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The answer, however, is not to swing ALL THE WAY back in the other direction either, as totally anti-car policies won't undo the decades of kowtowing to the auto at all costs did.
Cars and people can co-exist. It just seems no one on either the militant urbanist or autophile sides are interested
Cities in developed countries with very pleasant urban areas that make living life without automobiles easy have generally also not done away with vehicles entirely, so pretty much no one is swinging "ALL THE WAY" back. US cities and urban areas for the most part are so auto-dependent though that even getting to something like Australian or Canadian, both fairly new developed countries with very high automotive ownership and usage rates compared to other developed countries, seem like massive changes given where the baseline for US cities and urban areas are. I had originally believed this was just a newer country with a lot of land and wealth per the population with much development and population growth happening in the age of the automobile, but visiting Canadian and Australian cities changed that. There's also a crinkle in actually looking into what the post-war state of cities in other developed countries in regards to what remained and the large population booms many of these areas had in the 20th century even in the older cities of the Old World as well as looking into what US cities were like even in the 1950s.
I think the thing to realize though is that there's a lot that can be done to improve things pretty rapidly. There are highways that are near their end of life and not heavily utilized that can be removed. There are a lot of below-grade highways that can be capped. There is a lot of existing rail right-of-way still around that is under utilized and can be rapidly improved, or if they have passenger service already, greatly improve their frequuency. There are a lot of wide streets that can benefit from bus lanes and improved bus service as well as wider sidewalks and bus lanes. There are easy cuts to make in cul-de-sac areas that can make navigating out of them via walking or bikes to commercial areas or transit shorter and simpler. There are zoning regulations that can be loosened for more mixed-use, greater density, and not mandate parking spaces. There's a lot that can be changed in a reasonably short amount of time and would make cities more pleasant the sort of thing you see in US television shows where kids actually can have some autonomy and safely bike around to and from school and events, likely greatly reduce housing prices with better use of land not devoted to personal vehicle usage and parking, use up far less in space and energy resources and generate far less in emissions.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 12-13-2022 at 09:10 AM..
I have frequently held up two developments from the 1920s — the dawn of the Auto Age — as examples of how we quickly learned to design urban environments where cars and people could play nice with each other — knowledge we didn't deploy extensively in the Depression years and quickly discarded at the end of World War II.
One is the Country Club Plaza (begun 1921) in my hometown of Kansas City, Mo., the first planned shopping center in the United States. The other is Radburn (1928), the "Town for the Motor Age" suburb built next to a train station in northern New Jersey.
Most of the buildings on the Plaza have two stories, with shops facing the streets on their ground floors and offices on the second floors. The few buildings with more floors once housed department stores; two have been carved up into mini-malls. Parking is free and provided in multistory parking garages tucked behind, below, or above the stores. I do not know whether Nordstrom is proceeding with or has dropped plans to build a store on the site of one demolished parking garage.
Radburn consists of a small shopping strip at the main intersection closest to the train station, a cluster of apartments next to it, and a collection of single-family houses facing a large green in the center of the development. A pedestrian path encircles the green and connects to other paths leading to the front doors of the houses. The backs of the houses face service driveways where their garages are located; bridges over the road that feeds these driveways connect the central pedestrian path to the surrounding streets.
This modular design could easily be replicated, and it was the intent of Radburn's developer to do so, but the Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression scotched those plans. The developer of the Plaza, who also created Kansas City's most attractive and exclusive residential districts along with its answer to Levittown, tried to preserve the Plaza model with his second shopping center, Prairie Village (1955), but had abandoned it by the time he built the Red Bridge center in 1961. (He also built some small strip shopping centers along local streets in the 1920s and 1930s; I don't know whether he had any role in the development of Brookside, a street-oriented shopping district whose buildings span decades from the 1920s to the 2000s.
But yes, there is a middle ground. And even the patron saint of urbanists, Jane Jacobs, recognized that neither cars nor cities would disappear completely — she wrote that either cars would erode cities or cities would gradually reduce the use of cars. I think many of us, autophiles and autophobes alike, can agree that the built environment we now have doesn't serve everyone well and that we should strive to create one that will. That environment will not privilege cars the way our present one does, but neither will it eliminate them.
