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The Downtown Pittsburgh - Oakland BRT new plan is out, and it does look like there is some kind of transfer center at Steel Plaza T station. Hopefully very close to the rail platforms.
Also, there are actually 5 branches of this to go further east from Oakland, and one of them does utilize the busway, while the others fan out through neighborhoods. Looks like it could be a pretty good addition to the system. It's fairly extensive, it has 81 stations planned, with 8 miles of dedicated lanes.
Texas Medical Center is roughly 2 neighborhoods away from Downtown Houston and its massive/ pretty much looks like its own Downtown in size and scope. But I expect Midtown and the neighborhood too the north of TMC called Museum Park (Although I’ve never heard it called that once in RL and seems to be called that on google maps) to become less commercial a skyscraper districts in the future as their perfect for that, hopefully they’ll get an actually dense apartment/condo neighborhood in Houston instead of the current 9-5 skyscraper neighborhoods that we have.
Let's call downtown what it is: a hub. And the purpose of this thread seems to identify which cities (or which metropolitan areas) have developed a second locale that suggests hub like centrality.
If you were to create a continuum but 10-to-1 on degree of multiple "downtown-ness" (measured by how many such hubs exist in the given metro area, through combined importance and influence compared to the original core) with "10" being most multi-hub qualified and "1" basically having one core that dominates all....
then I would say, without equivocation, that one city stands way, way above others in being a "1", the most core centric city in America and arguably the world....my home town, CHICAGO.
Happily, this is no competition....it's strictly a way of identifying how a city/metro area works...there is no better/worse here and none implied. Chicago comes out way ahead of other cities on this (IMHO) and having the qualities that this set up creates, you'll see tings both good and bad about it.
So why do I think Chicago is different? Where do I begin?
Chicago almost from the get-go has been a city that developed on the hub-and-spoke concept and a city based on concentric rings moved outward from the downtown core and whose growth and development were based on the degree of proximity to the original core.
The spoke-and-wheel concept dominates Chicago and Chicagoland....check any GPS, particularly global earth, and you will see the reality of "all roads lead to Chicago" (good to know if you are rome-ing about). Everything converges at this one point, all comes together: CTA rail.....every single CTA line can take you downtown and back (although on the purple, you'd have to go on the express) except the yellow...which get you to Howard Street for a ride on the red or purple lines heading downtown.
Metra, out computer rail system, mimics CTA in this regard, actually besting it by one: there are no Metra lines that down't go downtown. Finish it off with the hwy system/ the interstates: Chicagoland's expressway system is basically designed to do one thing: get people into and out of the core area. The beauty of this is that you can shoot an arrow blindfolded at a map of the Chicago area and wherever it lands, you'll have no problem for that point in being able to find a reasonable route downtown. The beast of this is that everything, all traffic it appears, is dragged through the bottleneck that is downtown. Years ago (last century for that matter), they tried to get a crosstown expressway built from the Edens/Kennedy conjunction on the n.w. side, going south until 60 hundreds where it would have made a 90° turn to east to the Dan Ryan Expy. Never happened as the backlash against the interstates ramming through our cities was well in play, and the Crosstown met the same fate as the killing off of Robt Moses's lowers Manhattan expressway dream and even knocking down the Embarcadero Fwy.
Chicago's topography, like that of Manhattan, gave rise to and fostered centrality. Chicago's original downtown loop area was a confined peninsula with the lake the east and the river to the north and west (since south-of-loop was devoted to acres of rail land, the downtown area was as much "island" as "peninsula". Space was at a premium and, as such, put on the pressure that made this city the first to develop the skyscraper so more space could be added to a finite plot of land.
Business, culture, the works settled into this downtown core like none other....certainly the lake was an attraction. It was Chicago's core, its very strength, that prevented the city from going down in the tubes in the post WWII decades as cities declined across America. And through much of the later half of the 20th century, it was the old layout of excessive trackage in the downtown area (again.....like no other city) that opened the way to large scale redevelopment that exploded downtown's old Loop boundaries with air right land in prime location fueling the growth.
Some may think Michigan Ave/Mag Mile is a "second downtown". It's not. It is part of a continuous downtown area that includes River North, the South Loop, the Near West Side, and more. CTA floated the idea of a "Circle Line" a number of years back (in a city of elevated trains, I can literally say this one "never got off the ground")...the Circle Line plan was to use existing subway and el tracks together with some new construction on the southwest portion of the central city (elevated tracks) and northwest portion subway). When they came up with this plan, I had the idea that the new downtown needed a name. the old downtown was The Loop. Up until the mid-20th century mark The Loop=Downtown. Synonyms. Most cities just went with the generic name "downtown" for their CBD's (I guess they thought theirs were located at the lower tip of Manhattan) while two got creative with Chicago's Loop and Philly's Center City. Well, the Loop stopped being downtown Chicago and became just a part (a VERY important part) of an expanded downtown area. So since The Loop=a neighborhood, downtown could use a name of its own. I offered up "the Circuit", just as "the Loop" drew its name from rail lines (and they weren't even el lines; they were streetcar lines that preceded them and ran a loop through downtown before heading back north, west, or south.
