Nope. We maintained a higher share of railway traffic, and more extensive branchlines for long, even if from less money, and mass transit was definitely encouraged -- up until the sixties or so. The rot started then, and was greatly enhanced after the end of what was called 'communism'. (Even in East Germany. Unfortunately what you say about abandoned lines in Germany is not true, only the second big wave of closures was later than in Britain.)
But I entirely agree that the EU's promotion of highways here, and our local elites, technocrat experts (sidesweep at François) are totally wrong in promoting investment in highways reaching Western European levels, rather than in keeping railways and bringing them to Western technology and comfort levels. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I'm not talking about the extensive Western style web but just a basic set of arteries - at a minimum one north south route (Gdansk-Warsaw-Krakow) and two East West ones (Berlin-Poznan-Warsaw-border and Dresden-Wroclaw-Katowice-Krakow-Przemysl-Lviv), plus a few spurs)
My message to Western European greens who make this argument - we'll stop building them the moment you shut yours down.
Who and what for?
I know exactly what you mean. Hungary's highway netwrok consisted of four badly maintained stubs in 1989. The build-up of highways contributed significantly to a great shift of cargo from rail to road, also of passengers from buses and trains to private cars. Proponents in the ecnomy see them as economic stimulus (because only lorries can transport stuff...), and private drivers just enjoy whizzling along (where the alternative they are exposed to is a public transport that is steadily depreciating). But noise, gaseous, fine particle emissions are growing, oil consumption too, solely highway-accessible commercial and housing projects are spreading on the landscape (often taking good arable land or green areas near cities) and the desertion of the countryside didn't exactly stop.
So, I'm all for calling on Western Greens to dump their cars and call on dismantling highways for fairness, but I think we here are repeating the West's mistakes out of shortsightedness. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
You don't get any positives from a lack of highways, rather the reverse. Plus I think convenience matters - being able to travel to places is nice, and mass transit networks are great within cities or between major centers, much less so otherwise. (Which is why I actually don't think we're ever going to get rid of cars - they're an extremely useful invention. Unless that is you're planning on a future where there is basically no population outside extremely dense Manhattan style urban areas - the rest just heavily mechanized mega farms and wilderness. That's going a bit far for even as devoted a fan of urban living as me.)
Probably, yes.
The framing of the issue as whether or not to have highways is, of course, a frame that is biased to give the yes answer. Frame the question in terms of should we put the effort into building the highways or the equivalent effort into building dedicated transport corridors for public transport, the answer is no longer so automatic.
And, yes, in the early 1900's you could go from one small city to a small village to a next small city in Ohio via interurbans without requiring either horse-drawn or horseless carriage. The idea that cars are required for life in small towns is just an ahistorical projection of current institutions.
Indeed, one of the major elements that interfere with recreating that in the US is the heavy subsidy of the auto-over-all system. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
This is a common misconception. They do continue to happen there, except it's less transit traffic and more the increased local traffic. The problem is worse in major towns, where the increased highway traffic feeds into main roads whose capacity can't be increased beyond a certain limit (houses can't be demolished that easily for extra lanes), leading to increased traffic jams.
is that strip mall or subdivision any better because it's by a major two lane road rather than a highway?
Yes, because at least mass transport by bus is more likely to happen, and the development is more likely to be at least on the edge of town rather than metastasing in the middle of previously green areas. But I agree that sprawl is a broader problem than to be caused by highways only.
mass transit networks are great within cities or between major centers, much less so otherwise.
Less so is relative, and not a constant -- which is kind of my point, with current policy enhancing the convenience of car-based travel and reducing that of especially countryside mass transit. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I shall mention for me this is both theory and practical experience. The city I live in now was along a busy main road, got a bypass a decade ago, but main street now has busy and noisy traffic all day again. The only plus is less trucks. Meanwhile, it's not like the new road doesn't affect previously main road free residential areas, something unavoidable with population density in Europe... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Meanwhile, consider: while Poland had about 100 km of highways, it had:
