolitical as drivers are also and and oh my god, I don't know how to that guy telling you that you had too much politics in the engineering last time really got to you, huh? There's it's wild to just because like Kelly Drive is also surrounded by Fairmount Park. Boathouse Row is there. So it's it's absolutely wild. I have driven with Roz on Kelly Drive. And it is it is terrifying also as a driver and I don't understand it like how it's such a major road. I mean, I hate driving on it. I won't do it by and large and I'm not a cyclist like I'll survive a car crash most likely and Lincoln Drive

with the merges right here throws a driver in the creek like every other day. But yeah, if you search the Kelly Drive tag on like our local news, it's just story after story of like horrific crashes because people will routinely do 50, 60 miles an hour on a road totally not designed for it and be like why is everybody slowing down? Incidentally, it's another parkway which is designed for cars only. So yeah, the rapid and quote safe, unquote, movement of cars and cars only is priority number one in you know, designing for in traffic engineering in roadway engineering in any kind of like engineering of streets and has been for 50, 60, 70 years. Does anyone here know why the complete streets design always has like the two travel lanes of cars, then a bike lane

and then parallel parking? Shouldn't we switch the bike lane and parallel parking so that the parked cars protect? It was illegal in Pennsylvania to have anything other than a parking lane next to the curb until or to have a parking lane in the place other than next to the curb until two years ago. I think that's that may be determined by state departments of transportation. One of the reasons it was took so long to be accomplished in Pennsylvania is because there were actual state laws against organizing it in a more sensible fashion. Right, and that's a common argument for like new urbanist planners who say you know like good design is illegal, right? There's like these most of the you know like new urbanists get or you know

nine out of ten times say a lot of weird stuff but a couple of things that they're definitely right on is that and that there's all these moments where you realize that the way that the quote unquote correct way or the way to not get sued you know to to engineer and design a road corridor is always one that not only like is mean to pedestrians or cyclists but just like doesn't even think we have it. Yeah, right, which is how which is how you get like parallel parked cars have to be next to the side. Well we have let's say critical support for numtats maybe. I would definitely say critical support for numtats but there is definitely some criticism. It's less like the emphasis is on the critical. The thing about traffic engineering as a field

right is when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail right traffic engineering data you know what we collect is usually it always points to one solution which is widening roads removing obstructions to fast moving traffic in the name of safety or increasing speeds both of which increase speeds and building new roads. Everyone in the industry knows about induced demands but they would never do anything about it right because if you actually did anything about it it would destroy the industry. Well I mean apart from everything else that's just a sexy aerial photo that you've put up I love to merge at 70 miles an hour to go to the pub or sneaker outlet. Yes or or I like an interchange with curves. It is a it is a thick interchange. Oh I've almost

killed you at this interchange. No. Twice. Left to their own devices traffic engineers will always build New Jersey. So I guess we'll finish off here by giving a few examples of like modern traffic engineering because of stuff which is ongoing right. So this is interstate 95 revive. This is something the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is doing right now. Now I mentioned earlier that interstate 95 should not be in the middle of the northeast second largest and second densest city. It's bad for all road users because of its location and there's several bypasses which are readily available. You know you could run it over the New Jersey Turnpike or I495 to do 76 and you know the elevated freeway in Philadelphia was falling apart. Well PennDOT

decides well let's make it bigger. Right. It's got it's got trees on it. You know it's got some trees. It's got the trees. And also I'm of some concern to me is the fact that most of Philadelphia seems to have been replaced with like featureless gray cubes. Yeah they they they should be. They should be free featureless brick cubes. I see. If we're being accurate. So this is a I95 revive. It's a multi-decade multi-billion dollar project in order to widen I95 through Philly which it shouldn't be there in the first place. And it's actually involved like suspending public transportation to make room for the highway construction right. We had the smart. Yeah that's the way to do it. The Route 15 trolley went all the way up to Richmond which is a neighborhood

in Philadelphia and it was cut back by like two miles to make room for the freeway they were rebuilding. It's been cut back since 2011. They may restore it in two years. Cool and that that extra capacity is just going to fill up instantly as soon as it opens right. Parts of it already are open and they're already congested as hell. Of course. SEPTA has had to borrow mark equipment to run bigger trains to alleviate the congestion that's already here. And it's wild because that section of Philly like now has a casino and a whole bunch of shit and there's no fucking way to get there on public transit. That's not insane. And you still have to run across a street basically. So there's a street called Delaware Avenue in Philly that's kind of a pseudo