It is no accident that both Chicago and "centrality" begin with the same letter.
Let's call downtown what it is: a hub. And the purpose of this thread seems to identify which cities (or which metropolitan areas) have developed a second locale that suggests hub like centrality.
If you were to create a continuum but 10-to-1 on degree of multiple "downtown-ness" (measured by how many such hubs exist in the given metro area, through combined importance and influence compared to the original core) with "10" being most multi-hub qualified and "1" basically having one core that dominates all....
then I would say, without equivocation, that one city stands way, way above others in being a "1", the most core centric city in America and arguably the world....my home town, CHICAGO.
Happily, this is no competition....it's strictly a way of identifying how a city/metro area works...there is no better/worse here and none implied. Chicago comes out way ahead of other cities on this (IMHO) and having the qualities that this set up creates, you'll see tings both good and bad about it.
So why do I think Chicago is different? Where do I begin?
Chicago almost from the get-go has been a city that developed on the hub-and-spoke concept and a city based on concentric rings moved outward from the downtown core and whose growth and development were based on the degree of proximity to the original core.
The spoke-and-wheel concept dominates Chicago and Chicagoland....check any GPS, particularly global earth, and you will see the reality of "all roads lead to Chicago" (good to know if you are rome-ing about). Everything converges at this one point, all comes together: CTA rail.....every single CTA line can take you downtown and back (although on the purple, you'd have to go on the express) except the yellow...which get you to Howard Street for a ride on the red or purple lines heading downtown.
Metra, out computer rail system, mimics CTA in this regard, actually besting it by one: there are no Metra lines that down't go downtown. Finish it off with the hwy system/ the interstates: Chicagoland's expressway system is basically designed to do one thing: get people into and out of the core area. The beauty of this is that you can shoot an arrow blindfolded at a map of the Chicago area and wherever it lands, you'll have no problem for that point in being able to find a reasonable route downtown. The beast of this is that everything, all traffic it appears, is dragged through the bottleneck that is downtown. Years ago (last century for that matter), they tried to get a crosstown expressway built from the Edens/Kennedy conjunction on the n.w. side, going south until 60 hundreds where it would have made a 90° turn to east to the Dan Ryan Expy. Never happened as the backlash against the interstates ramming through our cities was well in play, and the Crosstown met the same fate as the killing off of Robt Moses's lowers Manhattan expressway dream and even knocking down the Embarcadero Fwy.
Chicago's topography, like that of Manhattan, gave rise to and fostered centrality. Chicago's original downtown loop area was a confined peninsula with the lake the east and the river to the north and west (since south-of-loop was devoted to acres of rail land, the downtown area was as much "island" as "peninsula". Space was at a premium and, as such, put on the pressure that made this city the first to develop the skyscraper so more space could be added to a finite plot of land.
Business, culture, the works settled into this downtown core like none other....certainly the lake was an attraction. It was Chicago's core, its very strength, that prevented the city from going down in the tubes in the post WWII decades as cities declined across America. And through much of the later half of the 20th century, it was the old layout of excessive trackage in the downtown area (again.....like no other city) that opened the way to large scale redevelopment that exploded downtown's old Loop boundaries with air right land in prime location fueling the growth.
Some may think Michigan Ave/Mag Mile is a "second downtown". It's not. It is part of a continuous downtown area that includes River North, the South Loop, the Near West Side, and more. CTA floated the idea of a "Circle Line" a number of years back (in a city of elevated trains, I can literally say this one "never got off the ground")...the Circle Line plan was to use existing subway and el tracks together with some new construction on the southwest portion of the central city (elevated tracks) and northwest portion subway). When they came up with this plan, I had the idea that the new downtown needed a name. the old downtown was The Loop. Up until the mid-20th century mark The Loop=Downtown. Synonyms. Most cities just went with the generic name "downtown" for their CBD's (I guess they thought theirs were located at the lower tip of Manhattan) while two got creative with Chicago's Loop and Philly's Center City. Well, the Loop stopped being downtown Chicago and became just a part (a VERY important part) of an expanded downtown area. So since The Loop=a neighborhood, downtown could use a name of its own. I offered up "the Circuit", just as "the Loop" drew its name from rail lines (and they weren't even el lines; they were streetcar lines that preceded them and ran a loop through downtown before heading back north, west, or south.
It is no accident that both Chicago and "centrality" begin with the same letter.
I have always wondered why Chicago built up instead of out. Manhattan being an island I can understand why New York built up but Chicago was a mystery to me. Good post over all.
I think the OP pretty much got it right in the first post with Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Some other things that occurred to me-
Houston has the tallest skyscraper outside of a central business district, maybe they should get considered.
Someone suggested Mid-Wilshire as a third DTLA. I would suggest Ventura Boulevard from Sherman Oaks to Studio City.
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