“On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development
Although spatial differences in economic development tend to be highly persistent over time, this is not always the case. This column combines novel data on Roman...

On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development

Although spatial differences in economic development tend to be highly persistent over time, this is not always the case. This column combines novel data on Roman Empire road networks with data on night-time light intensity to explore the persistence and non-persistence of a key proximate source of growth – public goods provision. Several empirical strategies all point to the Roman road network as playing an important role in the persistence of subsequent development.

(via Roman roads and persistence in development | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal)

Infrastructure and unending empires // JAY

This is how you actually “resist"

(Via https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/749t22/this_is_how_you_actually_resist/)

"Britain’s Totally Fake Roundabout Is Driving Locals Crazy
A road in Cambridge was redesigned to actively confuse drivers."

— Cambridge’s New Road Markings Are Supposed to Be Confusing - CityLab

Cash-Strapped Towns Are Un-Paving Roads They Can’t Afford to Fix

WHEN MONTPELIER DECIDED to rip up a pothole-riddled asphalt road and replace it with gravel in 2009, it didn’t see itself at the forefront of a growing trend in public works. It was simply responding to a citizen complaint.

Repaving roads is expensive, so Montpelier instead used its diminishing public works budget to take a step back in time and un-pave the road. Workers hauled out a machine called a “reclaimer” and pulverized the damaged asphalt and smoothed out the road’s exterior. They filled the space between Vermont’s cruddy soil and hardier dirt and gravel up top with a “geotextile”, a hardy fabric that helps with erosion, stability and drainage.
In an era of dismal infrastructure spending, where the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the country’s roads a D grade, rural areas all over the country are embracing this kind of strategic retreat. Transportation agencies in at least 27 states have unpaved roads, according to a new report from the National Highway Cooperative Highway Research program. They’ve done the bulk of that work in the past five years.

The US Is About to Waste $305 Billion On Roads We Don't Need

The success of self-driving automakers and tech companies depends on the quality and performance of the country’s roads. Google and Apple and Tesla and Uber are not just users of these roads, they’re the stewards of these roads going forward. Roads are their hardware for solving our mobility problems with better technology.

The US Is About to Waste $305 Billion On Roads We Don’t Need

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Further reading: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State

Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national economy, and how technology caused strangers to stop speaking.

In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns. By 1848 the primitive roads were transformed into a network of highways connecting every village and island in the nation—and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. The highway network led to contests for control over everything from road management to market access. Peripheries like the Highlands demanded that centralized government pay for roads they could not afford, while English counties wanted to be spared the cost of underwriting roads to Scotland. The new network also transformed social relationships. Although travelers moved along the same routes, they occupied increasingly isolated spheres. The roads were the product of a new form of government, the infrastructure state, marked by the unprecedented control bureaucrats wielded over decisions relating to everyday life.

Does information really work to unite strangers? Do markets unite nations and peoples in common interests? There are lessons here for all who would end poverty or design their markets around the principle of participation. Jo Guldi draws direct connections between traditional infrastructure and the contemporary collapse of the American Rust Belt, the decline of American infrastructure, the digital divide, and net neutrality. In the modern world, infrastructure is our principal tool for forging new communities, but it cannot outlast the control of governance by visionaries.

solarpunks:

Freeways delimit the use of space and are infrastructural markers of inequality in the city…The tactic of freeway takeovers is channeled towards a source of corporate and state power – the arteries of the global commodity chain. The participants of the takeovers express a disregard towards the interests of commerce, capital, and the state. This disavowal of capital is synonymous with the interest of racialized communities in refusing to accept the “mutual interests” they are expected to share with commerce and the state. These takeovers are not just haphazard but strategic.
– “Freeway Takeovers: The Re-Emergence of the Collective through Urban Disruption.”
(Photo: Noah Berger, Associated Press)

#Realtalk

Let’s build the road network of civic tech. Keynote at Open Knowledge Festival 2014

Keynote from Eric Hysen

Googler on the @GooglePolitics team

aljazeeraamerica:

Opinion: America’s crumbling infrastructure desperately needs funding
Last month, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) introduced the Update, Promote and Develop America’s Transportation Essentials (UPDATE) Act. The proposed bill lays out a clear roadmap on how to restore and modernize America’s surface transportation system.
Much of the recent debate on infrastructure investment has focused on economic stimulus and job creation. While these are important considerations, Americans shouldn’t lose sight of a simpler fact: Their roads need repairs and maintenance which requires investment. For far too long, lawmakers have ignored upgrading our aging infrastructure for other priorities. Americans are now paying the price. Although this is obvious from our congested highways, roads strewn with potholes, and aging bridges, a careful examination of the evidence is sobering.
Read more
Photo: Stephen Brashear/Getty Images

Roads facilitate capitalism // Jay

"Unborn roads weigh invisibly on the landscape like stories without endings
…
For Ballard, the motorway flyover was a modern manifestation of the sublime, in the literal sense of the word…something that combined aesthetic awe with existential dread.
…
Morrissey’s love of service stations is not so surprising. Like the out-of-season seaside resorts and rainy northern towns he also chronicles in his songs, they mine a rich seam of English ordinariess and gone-to-seed glamour.
…
[Concrete] flyovers… have remained, as a stigmatic image embodying the delusions of that era."

—

Joe Moran, On Roads (via amanda-lwin)

Love these quoyes