highway speaking of long fast open road and it's just a fucking nightmare box. You're a racing Italian-Americans here. It's called Christopher Columbus Boulevard. It wasn't until like 10 years ago man I don't give a shit. I just I just love to stumble out of a casino at three in the morning and get taken the fuck out by I don't know a PC cruiser or something. You will be like that's that is your inevitable death in Philadelphia. It's super tight too because across from that is a residential area. I just that's my absolute favorite part of Philly. One year on Christmas I drove up and down that because I just wanted to see the absolute shit show of like drunk old people leaving a casino at three a.m. on Christmas and it was just a fucking horror story. It was

great. Just Ralph Steadman drawings all through yeah right. Yeah yeah yeah. I'd like to draw attention to that triangle of green space right next to the highway. You know it's like what if we kissed next to the topiaries on next night 95. It's just it really is great how renderings are always in like the middle of summer. Like and you like that will always look like that all the time. It definitely won't be full brown shapes with a parking lot in the middle of it. There will be a beer garden. Yeah. Yeah. Found the never runs beer garden that charges for no goddamn reason. People telling you how nice it is to walk their dog there. Fuck it in Saturday. What if we kissed by the featureless gray cubes and we're both boys. Oh my.

They should be brick cubes. It's a similar situation which is occurring in Portland Oregon where interstate five. This is a Sims ass render. Yeah interstate five goes straight through the city. Right. State officials want to widen the freeway and are providing some minimal capping of the freeway as part of the deal. Right. You know you have this nice grass lawn on these bridges here. Right. And they also claim that widening the freeway is going to lower CO2 emissions because the traffic will move faster through the neighborhood. So locally why does why did the law why did the lawns not touch. That's really bothering me. Why is there a hole. You got to pay more for that. Yeah. I see. That's a DLC. I know I think the reason why

there there's a hole is because otherwise they have to provide actual ventilation active ventilation. Right. So they want to do this as cheaply as possible. There's very little green space actually being added through this capping. Well I mean that's clearly from from SimCity that's zoned as a low density residential. So I can't imagine what value engineering is going to do to that that that whole space. It's just going to be a field of concrete. So if you look at this little stub of pavement over here that connects to another stub of pavement over here right now and that's apparently a major cycling route and they've decided that instead we're going to fuck that thing. We're going to provide you with all this extra infrastructure but we're going to cut off the

route that people want to use. Right. So now when you when you take that same route either for convenience or because you didn't know that they've changed it and you get hit by a truck that's your fault. This is true. Yes. So there's there's a lot of local advocacy groups in Portland who are very much opposed to this widening but the the the the Oregon Department of Transportation may manage to override them just because they can say well this is an interstate project or a regional project and we shouldn't take the considerations of the neighborhood into account because people got to drive trucks from Washington to California through there because that's how you know we've designed the interstate system to function. Since when is it

ever that sunny in Portland by the way. Two days a year and then we're we're going to go to Florida. Do we have to. Which is the one David wants to talk about. Hell yeah we're moving to Florida where it's always sunny. I believe you'll find it's always sunny in Philadelphia. Yeah that's absolutely true. But don't compare it. So it's so this the monstrosity that you're looking at is Pines Boulevard which is the one that goes to the bottom from the bottom left to the top right and then Flamingo Road intersects it and you can kind of lose count of how many lanes are going or are intersecting there but it's basically three lanes in each direction with a double dedicated left turn lane in each direction

and a dedicated right turn lane in each direction. So you're you're basically traversing what's that like 12 lanes in any one set. I do see both roads have a bike lane though. Yeah well you know you want it to be accessible and pedestrian friendly. So intersection goal. Yeah yeah so in 2001 State Farm Insurance named this intersection the most dangerous intersection in the United States and they did that by compiling crash rankings or crash data from January 1999 to December 2000 and they counted over that two years 357 accidents and and I should also say that like numbers like two and three on that list are also in this general area because they're all just these massive arterial roads meeting at grade with each

