this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
1213 points (98.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
13276 readers
609 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have my doubts that military considerations were anything but a ruse to help sell the nation on the cost. That claim feels a lot like an utban legend, with embellishments like the design accommodating aircraft landings. The contemporary source material from the people supporting it cited the economic benefits mostly. As well, the military voiced support for the system, but the Secretary of Defense was Charles Erwin Wilson. He had been CEO of General Motors before taking office. At his confirmation hearing, he could see no conflict of interest. It was there that he uttered that famous quote, "What's good for General Motors is good for America."
The capitalist automotive companies had captured the military industrial complex, so I think maybe there's a slight possibilty that the latter's support for something that benefitted the former so immensely may not have been wholly genuine.
Doubt all you want, it's a free country afterall.
Some (just some) of the information I've seen on this indicates that the freeways built in North America are massively over built for the use case. The amount of underlying structure and support for the roads is not necessary and just serves to add costs with no tangible benefit to automotive travel to those that drive on it.
The only good reason to be so over built is so that the roadway can be used for something that isn't civilian traffic.... Like the road being used as a landing strip, or to support tanks and other heavy equipment rolling overtop without entirely annihilating the road.
But hey, you do your own research. Come to your own conclusions. I'm not telling you anything as fact here, just relaying what I've heard, and what, in my opinion, is true. But that's just like.... My opinion man.
That's the thing. I've looked into it, not super extensively honestly, but never found any project specification that included clauses or numbers about military use. Further, the infrastructure isn't overbuilt for the purpose, which is road transport of cargo. Trucks threaten to overburden the Interstate highways, which is why we have weight limits, and weigh stations to enforce them. Also, all.of the military vehicles I've seen on the highway are still just vehicles, modified from civilian models; even the tanks are not so.massive that they can't transport them on a typical flatbed trailer. The last thing that makes me doubt the military-use justification is that it's a double-edged sword: Our military can use them.to rapidly deploy forces, but invaders could also use them just as effectively, and to rapidly advance into the heart of our cities.
Eisenhower is called the father of the Interstate Highway, and he saw the need for economic reasons. The cost of construction was the primary fight, and "Defense" got added to the title of the bill authorizing it so they could justify spending some defense funds, but that looks awfully perfunctory, being added later.
Fair enough. I'm happy to have contending viewpoints on the matter and civil discussion about it. You've given me a lot to think about and more research to do, and I appreciate that.
I don't know that I'll remember to come back and comment here when I've done all that, so in the event I forget, I hope you have an excellent day/week/month/year/life.
Thanks for the note. I just wanted to stop back and say that I appreciate it. It's not my intent to win an argument, and I was thinking about leaving Reddit before the API fiasco because it seemed like it has a culture of combat-by-verbiage. My username is an old, nautical version of shooting the breeze, or chewing the fat, talking just for the pleasure of talking. That's what I was going for here, and mission accomplished.
You're missing the "privatized railways" and "trains need more grading" components.
Businesses need to ship cargo. However the private railroads road block attempts at public freight rail (which is massively more efficient) so the demand from businesses is to run truck traffic over highways which is where like 99.9% of road wear comes from.
Private railways also have no incentive to expand service (it costs a lot to properly grade for freight and they have regional monopolies. )