More Damaging to the U.S. Economy: Lack of Highways or Lack of Transit? (groceries)

[BajanYankee]

Imagine the following scenarios.

1. Woefully deteriorated highways. Bridges at various critical junctures (e.g., Mississippi River) collapse. These crossings cannot be replaced for an entire year.

2. Rail transit in every major city shuts down for an entire year.

Which scenario would be most devastating to the economy?

[sav858]

A LOT more people and goods are moved via highways than "rail transit" so easily highways.

[Prickly Pear]

I vote highways. I couldn't imagine what would happen to freight if all the highways, say, shut down and we no longer could get our groceries like we used to.

[annie_himself]

Hard to say, if you could enlarge the scope of say, New York, DC, Chicago, or SF without transit would shut the city down. Loss of interstates leaves us with state highways, loss of state highways leaves us with local roads. If it was from a national scale, I would vote highways, if we were looking at the country as one large city, I would say transit.

[Ant131531]

Highways. No contest.

[Chava61]

Originally Posted by annie_himself

Hard to say, if you could enlarge the scope of say, New York, DC, Chicago, or SF without transit would shut the city down. Loss of interstates leaves us with state highways, loss of state highways leaves us with local roads. If it was from a national scale, I would vote highways.

On a national scale highways but on individual scales of cities like New York City, etc. definitely public transit is more important than highways.