other. But where are you going to get to the men's warehouse? Or the Chick-fil-A. Yep right yeah right clearly yeah it's the only way to do it and actually what is convenient is that further up just a little bit further out of frame here is a hospital so when you get decapitated in that the intersection you know your organs are still fresh. The downside is if you get decapitated well let's say not decapitated but let's say you get like mildly crushed or something at like the second or third worst intersection there's a decent chance your ambulance is just going to get taken out on this one on the way to the hospital. Yeah yeah good point yeah I actually I say decapitated because I've seen that like I live by this intersection growing up for like the

first like 18 20 years of my life and you just like see the like the most horrendous car accidents there like all the time all the time. So by by 2012 they said that they had fixed most of this they got rid of one turn off out of a McDonald's that's a that's just how do you have an intersection with patch notes. It's like well well we got rid of the turn from McDonald's we eliminated one light phase you now have to make two turns to get to the Chick-fil-A. Yeah the drivers no longer clip through yeah and this should prevent people from dying. Problem solved yeah they did they um let's see what else did they do they uh they lengthened the lengthened the turn lanes and uh and did some stuff to the median to prevent more unnecessary

left turns and like and that's basically it they said that they that they reduced it they also put in red light cameras so you get like a hundred and fifty dollar ticket for running the red light. And some city official gets a bunch of snuff moves yeah yeah yeah well so it was and the reason it was so dangerous was because if you even ran a yellow light if you went on a yellow this intersection is so enormous that by the time you get to the other side it is fully red and the other side is ready to go. So that was a lot of the t-boning that happened in the intersection was because it's just so enormous that even in a car you can't get past it without uh yeah god forbid you're walking or you're on a bike. It sounds exactly like the Roosevelt Boulevard.

Yeah and if you look closer into it there is no like median to stand on in the middle there like least nothing's safely like sized to to wait for the next change so yeah it's really you can't get across this. I believe the same the same study the same state farm uh study that named this one of the most dangerous intersection in the United States also named two intersections on Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia the most dangerous intersections in the United States. Second and third hell yeah we podium twice yeah it's it's fucking insane and it's the same thing you get uh houses and stuff that are right on the boulevard and then people doing whatever like 70 miles an hour uh this is gonna be some real angry criticism northeast Philly because it's gonna fuck itself.

The great northeast. It's absolutely insane because you absolutely have people fuck them. Join Bucks County uh tons of people just die all the time on the boulevard and people are just like I can't imagine why it's so dangerous which is why we were first to get uh red light cameras yeah because people kept dying. I love to watch people get turned into hamburger trying to turn into somewhere called like I don't know the apartments at yeah like I could I can finish that for you it's really just like anything that was uh bulldozed to make for those apartments like make way for the apartment so it's like apartments at Cyprus Hill right is it right yeah oh shit they demolished Boston to make Boston mark fuck I like that place and you can just copy paste that

intersection uh just north and south up and down that entire region what's uh uh actually one more thing about red light cameras is that most cities uh rent them they don't buy them and install them it's a rented service and the and the pamphlet that you get as a city official when you're being sold this red light camera service is um you know the the fee the the fee that you pay to rent it uh will be um smaller than the revenue that you get from tickets because they assume that it's built into the system that people will run red lights and that's the only way that this makes sense to to run is is if you get enough infractions uh and up here in Albany where I live they installed red light cameras for a couple of uh a couple of years and uh but they weren't making enough money

they were actually spending money on the traffic can cameras it wouldn't um it wouldn't break even and then so they took a couple of them out uh because they don't they don't they don't work as as sold to these cities if people don't run red lights it's it's like it's you know it's like a you know running a bank on um on overdraft fees you know it's it's the same it's the same sort of idea that you have to have infractions in order for the whole system to work yeah on the plus side I'm I'm really glad that in under 10 years uh you know this being Florida the whole thing is going to be under six feet of water and that intersection would just be like one big deep trench that can just kind of like form a kind of moat between like warring raider gangs and the like above water