Those are some pretty interesting examples of a road mostly not taken whee we took a stroad or highway instead.
I think one good thing about KC is that a lot of the highways are below-grade and has some hope of being capped in addition to a few parts and ramps being removed.
I have frequently held up two developments from the 1920s — the dawn of the Auto Age — as examples of how we quickly learned to design urban environments where cars and people could play nice with each other — knowledge we didn't deploy extensively in the Depression years and quickly discarded at the end of World War II.
One is the Country Club Plaza (begun 1921) in my hometown of Kansas City, Mo., the first planned shopping center in the United States. The other is Radburn (1928), the "Town for the Motor Age" suburb built next to a train station in northern New Jersey.
Most of the buildings on the Plaza have two stories, with shops facing the streets on their ground floors and offices on the second floors. The few buildings with more floors once housed department stores; two have been carved up into mini-malls. Parking is free and provided in multistory parking garages tucked behind, below, or above the stores. I do not know whether Nordstrom is proceeding with or has dropped plans to build a store on the site of one demolished parking garage.
Radburn consists of a small shopping strip at the main intersection closest to the train station, a cluster of apartments next to it, and a collection of single-family houses facing a large green in the center of the development. A pedestrian path encircles the green and connects to other paths leading to the front doors of the houses. The backs of the houses face service driveways where their garages are located; bridges over the road that feeds these driveways connect the central pedestrian path to the surrounding streets.
This modular design could easily be replicated, and it was the intent of Radburn's developer to do so, but the Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression scotched those plans. The developer of the Plaza, who also created Kansas City's most attractive and exclusive residential districts along with its answer to Levittown, tried to preserve the Plaza model with his second shopping center, Prairie Village (1955), but had abandoned it by the time he built the Red Bridge center in 1961. (He also built some small strip shopping centers along local streets in the 1920s and 1930s; I don't know whether he had any role in the development of Brookside, a street-oriented shopping district whose buildings span decades from the 1920s to the 2000s.
But yes, there is a middle ground. And even the patron saint of urbanists, Jane Jacobs, recognized that neither cars nor cities would disappear completely — she wrote that either cars would erode cities or cities would gradually reduce the use of cars. I think many of us, autophiles and autophobes alike, can agree that the built environment we now have doesn't serve everyone well and that we should strive to create one that will. That environment will not privilege cars the way our present one does, but neither will it eliminate them.
Actually, a better example than Radburn is Shaker Square at the SE edge of Cleveland; widely credited as the nation's 2nd designed suburban shopping district (after Country Club Plaza, of course). Shaker Square was designed around Cleveland's then-new light rail rapid transit line as well as perpendicular, crisscrossing boulevard roadways, and a major apartment district, in the late 1920s. SS's 4-pavilion quad-plaza concept was patterned after Amalienborg Square in Copenhagen. While far less tony than its original incarnation, Shaker Square still exists, along with the Rapid Transit, in its original form:
^that cleared area stretched from south philly to well into lower northeast philadelphia
Yea, Philadelphia definitely got hit hard, but I think there are cities that got hit a bit harder.
Here's Detroit versus Philadelphia on the same scale and these are about the same size and were about the same population and thus density in the 1950 census though Philadelphia has more greenspace set aside: https://www.acme.com/same_scale/#42....5.17532,13,R,R
You can see that the highways are greater in number and make tighter "blobs" in the others than in Philadelphia and none of these were tunneled or covered in any significant extent though hopefully this will happen (or some parts of highways removed) in the near future.
^that cleared area stretched from south philly to well into lower northeast philadelphia
There are about 132 square miles of land within the Philadelphia city limits.
I think you will find that the total amount of land taken for Interstates 76, 95 and 676 in toto is less than one-tenth of that amount.
Compare that to the amount of land carved out of St. Louis' 66 square miles for Interstates 44, 55, 64 (US 40) and 70. I think someone from St. L posted a before-and-after photo of the swath of land just southwest of the heart of downtown cleared for the Daniel Boone Expressway (US 40, now I-64).
