I think we should find ways to get ahead of the disruption that construction creates.
I know people and cities do not at all work in the way that I am about to describe, but imagine being able to shift the population of a city and all its necessary infrastructure to a second backup city so as to minimize disruptions.
All the necessary modifications could be made to the first city without affecting people living there because they would be living and working elsewhere until the work was complete.
Once the work is complete, everyone would go back to whatever address they previously had in the first city, and then work could start on improving the now vacant second city.
Obviously, there are lots of issues that I have not described like how this works when many places already have a housing shortage, and having to build that second city in an “empty” area that can be provisioned with the same quantity and quality of resources enjoyed by people of the first city.
In addition, I think a large complicating factor in construction today is something that I have not seen people talk about: when is it a good time to tear down existing structures. The lack of a “best before”/“expiration date” means structures stay up until failure or until the current owner wants to build something new in its place. The building stays up with possible inefficiencies (heating, cooling, energy use) that might be too expensive to remedy because of the age of structure.
Its amazing disruption is even relevant to the discussion at all. Cities should not be so brittle that having two lanes on a single road go down for a cut would make a dent. In reality they aren't, but people are emotional beasts, they don't want to have to detour their longstanding commute for reasons they don't see themselves benefiting from. So they dig in, and decide this couple block stretch of road surface is the hill I die on, and local politicians better be damn sure to listen because no one else votes in local elections but these emotionally driven pissed off people. The whole time the press is pandering to them with false equivalency two sides reporting, when really the story is often about suburban car driving wealthy people being mildly inconvenienced for maybe 20 months so that the working class can see a generational improvement in mobility, and this is somehow an unacceptable tradeoff to make because of the status of these people.
> Cities should not be so brittle that having two lanes on a single road go down for a cut would make a dent.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the way democracies fund major construction projects is to first wait until the existing infrastructure becomes completely unbearably overloaded, and only then to kick off a process that will solve the problem in 10 years time.
According to the example in the article, the damage from cut and cover also displaces the sidewalks (so that customers of a business have to reach the business via alleys) and causes evacuations and flooding.
In the Roncesvalles neighbourhood of Toronto (not as dense as downtown, but still an extremely walkable and bikeable commercial district), they had a major section of street closed for surface rail replacement for a significant amount of time, and it was very hard on businesses in that stretch -- people just didn't go there because it was noisy and dirty and unpredictably hard to get to and from places.
I don't think the objection in built-up areas is (just?) about driving.
You seem to think road lanes are cheap. They are not. My local library has thousands of books not touched on a typical day. The only roads not touched on the typical day are in new developments not ready for building construction to start, once the first building is occupied those roads will also be used every day.
Every given day there's probably dozens of miles of lanes that are closed due to crashes or refurbishment. Probably a lot more than that depending on where you cast your net. Whats another stretch of road going to do on aggregate anyhow? When bridge work or sewer work goes on over these same roads they go down for years too, sometimes totally down with no travel at all, e.g. in LA it took the city 8 years to replace the 6th street viaduct in Downtown LA and traffic was forced to detour for nearly a decade. Yet the sky didn't fall, things carried on basically how they always have with hardly a noticeable impact, and now that the bridge is open today I wouldn't say that traffic in the nearby area has been dramatically changed one way or another. There was plenty of redundancy and spare capacity in the network as it were.
Tell me, if a shelf had to go out for repairs in your local library, would it damage everyone who touches the books on that shelf, or would they simply be moved to a different shelf?
If a shelf was millions of dollars you can bet my local library wouldn't have any more than they needed. Because a shelf is cheap my library can afford to have extra.
Also selves in my library are redundant in ways road lanes are not. If you move a book across the library that isn't a big deal, but if they move the book to a different city that would be a problem. Likewise, even if there was an extra road lane someplace, if it isn't close and going in the right direction it is not redundant.
Concrete alone is 4-8% of global annual emissions, so I would imagine once you factor the carbon impact of destroying, hauling away the rubble, and then making, transporting new building materials, the net impact is not good. There is a reason why most cities are targeting retrofits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
I know people and cities do not at all work in the way that I am about to describe, but imagine being able to shift the population of a city and all its necessary infrastructure to a second backup city so as to minimize disruptions.
All the necessary modifications could be made to the first city without affecting people living there because they would be living and working elsewhere until the work was complete.
Once the work is complete, everyone would go back to whatever address they previously had in the first city, and then work could start on improving the now vacant second city.
Obviously, there are lots of issues that I have not described like how this works when many places already have a housing shortage, and having to build that second city in an “empty” area that can be provisioned with the same quantity and quality of resources enjoyed by people of the first city.
In addition, I think a large complicating factor in construction today is something that I have not seen people talk about: when is it a good time to tear down existing structures. The lack of a “best before”/“expiration date” means structures stay up until failure or until the current owner wants to build something new in its place. The building stays up with possible inefficiencies (heating, cooling, energy use) that might be too expensive to remedy because of the age of structure.