neighborhoods that's going to be cool unless we unless we dig the hole you can see actually all the canals unless we dig right you should you should elaborate about the hole because this is coming yeah because I posted on on twitter my idea to combat climate change you you solved it you solved climate change yeah it's to dig a large hole and then all of the sea level rise can flow into the hole very proud of you as opposed to everywhere else yeah that should be as that should be a sequel to the movie uh the core oh yeah uh the core I my my suggestion oh I'd watch that you've just done that one episode of Futurama yeah my suggestion was uh to use the um giant coal uh lignite mining pits in central Germany and just like we burn the fossil fuels and then we create

the hole and the sea level rise goes into the hole and it solves itself it's fine yeah it's fine oh no so we build the giant hole and we accidentally extinguish the core at the center of the earth so then we need to send just turning the hose by bomb it so then we send a submarine with a nuclear bomb down the hole to reignite the core the core yeah it's it's like a lawnmower you just have to like jump stars at a few times just open the choke you know just really you know put some put some elbow grease into it so while we're disrupting climate change you'll be happy to know that traffic engineers are disrupting um intersections right oh good so you know we have like exotic intersections which are designed to reduce vehicle to vehicle conflicts it's sort of at the expense of all other

road users this is something which is popular on twitter recently uh the virginia department of transportation published a video on what they call a restricted crossing u-turn right jesus webs all right i i can't i can't explain i can't explain why but this looks like a white supremacist symbol it's i mean fundamentally it is yeah i just i i love to be yeah crossing a freeway in the root of a pacman ghost okay okay so i i guess i should explain how this works let's say you're turning right for okay so you got you got one road which you know you just go across the other road you know you got to do a thing right so the idea is if you're turning right you just turn right or excuse me you just turn right through this outer one if you're turning

left you have to go down into the special left turn lane then you wait for an intersection here and then you come back around and go straight across or if you're going straight you have to do the same thing right and this this reduces points of conflict between different paths for motor vehicles right which makes it a little bit safer for motor vehicles like statistically speaking a problem which is if you're using those crosswalks that are marked the traffic's going to be coming at you from literally i think a different direction each time yes if you're just trying to cross you know the street normally you have to use five crosswalks instead of one five crosswalks each in a different like bizarre direction

that's good cardio yes and if you're a cyclist they included bike lanes on these streets right there's no indication of how a cyclist might actually use this intersection i watched the video they were like well you can either use the sidewalk or if you're more comfortable you can ride in traffic i don't think lance armstrong could ride in traffic in in this intersection this is dodgeable with cars yeah i mean it's frogger it's just straight frogger i'm just imagining like both the air quality and the the the sound of walking in that little diagonal part in the middle yeah i'd have asthma by the end of it i want to be the guy who has to like get on a zero turn mower and like clip the grass and all of those like elegantly fluted

like lawns there in the middle that's gonna be fun oh my god oh my god i don't want to do that maybe i do i'd get like i'd get hazard pay yeah well they they tape it to like two perfect little points that's gonna be so fun to like be on like a ride on mower with like school buses and shit coming past you at 70 miles an hour or you're gonna have your boss they like use the hedger so yeah this is one of several exotic intersections that modern traffic engineers are coming up with to you know increase safety but only for you know drivers and other you know road motor vehicle of users truckers bus drivers people on buses so on and so forth at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists you know there's stuff like diverging diamonds which was the cover the cover image of

this or the first slide there's stuff like the single point urban interchange there they're all they're all dumb for anyone who's not in a car yeah but on the other hand they're all the top rated things on the city skyline's workshop so this is true so it's a land of contracts so you know we're stuck here right um you know we're in a situation where traffic engineers and traffic engineering and the way we've structured our you know funding of infrastructure have uh got us stuck in a situation where the only possible solution is to expand roads right and the people who are you know working on doing traffic engineering you know they're generally like older whiter people who live in suburbs and they drive everywhere they don't see a reason why we might

change our ways right that's political and you're doing politics now i can't do that sorry in college when i was researching this uh state uh highway corridor uh redesign they were thinking of putting in roundabouts in different parts of the of the of the street and um there were these all these meetings where these boomers would stand up and one do this the most elaborate math like that back of the napkin math uh about how you know if you reduce speed by 10 miles per hour and the average person driving that car makes like 60 000 a year then like you're losing 10 million dollars an hour in lost like productivity by reducing the speed of the road it was really quite incredible stuff but also that roundabouts are un-american they're good enough for europeans maybe but here in america

