Would Atlanta benefit from it's own version of Charlotte's I-277?

[Shakeesha]

Originally Posted by march2

I live in the Charlotte area and most don't like I-277 in uptown. As Mutiny77 said, it cuts of a lot of uptown from surrounding neighborhoods. Growth is greatly accelerating beyond I-277 now, but it's still a bit of a barrier that we wish just wasn't there.

It does cut off neighborhoods. It seems to be a common characteristic of southern cities. Many thought the wheel and spoke design would be beneficial for interstate commerce, but failed to consider the negative impacts on historic neighborhoods. Mute may have insight on what could be done, if anything.

[Need4Camaro]

Originally Posted by Shakeesha

It does cut off neighborhoods. It seems to be a common characteristic of southern cities. Many thought the wheel and spoke design would be beneficial for interstate commerce, but failed to consider the negative impacts on historic neighborhoods. Mute may have insight on what could be done, if anything.

The Spoke and Wheel design is great for connecting suburban entities but for core areas it disconnects too many urban districts from the core causing the core to become more reliant on its suburbs than its direct outlying areas, I.E. car-dependency. Ingenuity is needed to make a Spoke and Wheel design work without destroying intown areas, and that typically involves expensive tunneling or capping sub-surface freeways.

The Downtown Connector, is.... ...better at disrupting as few neighborhoods as possible but merging two 8 lane freeways together into a mega-highway severely disrupts flow, not only because the merge of countless vehicles into one super-highway but also because highways can only become so large before they begin to lose efficiency in lane count...meaning... a 4 lane highway is about twice as efficient as a 2 lane highway, but and 8 lane highway is only about half more efficent than a 4 lane highway. This is because local traffic leaving from the left lanes have to migrate too far to the right to exit, that plus the exiting lanes are still a bottleneck when they leave the road. Its better to instead segregate local and thru traffic into dedicated lanes while making it so that thru traffic is unhindered by local traffic.

For the interstate system in general, The original Eisenhower Interstate Act was NOT intended to go through the core of cities. Eisenhower himself predicted that their presence within cores would cause major disruption and would also become infeasible to keep up with the demands of traffic. Eisenhower wanted to bypass the cores and distribute inner-city travel by high capacity highways supported by user fees (I.E. Toll Roads) Chambers of commerce as well as greedy politicians are the ones who changed this in order to promote commercial and industrial growth, which was successful but not without a plethora of consequences.

[mhays25]

The more you close-in districts near your downtown AREN'T cut off by freeways or other major highways physically or psychologically the better.

It's hard to come up with metrics for a downtown since they're all unique and any set criteria will have exceptions. But let's say it's important for 1% (or better yet 2%, or well over) of a mid-sized US metro's working population to live within a mile of the middle of the CBD. Of course the average village would be 100% and lower Manhattan wouldn't hit 1% to illustrate its imperfections.

But I'll guess that Charlotte and its peers might be in the 1% range today, and would prefer to top 2%. Adding a freeway would typically be a major hurdle.

That said, if the alternative is a surface boulevard, that might be just as bad or worse. A freeway can be a tunnel, a ditch, or a viaduct. If every street crosses it, you avoid much of the problem from a pedestrian viewpoint.

I'm a car-free militant pedestrian and transit supporter, but I advocated for a 1.8-mile deep bypass tunnel to replace a viaduct/tunnel/surface highway in my city. The tunnel just opened and we're now building a surface boulevard to replace some local access. The main reason I supported this was we're shaped like an hourglass and the pass-through traffic would have otherwise tried to use surface streets through Downtown, which the State would have required to cater to pass-throughs (some traffic would have gone away over time, but not all). The second reason is that I didn't want an overnight seismic change that would drive out businesses from Downtown or industrial districts whose trucks pass through. We should focus on transit for any new capacity, but maintain the existing capacity otherwise.

[orlando-calrissian]

The Downtown Connector merge is a problem, but its exacerbated by the poor metro planning in Atlanta. Building far-flung suburbs in the boonies only to have people commute to Downtown and Midtown Atlanta by single-occupancy vehicle is the real culprit. There should be a heavier concentration on densifying the interior neighborhoods and on expanding MARTA.

All cities should be looking at ways to reduce the impact of freeways built downtown, not adding new ones. Atlanta should consider burying or capping the Downtown Connector between MLK drive and 14th Street.

[HandsUpThumbsDown]

Probably not.. these highways rarely increase quality of life for residents or improve traffic flow for more than a few years