grue , 6 months ago

I think people are intuitively understanding that it’s not really a possibility in a country as large as America.

Their cynical intuition is wrong, though, and the “large country” argument in particular falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. So what if we have more roads? We have commensurately more traffic engineers, too! There is no excuse not to design properly.

Anyway, NJB has an entire video debunking that, so I’m just going to cite it instead of wasting my time arguing the point myself.

We also have different types of traffic compared to the Netherlands, more large vehicles and people without access to public transportation for daily commutes.

Vehicle size is irrelevant. Lack of access to public transportation is indeed a problem; however, in general “we shouldn’t fix problem A because we also have problem B” is not a valid argument. It just means you should fix problems A and B.

Compounding all this with the fact that the federal government has no control of how most of these roads are built…

Sigh… look, you’re not wrong to argue that that’s a popular perception; however, that’s much more a consequence of the shitty state of civics education than it is an accurate description of reality. There’s a bunch of different ways the Federal government exerts control, including things like taxation and funding (including for state- and local-maintained roads in a lot of cases, not just U.S. Highways) and collaboration between the FHWA (government) and AASHTO (industry) on design standards. It’s more complicated than just a unitary central government dictating things, but rest assured, roads are designed in a relatively standardized way nationwide.