you know we stop at rational right angles okay very i think this is i think this is funny to contrast with the image i put here is um this is a rational design which was come up with by new jersey traffic engineers near toms river like it or not this is what peak performance looks like yes you'll notice it's a cloverleaf intersection now what do you not notice what what do you notice it's missing from a typical cloverleaf intersection overpasses yes what so so what what's happening what what why why though this this this central intersection here only has uh you can only go straight through the intersection okay first of all homophobic yes so it's canceled already right if you want to go left you have to go through the cloverleaf if you want to go right you have

to go through the cloverleaf right this was a rational insane solution which is determined apolitically by new jersey traffic engineers um to be the best solution for this location also note the uh crosswalks very pedestrian friendly despite the fact that they do not link to anything well sometimes you got to get onto like a little circle of like completely dead grass and two trees i want to go from dead grass circle to tree circle and then half tree half dead grass circle they're completely different experiences if i if i'm following the law i have to parachute in here and somewhere in the middle is executive cellular phones yes you have to dodge traffic to get to your executive cellular phone i you know i you know this isn't even really like

a metaphor anymore you know it's really just um it's it's like watching liberals trying to square some sort of contradiction of capitalism right where you're just like uh oh there's like under serious underlying problems that they want to ignore so instead they'll make these ever widening and confusing uh stopgap measures that don't ever solve the underlying problem and they make everyone else go through more and more steps to get to where they need to go are you saying that the new jersey dot has a plan for that the subtext is just text now and the text is i i don't know a bunch of dead grass next to a bahama breeze yeah i'm sorry i can't stop naming the stuff that's bi intersections just because it it so appeals to me on like some kind of psychic level yeah garden

stay dental at times river and the friendlies place at other place uh yeah yeah great artisans restaurant and brewery and the world the world's fargo is nice because it's like having an interstate of like at the very least a large like high capacity road is good for if you want to rob the place i'm trying to guess what the parking lot is in the bottom right because there's no cart corrals so yeah okay there we go all right yes so yeah i mean traffic engineers they don't want to change their ways the public which is a real problem is like you know common sense says if you widen the road you'll be able to drive faster and you'll avoid congestion and you know the thing is statistically this is not the case right um but you don't have a lot of political support for like

actual you know reforms that would reduce congestion which would involve uh you know not widening roads and improving public transportation and then like you know politicians they want ribbon cuttings which you know you get the the the most rational way to invest your political capital is to expand roads because that's like nice and easy it's like yeah i widened the road now everyone's happy right it's concrete literally and do you create jobs for that one guy with all the shovels bless it bless yes that's true steve with the shovel andrew quomo just uh opened uh did a ribbon cutting for a new off ramp to the albany international airport by me and uh there's just like these goofy photos of him like giving thumbs up next to an exit sign

that that is just like so completely uh uh photoshoppable to just remove the albany international airport input whatever you want like on that sign and him giving a thumbs up that's kind of the bold leadership that we need and these times of strife is to open an off ramp yeah i the thing is really is that highway construction at this point and road widening it's a dead end technology right unless you're like one of those autonomous cars you know believers who thinks we're gonna have millisecond coordinated intersections right uh which i don't believe in i think that's bullshit well you just get a bad intersection like the one that we looked at and instead of killing one or two people at the time it's five hundred as all of these like

millisecond proof cars just fucking telescope into each other yeah yeah as soon as one car screws up with every single car is just becomes a mash of like splinters of steel and human flesh so you didn't update flash always knew the security updates would get me eventually and the thing is ultimately like you know improving the built environment for the sake of pedestrians for the sake of you know cyclists for the sake of road users other than cars is very very very cheap it it it's just restriping a lot of the times but it requires taking space from drivers and like that's a political non-starter right now because you know there's so much congestion and we don't think that maybe giving space over from cars to something else might get us to our destinations

more quickly and um you know i i guess in short we're up shit creek um cool that's a bad way to end but you know here we are but we're all just merging across the enormous highway yes into a into a bold new bahama breeze future yes we live in a society that's society we live in a society but we're we're accessing to a margaritaville thank god i love margaritaville i'm not ashamed of it i want to go to the bahama breeze now just to see how it is coconut shrimp delicious so yeah with with that at grade glover leaf um i guess you know that's that's where we are carbads train goods horse agents of chaos wild card yeah chaotic neutral um uh new jersey department of transit cancelled um very much cancelled

