Why America May Be Finished Building New Beltways

I'm here in Indianapolis, Indiana. This is a midwest city with a very circular design. I also went to Lexington, Kentucky because these two cities are home to important beltways, mainly I-465 in Indy and State Route 4 in Lexington. These beltways provide efficient access around the metropolitan area and a bypass for the downtown for drivers who don't want to deal with the high traffic volumes of the inner cities. When I drove through Indianapolis this week, I used the beltway to avoid I-65, which goes straight through the city. So it's an overall helpful way to alleviate traffic, and it's pretty efficient, right? Well, there's also some criticisms. Some say the roads simply help us drive in circles around cities and encourage car usage, and others point out that we can't just keep building beltways as cities get bigger and bigger. These are two very reasonable ways to look at the usage of these ring roads, but either way they're still being built in cities across the country, and that begs the question, how long will we keep doing this? Is the idea of a beltway going out of style, or will it be useful for decades to come? Today I want to go over that idea and come to a conclusion on the future of this design. Before I get into that though, I wanted to quickly ask if you would please consider subscribing to the channel. I'm very very close to 100,000 subscribers, which has been my lifelong goal. So if you enjoy geography content like this and want to support me, simply subscribing to the channel is an easy way to do that. Thank you! So as I said before, beltways are useful tools for urban and suburban transportation. They're circular highways that go fully around the cities, or technically around half of the city in cases that are limited by water, basically giving more options for the traffic that directs more vehicles away from the downtown area. As far as highway designs go, this is about as basic as it gets. It was used in ancient times for military and trade purposes, and European cities like Paris built ring roads where the city walls once stood. So if you wanted to know why Paris' inner ring road exists, there you go. The idea then developed in the US at the same time basically anything interesting in the US transportation occurred, which was post-WWII when suburbanization began. These suburban neighborhoods forced cities to expand outwards at rates never seen before, and metro areas suddenly took up significantly more area. American cities were no longer reliant on the downtown to survive, so the idea of constructing beltways to bypass these already crowded central business districts and support increased suburban growth developed and turned into action with the passage of the interstate system, which provided the country with a comprehensive plan of how their highways would be built and what ideas they wanted to push with this. The first interstate beltway was I-695 in Baltimore, Maryland, which was completed in 1962 and stretched 51 miles around the city. Shortly after, the capital beltway was completed around the DC metro in 1964, and that's still one of the nation's longest at 64 miles. Over the next few decades, cities like Atlanta completed a beltway, Houston completed a beltway, and suddenly most large metros in the country had one of these looped roads planned. So that brings us to the present day situation. Beltways are very important to most cities, and most major metros either have a completed beltway or a different form of freeway network that forms a circle. An example of a large beltway would be Kansas City, and usually the flat midwestern cities that don't have to deal with terrain or topography are the ones that end up having the most complete freeway rings. Somewhere like Atlanta also has quite a long one, and in these southern cities, these beltways can get really bad traffic, especially in certain areas, such as I-285 near the airport. An example of cities with this circular form would be Minneapolis, which has plenty of different freeways in the metropolitan area that come together to form what could be called a beltway. This doesn't mean every city is like this, though. Nashville, Tennessee only has a half beltway, with the north part of the city being much less populated. And Sacramento, California has nothing of the sort, though I'll mention this later. Because first, I want to use Houston as our example for this video. So Houston is home to two main beltways, I-610, the inner beltway, and the Sam Houston tollway, which would be the outer beltway. It's important to keep in mind that this outer freeway is already the longest fully limited access ring road in the nation, so what happens when they decide to build yet another beltway? This is what the city is doing with the Grand Parkway, which currently stretches 176 miles around the outskirts of the city, and it's set to be expanded even farther. This parkway has cost 1.9 billion dollars so far, and this will push to maybe even 3 billion dollars by the time it's all said and done. This shows you how extensive of a project it is, and it could be paving the way for America's future. North Carolina has followed this during the 2000s, constructing a new beltway around Charlotte, Greensboro, and now Raleigh, which they're in the process of finishing. These three massive projects total around 6.4 billion dollars, and this is currently happening. So if you have the mindset that freeways are an idea of the 60s and 70s, this is a reminder they're still being built in suburban areas all over. Even in California, a state with very different politics, the Southeast Connector is being built in Sacramento to help offset traffic in that part of the metro. This corridor has been approved at 34 miles long, and it will begin to cover the metro that notably doesn't really have a beltway. Even Lincoln, Nebraska has been working on their own beltway. They finished the southern part of it in the last few years, and the environmental impact statement has been approved to expand this north to I-80, which would give the city a mostly complete beltway. This is in no way a massive metropolitan area, but they're still growing, and they're building a beltway to help with it, and this ends up just begging the question of when these projects will stop getting approved. Cities are expanding at insane rates, like Houston which has expanded its metro area by miles upon miles of land in the last few decades, and suburbs are just pushing this land consumption that encourages the building of beltways and suburban freeways. So what are things going to be like in 30 years? Atlanta originally had a plan for its perimeter, which is its beltway, to stretch around 25 to 30 miles farther outside the metro than it ended up doing, covering the entire north part of Georgia, basically. Atlanta is booming in population, so it's not entirely impossible something like this could get approved if the environmental impact isn't too large. Are we going to see beltway projects like that in cities like Orlando or even Phoenix as they expand outwards? It's entirely possible. If Texas can construct an over 200 mile beltway like the Grand Parkway, so could any other city. You gotta think that as suburban growth continues, pretty soon some cities that's more open to the idea of freeways are going to bite and build another longest beltway in the country. But maybe they won't. My argument here is that if cities get too big, these projects will simply be too expensive to complete. I don't think many states can get 6.4 billion dollar freeway projects done like in North Carolina. And sure, traffic is a big issue, but I don't really see a world where a massive 300 mile beltway gets built around Portland, Oregon. Furthermore, a lot of the nation's fastest growing cities are in the west, where massive projects like this end up being way harder with the possible environmental impacts that would come from a mega highway around Las Vegas that flattens a mountain and puts a bridge over Lake Mead. I simply don't see it as an option for this to continue forever. But to answer the simple question of the video, no, America isn't done building beltways. Mostly because in a lot of cases, it works. These highways reduce suburban traffic, and simply letting these car-dependent suburbs expand without freeway infrastructure ends up with terrible traffic anyway. So cities may keep using the tactic as long as it's viable. Thanks for watching. Thank you to the members this week, Charles Watson, Pete Tedeschi, Hello Gaming, Aiden Kiles, Janine Alice, Simon Atwoods, Jake Huffs, KG, TheHappyHodegg, Reznor Wilkerson, Grant Dickerson, John Haywood, Julius Landry, Philip Monroe, Doug R., David Leavenworth, Midwest Railfan, Andres Quintero, DS, Richard Hordwell, Mick Kastner, Dee, Steven Phillips, CJ Brick, Big Pasty, Resident Contrarian, Hazev The Wolf, Bunny, Brock Sanders, Steven Priestman, SB Wilder, Fortis Jake, ChillerGC17, Alex Williams, Mikita Martinov, Kurt Ainsley, Drum Call, KMS162, J. 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