... is problematic because you'd have to reroute the railway lines that go through the city. Here's the map.
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| A map of US freight lines with Rochester circled in yellow. If you cut that link, you've got real problems. |
I started musing about what might happen to the rest of us if we simply abandoned the cities to their fates. Rochester came up because they had riots last night. Apparently, photos surfaced of a naked, black man being held by cops in the middle of the street with a bag over his head. The dude was blasted out of his mind on PCP and had been spitting on them, claiming he had the Wuhan Flu. This was in March, at the height of the Kung Flu hysteria. The cops followed standard procedure and didn't abuse him. He later died from his PCP overdose.
Following the far-left playbook, mobs formed and smashed, looted and terrorized Rochester. Rochester has a Democrat mayor who is a black woman. Blah blah blah. Insert the standard description of the systemically racist system's power structure here. No surprises. It's as blue as blue can be.
In the past, I've argued that the riots will drive the Normals out and the cities will become more and more radical. This morning, I started musing, "And then what?"
Rochester's money comes from universities, health care and tech. As New York City is discovering to the tune of a $9B tax shortfall, that work can be performed anywhere. The city provides almost no irreplaceable services. Let's assume the Normals do indeed bail out of Rochester and the place becomes a massive CHAZ/CHOP dystopian wasteland. Who cares?
Well, we all do. Cities are cities because they are transportation hubs. We still need freight trains to move bulk goods. We definitely need the freeways so semi trucks can bring us the things we ordered from Amazon.
Looting and destroying local businesses and terrorizing the Normals until they leave is but a temporary evil. After a time, those people will relocate and, hopefully the wiser for their ordeal, set up lives in saner, redder locations. The transportation infrastructure is another thing entirely. If Rochester or any other hub goes feral and the progressives realize that they can bring down the racist system which is full of systemic racism by cutting rail lines in their cities, things will get rather lively indeed.
How do you protect a transportation grid that goes through hostile territory where the enemy doesn't wear uniforms or have a distinct chain of command? In the past, everyone from the Romans to the Union Army to the Wehrmacht solved that problem with disproportionate brutality against the locals. I'm not sure we've got better solutions now.
In case you wanted to see it, here's the obligatory video of the latest battle in the Democrat Civil War. For a full meal of rancid, leftist bile from Rochester, here's the hashtag on Twitter.
Black Lives Matter activists raid Rochester restaurants and trash them. This is what social justice looks like. pic.twitter.com/uBDVvV5pL7
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 5, 2020
3 comments:
Most cities have highway bypasses. It will take a while to reroute rail lines, but it can be done. In the meantime more stuff moves by truck and goes around.
The reason so many "urban renewal" projects fail is because the people doing them just assume the city has a reason for existing. Many no longer do. Building a civic center, or shopping mall, or housing doesn't create a city. Cities, and more importantly the economic engine that justifies the city, built housing and shopping and civic centers. Cities were created by concentrated manufacturing, mining, agriculture, ports, trade or proximity to people, like bankers or brokers that create value. Take away the economic engine that built the city and it will die. We may learn how to live without cities. No reason to think they're necessary.
So called "Progressives" destroy everything they touch.
You make a good point that the urban renewal projects are cosmetic, creating the symptoms of a healthy city without addressing the causes. That's kind of what I was driving at when I looked into Rochester's sources of wealth. For Rochester, they're all mobile. For cities in the South with large auto factories, they aren't.
You're also right that in the end, you'd build bypasses around the cities perhaps with some kind of warehouse district 30 miles away. How the Rochesterians got their goods to and from the warehouses would be their problem.
Please note that most large auto complexes in the South are built in rural areas and support the infrastructure of the small towns nearby, thus ensuring growth and prosperity for those rural and suburban areas. They have less to fear transportation wise than any city located manufacturers and businesses.
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