i i i think in a future communist future we would keep the at grade glover leaf just because it's fine this is a good idea yeah the the way we execute landlords as we just put them in a car and just like fucking shoot them through that and just like see what happens very adored it's just just a giant monument to the past and capitalist excess and you just like put put uh the you know the the heads of bosses and landlords like in each uh different circle and you can visit this isn't even excess this is like the worst of capitalism because they they would splurge for like a glover leaf but they wouldn't build an overpass just like four sad crosswalks yeah that's because you you know that there was someone in the townhouses in the upper left hand corner

like scared that they would see the overpass and they're like i don't want to see a highway i want to protect the character of the neighborhood i believe that the townhouses came later i think the the the at grade glover leaf was an experiment in the new jersey department of transportation i feel like that could be a whole episode to be you know how how every single intersection in new jersey is like a piece of abstract performance art yeah i feel like you what you just described is uh the more true version the spiritually yeah yours is the more factual and mine is the more truthful yours is actually more truthiness as my old parish priest used to say it may not be literally true but contains a moral truth there yes so that's the episode which is run way over time

sorry buddy yep you're welcome next week we're doing the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse that's gonna be so good i can't wait it's gonna be a good episode yeah it's gonna be a lot of fun um does anyone have anything to pitch before we go you go first which is available anywhere uh podcasts assault uh i uh listen to uh listen to ironweeds also maybe and then uh i have a uh you can read real life real life mag.com i hope i got that right uh where i i just posted something about how um uh ghost the show ghost adventures on the travel channel like makes us all feel special in the different sorts of suburbs boring suburbs we live in uh that was a bunch that was really fun to write uh and uh pretty soon we're

gonna release the uh the call for papers for uh theorizing the web a fun conference that i do in new york city every year where uh people talk about uh society and and the internet in a way that doesn't uh uh say the word disruption 5 000 times yes it's a it's actually you know people who care more about society than technology it's a it's a it's a lot of fun we live stream the whole thing also David's um come on fresh future if you like oh absolutely yes that would be good and i was on theorizing the web last year so you know there's a live stream if you want to hear more of me talking and you're also on trash future if you dig back in our archives i was also on trash future yes and i have a thing to pitch cool because i have to do i have to do pennants

because i screwed up my voter registration this year you motherfucker i know right that's the most important part of politics is the voting yeah pretty much yeah so um if you're watching this the day it comes out which should be november 5th 2019 right um and hopefully early in the morning i i don't know how long it'll take me to edit this um when you go to the polls today and this is if you're in philadelphia do not vote straight ticket democrat right you you have five votes to spend on at large city council candidates and what you should do is vote for your three favorite democrats and then the two working families candidates right those are kendra brooks and nick o'rourke right they're number 716 and 717 and this is because two seats on city council are reserved for

non democratic party candidates and traditionally that's gone to republicans um now if everyone votes for working family parties candidates as opposed to the republicans we can change that around and kick the republicans off a city council and we'll have you know working families party candidates who will fight for working class interests and uh you know if you're if you're if you have a problem with that because you know the working families party endorsed elizabeth waran i understand but you know i too am a racist and sexist ernie bro um yeah and i can stomach it so yeah just just do it just do it on the same lines if you're in the uk uh election coming up in six weeks register to vote now the deadline is i think the 29th of november so register to vote do it one more uh

still in philadelphia uh so there's a ballot proposal statewide in pennsylvania which would called marcie's law uh this would uh give quote a bill of rights to crime victims but also totally fuck up all sorts of protections we have for accused people uh which would further totally screw them over in places like rural pennsylvania which are already super racist and it will you know the uclu has already filed against it but please do not vote for that it is a wild violation of all sorts of due process laws yes vote no on that there's also new voting machines in philadelphia so take the time to figure them out i'm gonna link a video in the description um and i've thanks for having me yeah uh good night everyone good night everybody

i forgot one more thing there's one more thing i i forgot to say uh uh jeffrey ebstin was murdered