Or, for that matter, the proportion of the 61-square-mile pre-WW2 City of Kansas City, Mo., occupied by the downtown freeway loop along with Interstates 35, 70 and US 71 (I'm sure the Missouri Department of Transportation will someday fill in the land between the lanes of the "parkway" segments of Bruce Watkins Drive to complete Interstate 49 all the way to the downtown loop).
Philadelphia, like Washington, lucked out in having most of the freeways slated for construction within the city limits scrapped. These include I-695 (Crosstown and Cobbs Creek Expressways), PA 90 (Pulaski Expressway and Belfield Bypass), PA 309 (Ogontz Expressway) and US 1 (Roosevelt Expressway Extension).
Aerial View from Union Terminal in Cincinnati
1958 vs 1964.
The West End of Cincinnati had 67,500 residents in 1950.
Its 6,800 now.
40,000 were displaced from a combination of highways and Urban Renewal "slum razing", which the Kenyon-Barr project was the single largest urban renewal project in terms of displacement undertaken in the 50s and 60s.
Cincinnati took away 1/3 of its urban core for a midcentury suburban inspired industrial park that is mostly vacant now.
400 acres of neighborhood turned into freeway and industry.
Aerial View from Union Terminal in Cincinnati
1958 vs 1964.
The West End of Cincinnati had 67,500 residents in 1950.
Its 6,800 now.
40,000 were displaced from a combination of highways and Urban Renewal "slum razing", which the Kenyon-Barr project was the single largest urban renewal project in terms of displacement undertaken in the 50s and 60s.
Cincinnati took away 1/3 of its urban core for a midcentury suburban inspired industrial park that is mostly vacant now.
400 acres of neighborhood turned into freeway and industry.
I'm kinda surprised Birmingham's not on the list. This was once on the site of what is now a major highway intersection (This is another aspect of that highway). We can't really say the gutting of Birmingham's street car system was because of highway system, though (It had heavily declined beforehand). It also wasn't the initiator of suburban white flight (Birmingham's heavy industry polluting the area was the initial cause in the 40s. The southern "over the mountain" suburbs had cleaner air. Racism still played a part, but it was a "we can't let them come with us" as opposed to a "we are moving because we want to get away").
Birmingham proper's slow revitalization shows how much the freeways through downtown affect the city. Downtown is surrounded by Red Mountain (natural), the Red Mountain Expressway (US 31/US 280), I-20/59, and I-65. The sides closest to the southern suburbs have always been the best off. When Downtown proper started to turn itself around, it was rather isolated to the city center from the southern side (near UAB). But, growth did slowly push out east past the Red Mountain Expressway side, which is the highest elevated highway, and is pretty open to pass underneath. Quite recently (this year), the area under 20/59 has been cleaned up, and interest in the are north of downtown has had a lot more interest almost immediately. I-65, while still elevated, is merely raised earth with some underpasses. West of I-65 has been the worst side of town for as long as I can remember.
That said, while not ideal (especially the effects downtown particularly by I-65), the Red Mountain Cut might've been a big lifesaver for the metro. Birmingham proper got some pretty brutal hits, as the Great Depression, fall of American industry, and the Great Recession all hit Birmingham pretty hard on top of the black eye from the Civil Rights movement. The suburbs holding decently well, and countering the image of being a dirty hole of a place did stem the metro from bleeding too much until conditions were ready for a revival (Even though its one of the most car dependent metros, air quality has noticeable improved since the days of heavy industry. Although industry ended in the 70s, air quality is still improving decades later.).
Most of Cincinnati's tax revenue came from heavy industry. Due to State annexation laws Cincinnati could not annex the manufacturing hubs of Evendale, Lockland, Reading and Sharonville right outside the city without those towns' voter's approval. Due to geography of the hills the only suitable land flat enough for large scale manufacturing industry was the West End, Over the Rhine and Downtown. The West End seemed expendable at the time because mostly blacks and the least affluent whites lived there. There were also plans to put an interstate highway right where Vine Street is now in the heart of OTR and the CBD, but the federal dollars ran out.
This was in the city plans since the 1920's but federal dollars in the 1950's bought it to actuality.
Last edited by Coseau; 12-16-2022 at 06:54 AM..
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