North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
Today's Boston can't even build a traffic tunnel. The Big Dig was a disaster-- took decades, costs billions more than planned, and was so shoddy the finished roof fell and killed someone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
As someone who works in an office building along rose kennedy greenway, I wouldn't say it was totally a disaster. Basically everything along the greenway has been revitalized and it's pretty beautiful to walk around in the summer. There is a lot more activity in the area and lots of new restaurants.
The real problem with the Big Dig is that is was designed and built in ignorance of the law of demand [1] as it applies to lane capacity. The traffic congestion that the Big Dig was supposed to eliminate simply moved outward [2].
They should have eliminated the Big Dig completely and spent the money on increasing rapid transit capacity.
That said, eliminating the elevated highway that cut the North End off from the rest of the city seems to have been a major boon.
I can't really speak to traffic because I rarely drive, but I do agree there needs to be more investment in rapid transit. I rely on the red line/walking to get to and from my office. It is the only line I would consider living on.
But I did want to add that it isn't only the north end that was cut off. I doubt the resurgence of the Sea port area/"innovation district" would have happened if it hadn't been for the big dig.
You can take a cynical view of it if you want to, but you also have to remember the economic aspects in play. At the time the US was experiencing unprecedented growth. There was abundant amount of capital to throw around. That just isn't the case today.
Contrast that to Southern China. Lots of insanely ambitious city projects, driven once again by tons of growth.
It's not about abundant capital - it's actually easier for American cities to leverage the bond market to raise capital now than it was in the 19th century. The bigger issue is labor and regulation. The people working to raise Chicago were frequently immigrants, either from other countries or from farms, working long hours, with little pay, and with questionable safety standards. Thanks to regulation and labor organization, workers on civil engineering projects are much less likely to fall off a building or have one collapse on them, and can afford to live much more comfortably. But that means it's much more expensive and difficult to undertake a large project.
Same goes for regulation. Notice that the whole reason Chicago needed to be raised was so they could drain run-off. So where do they drain it into? The Chicago River and Lake Michigan, which became toxic cesspools until very recently. And those shop owners didn't have much of a say while they were hoisted into the air. Regulation and democratic involvement are really annoying when you want a large capital project to go through, but they're really important to you when that large capital project is something that's being done to you.
It's common knowledge in the financial world that returns are expected to be very low in the near future. With that and the recession both financiers and economists (real economists, not random op-ed writers) are aware that the market and macro situation for government projects is ideal.
But it so happens that government projects today are very often financial disasters, particularly when backed by bonds or tax increases. There's no law of the market that says this should happen either, but it seems to be a feature of ossified political systems.
In times of rapid economic change, the risk of doing nothing is often far worse than a grand project that is merely less than fully successful. Chicago feared it would become a big flat toilet, for many good reasons.
When things work pretty well, it can be more difficult to allocated resources for bigger projects, I suppose.
Interesting to note, many economists in no small measure blame the recent financial crisis on the global cpital glut chasing returns. If you create an innovative instruments for financial capital to support physical capital (in this case US housing stock) you too can create a bubble.
You build infrastructure when you expect to grow, because that's when infrastructure creates the most value. Chicago during the late 19th and early 20th century wast he fastest growing city in the world, and was becoming wealthy from its central location in transcontinental trade.
Today, nearly all traditional American cities are on the tail end of a long decline (save a small handful, like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle), or else are the kind of sprawly suburban cities that don't have the same need for the ambitious public works that the traditional, dense, American cities had.
Totally different. "Cities" like Houston grow outward like the suburbs. Houston has almost 3 times the land of Chicago. Population density of Houston 3,623/sq mi, Chicago 11,864.4/sq mi. One is a city, the other a glorified suburb.
Well if any of today's American cities lost 5 to 7% of their population in a single year to some sort of medical epidemic I suspect there'd be a fair bit of civil activity.
Well I was going simply off the article. Still, even that entry shows pretty consistent spurts of deaths hitting 3 - 5% of the population so it's pretty consistent with the point of the article (after multiple years of deaths they were force/spurred to act)
I'm particularly struck by the contrast between a great city undergoing a decades-long project to raise everything above the local water level and modern-day insanity such as North Carolina making it illegal to base public policy on scientific reports about sea level rise.
One wonders if those lawmakers, teleported back to 19th-century Chicago, would deny that drainage is a problem and forbid basic public policy on any scientific report linking sewage to disease.
> North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
North American cities used to suffer with depressing frequency civil engineering disasters that killed dozens of people at a time. It truly would be odd if fear and trepidation regarding the topic is greater now, if that's actually true.
Caution might be greater, since we know more about the topic and more about what we need to be cautious of, but that's all to the good.
My impression is that project overages have scared cities quite a bit. To use your Boston example, the Big Dig certainly has scared many other municipalities thinking of something like that. The Denver Airport fiasco most certainly scared away people from building new airports for decades.
Moving into speculation... I believe that society values lives a lot more. It would be very hard to cost effectively build another Golden Gate Bridge due to the lives involved. Is this really a bad thing? So instead we build skyscrapers.
