The Engineer and the Automobile: Mistaken Predictions about St. Louis' Interstate System

0:00Okay, so yeah, now a lot of people, even a lot of supposedly free market people, defend the interstate system. They think, oh, this is some sort of great advancement at lower transportation costs, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I don't totally deny these things. Of course, the interstate system has benefited us in a number of ways. I traveled here on several of them myself, but the thing is that much like in any sort of government action, people are only looking at what is seen, you know, it's the old Bastiat thing, so what they don't see are the costs of it, and also that it did not succeed in actually what it was planning to do, mainly the interstate system was supposed to diminish the amount of traffic, it was supposed to make travel faster, Most of these things happened. In fact, most of these things got worse.

0:58And so this is yet another mistake of central planning. Let's see, which is the left button here? All right, very good. So this is basically the largest central planning project in American history. You know, we have World War II, World War I. Those are larger projects. But at least in the civilian world, the interstate system is the biggest thing. It is a huge grid laid out across the United States, billions upon billions of dollars, miles and miles of concrete, etc. So this is the most massive project that the federal government has ever undertaken during peacetime. It's always considered to be, by most people, this huge success, but actually it failed in most of its stated goals.

1:44I looked specifically at St. Louis, Missouri, but there are a number of other places. I've examined the literature on the interstate system as a whole, so this applies most other places as well, but St. Louis is where I focused on, partly because that's where I lived, so I was interested. Basically the three things that the planners failed to see is that they thought that it would revitalize the city, and when in fact actually what it did was cause more people to move out to the suburbs and the city to expand sprawl, and then also it did not actually Relief Traffic Congestion as they had planned, and further, there was a system of mass transit in the city that had been privately owned, although heavily regulated and eventually monopolized, and it completely destroyed that. It put an end to it completely.

2:34Okay, and just so you know something of what I'm talking about when I get to the actual traffic figures, this is a map of St. Louis with the interstates. I'm going to step away This is Interstate I-44 right here. It starts in St. Louis, runs all the way down through Oklahoma City out of California. This is Interstate 70 up north, goes all the way across the country, goes through Ohio, goes out to Colorado. Then you have I-55 coming up from the south, running up all the way to Chicago. And then I-64 here is actually not, was not an original part of the interstate system. They just took a US Highway, US-40, slapped an I-64 thing on it and called it interstate.

3:19It's not really an interstate. And then 270, which is the Beltway or outside of us, which at the time was considered to be, you know, way up in the country. Well, now that's the most congested interstate in the whole metro area. You cannot get on that thing at nine in the morning going northbound and not just be stuck there for hours. It's miserable. Okay, so in 1959, the Interstate system itself was commissioned in 1957. In 1959, the city of St. Louis commissions the Wilbur Smith and Associates Company to create a report on what the impact of the Interstate system will be, how it will be funded, etc., etc., etc. And so, you know, these authors, they come in and they go, look, you know, everyone else that has made predictions about highway planning before, they've all been miserably wrong, they've all made all these mistakes, but no, don't worry, we know what we're doing, we have complete confidence in our ability to predict these changes, and they were completely wrong, but that didn't stop them, of course. So, they definitely thought they could predict changes in traffic flows and also population.

4:27The first thing, population, they actually expected the city of St. Louis to grow between 1957 and 1980, but so the population of St. Louis in the 40s and into the 50s was well over 800,000 people, and they actually expected a slight uptick over time, but what actually happened is the city of St. Louis, the population fell by over 400,000 people, and the city of St. Louis now is about 350,000 people. So it lost over 50% of its population in the last 50 years. But they also did not expect people to move out to the suburbs as fast as they did. So St. Charles County, St. Charles is probably the most famous suburb of St. Louis.

5:16It was expected to grow fairly substantially, 36,000 to about 56,000, which is, as percentages go, A large increase, but in fact, it almost quadrupled in size to 144,000. What the planners did not see is that the interstate system itself was going to create more drastic changes. They were predicting from current trends at the time and not predicting from what their plans would actually do to the structure of population, etc. The interstates basically The benefit of the suburbs at the expense of the city, and trust me, St. Louis City now is in a bad way. Okay, also, probably more importantly, because what does it really matter where people live?

6:04It's not, at least to libertarians, it's not a great matter of concern if you live in the city, if you live in the suburbs, who cares? But the point there is that the interstate planners didn't know what they were doing. More importantly though, the main goal of the interstate system is to alleviate traffic, to make travel easier, and it failed in this. The way they studied this is they set up different, what they called, I can't remember, the mark lines, I think it was, that they would study how many cars pass through there a day and make projections about how many should be going through after the interstate system is completed. and so these are just a few examples trust me if you look at too many of these your eyes roll back in your head and you'll fall right asleep but this is you know three out of hundreds so you know they said that New Florissant Road carry about 3,327 automobiles a day actually by 1980 9,000 so this is triple

7:02the amount of people that an amount of cars that they expected Brown Road 4,300, actually 10,000, over double, Sappington Road, 3,000, to 10,000, again, triple. These are just, you know, by any reasonable estimate, this is incredibly off from what it actually was. Now, the part that I consider most interesting is the mass transit system. Now, St. Louis had had a thriving mass transit system before the interstate system was created. It was in a decline by the time that the interstates were coming in, but this finished it off. There were some buses, but mainly what it was was trolley lines. They had a lot of trolley lines that had been operating since the 1850s.

7:48So these are incredibly old, but they had been updating them, and it had been several, I think up to about five different systems operating at any one time. During the 20s, when the stock market crashed, most of those systems went under and some And so the city conglomerated them together and gave them a monopoly on trolley lines in the city, but still it was a private company. They're not getting any tax money. If you wanted to ride, you were paying money, so it was still a voluntary system. It wasn't funded by taxes at all. And, you know, when they started constructing the interstate system, they closed two of the lines directly, just say, sorry, you can't operate anymore, just for construction on Interstate 70. local road construction on Forest Park Parkway which is actually one of the better roads in St. Louis closed another two and a lot of the other ones were cut off at areas and so they had to they had to cut service to areas and so

8:45their the ridership fell so this is hurting the profits all around the most profitable line for years had been the one serving it was called the University Clayton line which served Washington University which is my alma mater so I I took a special interest in that one, but it was 1960 they informed that they were not going to be able to actually get to the university anymore because of road work also on Forest Park Parkway, which by the way they're still working on, it never stops, I mean you know every year it's another thing they have to add on, et cetera, et cetera, but so they scale that back for road work, it becomes unprofitable, 1964 it closes, then the company itself goes under and of course because you know even though they've just done everything they possibly could to destroy it the government then goes oh well it's too big to fail let's take it over and so 1963 they take it over and then promptly

9:49closed the last streetcar lines in 1966 now I want to want you guys to guess what do you think happens after they close these streetcar lines with the mass

10:29In 1990, they start working on a light rail system that literally goes over the old streetcar lines. This is utter absurdity, but they subsidized this thing for billions of dollars and never turned a profit, never will, but yet they've expanded it several times and they still plan on several more expansions. They also don't ever expand it to anywhere where anyone actually rides it, but that's another issue entirely. So here's a picture of that as the new Metrolink going out from Union Station out to the suburbs, but this thing is a complete waste of money and they could have probably just left the old system in place and with updates would have probably had a little bit better service than they do now for no taxpayer money, but that's the way it goes. Thank you very much.

11:37Thank you very much.