Alana Semuels: Highway Teardown Opportunities→

The Atlantic:

“As some of the highways reach the end of their useful life, cities and counties are debating the idea of tearing down urban freeways and replacing them with boulevards, streets, and new neighborhoods. Though it might sound like a headache, tearing down freeways in city centers can reduce air pollution and create parks and public spaces that bring cities together, according to Shelton.

“The removal of urban interstates is a growing trend in the U.S.,” Shelton and Gann wrote. This trend, if carried to its logical extreme, can yield sites of intervention that hold the promise of remaking the American city.””

It is important for citizens to consider and debate the merits of highway deconstruction. Often it may be the best option for a community.

Adam Frank: Disruptive Infrastructure→

NPR:

“The nation’s vast transportation network is a modern-day wonder built from highways and streets, off-ramps and interchanges, cars, trucks and buses. And the fossil fuel that powers it all represents another modern wonder — a complex network of linked drilling platforms, refineries, pipelines, rail lines and trucking operations.

The scale of it all is staggering. Try, for a moment, to think of all those thousands and thousands of miles of concrete, asphalt, steel piping and iron rebar. Now think about something even more staggering: In 1890 there were no gas stations — the very root of our modern transportation infrastructure. But by 1920, there were gas stations everywhere.

What does that tell you? It means all those highways, refineries and pipelines emerged out of nothing on a scale of decades. When you look at the history, it’s remarkable just how fast we built the fossil fuel-based transportation and energy infrastructure our civilization depends upon.

But what’s even more remarkable is that we have to do it again.”

First, we'll add new elements to our existing infrastructure. Next, we'll settle on one or two sustainable transportation options that scale (e.g., electric streetcars, ultra-lite rail). Then we'll slowly replace the old, less used transportation infrastructure (e.g., less roads, parking lots, gas stations).

John Edwards: Hennepin-Lyndale Bottleneck Through the Years→

streets.mn:

Some very thoughtful comments at the end of the piece!

Christopher Hawthorne: City Freeways Are No Longer the Solution→

LA Times:

“The relationship between Southern Californians and our freeways is broken. Freeways still enable mobility — at certain times of the day. At many other times, they actively seem to frustrate it. They don’t stitch together the region, if they ever did, as much as divide it. The idea that they help us make sense of Los Angeles — that they operate as existential way-finding devices — now seems quaint, at best...

Increasingly the fundamental task Los Angeles faces is one of re-urbanization — of infill development, of reanimating or repairing the public realm. At the heart of that task is an understanding that the most successful kinds of spaces in the city are the ones where a broad range of activities has a chance to play out.

In this emerging Los Angeles, the freeway is an outlier, a hulking support system for an aging, if not outdated, set of beliefs. The freeways were built to allow the region to stretch outward; the movement that counts now is in the opposite direction, as the city doubles back on itself, looking to develop more densely areas where it built lightly before.”

Mass transit was our past and it is our productive future.

Bad Engineering Leads to Excessive Roads→

Eric Jaffe, writing for CityLabs: 

Alan Parker, Flickr.com

“Some of the most trusted planning tools used to manage vehicular traffic have shown themselves to be pretty harmful to city life in certain ways. A metric known as Level of Service, which aims to minimize automobile delay at an intersection, can act as a huge obstacle to public transportation projects. A design book calling for 12-foot lanes, an engineering staple across the country, can speed up car flows and endanger public safety as a result.

It might be time to add one more established tool to the questionable list: the Trip Generation Manual from the Institute for Transportation Engineers, a common guide that tells traffic planners how many car trips will be generated by a new commercial or residential development project.”

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge with a little less dependence on assumptions lights our way.

U.S. 'motorization' may be in permanent decline→

Ron Meador, reporting for MinnPost:

“A new report from the University of Michigan finds probably permanent reductions in Americans’ rates of vehicle ownership, fuel consumption and miles driven per year. Americans’ century-long love affair with the automobile is a many-sided and much-studied thing, and the research does not lack for complexity and contradiction. Lately, many of the trend lines have seemed to be going down, but the reasons for those shifts are much debated ...

Against that background, a new report released from the University of Michigan on Tuesday stands out quite sharply. It finds probably permanent reductions in Americans’ rates of vehicle ownership, fuel consumption and miles driven per year, the three components of what author Michael Sivak calls “motorization.” His analysis attributes our declining motorization to several factors, while insisting that economic conditions cannot be the primary force behind them.”

John Snape

Sivak's report

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.