
The Highway Hit List - wallflower
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2017/01/the-highway-hit-list/514965/
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santaclaus
What surprises me is the vitriol with which people fight back at these
efforts. I live in Oakland, and seeing people lose their minds about 980 has
been quite interesting. Whenever I take 980 it is mostly empty, and removing
it would make downtown and west Oakland way more accessible from either side.
Should residents of Walnut Creek driving to Alameda (who from what I can tell
are the only people that regularly use 980) dictate Oakland's urban future? I
would say not.

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ryankupyn
I used to be all for the removal of highways, but now I worry that this trend
will accentuate economic inequality and hurt poorer people who might want to
move to the big wealthy cities where these highways are being removed.

50 years ago, when these roads were being built, they enabled wealthy workers
to flee to the suburbs and commute into city centers for work, cutting through
the poorer neighborhoods left behind.

Now the geographic patterns are reversing in some areas, and city centers are
now far more vibrant (read: wealthy), while in places like Los Angeles, where
I live, much of the new population growth is occurring on the periphery of the
urban area, where lower income workers can afford to live while enduring long
commutes into the city.

I live in an affluent neighborhood, and many of my neighbors want to make the
city more walkable and "friendlier", by making roads smaller and de-
emphasizing cars in favor of transit and human-scale development. In the long
run, I think this is a good idea, and would dramatically improve my life in
the city.

But at the same time, if policies make a city and its high quality jobs
difficult to access for people who can't afford to live in the city itself,
it's not necessarily a net positive, especially when the wealthiest cities are
enthusiastically restricting supply.

Ultimately, I worry that we will look back at this period in urban policy as
the time when city centers got far wealthier, low-income people were
displaced, and the focus of wonks turned to creating cities that rich people
like them would like to live in, without realizing that the same policies that
makes a city enjoyable to live in also makes the engine of good jobs hard to
access for people who aren't fortunate enough to already be living there.

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jacobolus
Many people commute to Los Angeles by highway for >1 hour each way every day
(for some, it’s 2 hours each way), with much of the trip stuck in bumper-to-
bumper traffic. This is an absolutely miserable waste of human time, gasoline,
CO2 emissions and other air pollution, automobile construction, road
construction/maintenance, and so on.

If our municipal planning put denser housing (doesn’t need to be Hong Kong
here, just 5-story apartment buildings would be fine) and denser employment
space next to train/subway stations, so that more people could live within
walking / transit distance of their workplaces, we could save huge amounts of
resources and human happiness.

Empty highways are amazing for automobile speed and flexibility. But highways
scale very poorly to higher amounts of traffic. They’re great for cross-
country road trips. But for routine commuting, especially once they start
filling up, they’re pretty well the worst available option.

And that isn’t even getting into the harmful effect the highway has on the
neighborhoods it goes through. For nearby residents, a highway is like a
combination of the inaccessibility of a river + the noise and air pollution of
a factory, running 24–7.

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mjevans
Real solutions (in my opinion):

    
    
      * Public (city/state/etc) owned parking structures at the edges of the city.
      * Good, all weather sheltered, pedestrian access between in city parking / housing / jobs.
      * More residential development within cities, until the competition drives the rent down to the same as (or close
        to) the surrounding areas; when it increases due to network effect push again to keep it within that bound.
      * Improve building codes to keep the quality of life in the city the same as out of the city.
      * Incentivize (tax benefits for compliance, tax more for non-complianc) units having more 'family'
        sized dwellings (and those even better acoustic isolation).  Make it possible to afford and find
        a place to raise a family within the city.

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dnautics
I will be a little bit sad to see 280 spur go. For some parts of SF (e.g. Pac
Heights) it is better to take I-280 and cut through the tenderloin (6th street
exit -> harrison -> 7th street -> leavenworth -> pine) than to take the
central expressway spur. When I was driving for lyft, the 280 was a fast and
reliable way to return to the high-volume SoMa area for pickups during the
evening rush.

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SeanLuke
Richmond VA's got one of these situations. In the 1950s I-95 was routed
straight through Richmond's historic black district, Jackson Ward, destroying
it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Ward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Ward)

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rodionos
Plans to remove 280 spur in San Francisco, that's a major change.

