Cancelled Expressways and Freeways

[poshbakerloo]

Originally Posted by ed110220

These would have been fantastic! Especially the south cross route as South London is such a mess. Also, on such a massively important route as the M25, duplication of roads is necessary (ie one motorway is not enough) in particular on the western side.

If they had been built in the 1960s, the inevitable whining and moaning would be long forgotten by now and no-one would remember what all the fuss was about.

The thing is that people look at city planning as a technical and theoretic exercise...When in reality its more about our human wants and needs...

A load of urban motorways may work in a more practical and efficient manner but so much of London would have been lost...

The ringways plan fitting in with a load of other plans such as demolishing the centre of Brixton and building several tower blocks instead...

Had all this been built people would see ugly concrete elevated motorways everywhere. And believe me, people would still moan about them being a nightmare to drive on.

[Penn's Woods]

Originally Posted by Suburbanist

Those plans for Paris are so cool. IT would be a much better city (not that it is bad) had they got modern freeways right into the heart of the central areas.

When I was driving in Manhattan, I realized how bad cross traffic is because it lacks the two proposed crosstown links, namely the Lower Manhattan Expressway. With a sleek design and modern lighting, it would be a tremendous addition to Lower Manhattan and ease traffic from NJ to Brooklyn.

It's a fucking city! I realize that you think everyone in the world should live in a free-standing house with a white-picket fence, but - news flash - there are people in the world who don't want that sort of lifestyle. And "there's nothing wrong with that." Do you know how many distinctive, lively neighborhoods would have been wiped out (and at astronomical eminent-domain costs to taxpayers) to accommodate traffic from New Jersey to Brooklyn that has other ways of getting from New Jersey to Brooklyn?

Like the utterly unnecessary South Street Expressway that was canceled in Philadelphia. Unnecessary because the Vine Street Expressway (which usually flows freely, 20 years after it was opened) serves the same purpose - connecting 76 and 95 a mile to the north of where South Street would have done. But there are people who regret it wasn't built because apparently all that matters to them is that as much as possible should be paved.

[Penn's Woods]

Originally Posted by Nima-Farid

This is how Lower and mid Manhattan Exp would have looked like on google earth
image hosted on flickr

image hosted on flickr

Have you ever been in New York? Do you know what that would have done to the city and do you care? And do New Yorkers have a right to a say in this? Or only Iranians and know-it-alls from Tilburg?

[hammersklavier]

Originally Posted by Penn's Woods

It's a fucking city! I realize that you think everyone in the world should live in a free-standing house with a white-picket fence, but - news flash - there are people in the world who don't want that sort of lifestyle. And "there's nothing wrong with that." Do you know how many distinctive, lively neighborhoods would have been wiped out (and at astronomical eminent-domain costs to taxpayers) to accommodate traffic from New Jersey to Brooklyn that has other ways of getting from New Jersey to Brooklyn?

Like the utterly unnecessary South Street Expressway that was canceled in Philadelphia. Unnecessary because the Vine Street Expressway (which usually flows freely, 20 years after it was opened) serves the same purpose - connecting 76 and 95 a mile to the north of where South Street would have done. But there are people who regret it wasn't built because apparently all that matters to them is that as much as possible should be paved.

...Although I submit that the express lanes of the Roosevelt Boulevard should be depressed and made into a freeway. The road as it exists today is a danger to everybody and absolutely suicidal for pedestrians.

When the Delaware Expressway (I-95 through Philadelphia) was first proposed, it was to be a freight trunk route along a highly industrially active waterfront. Now that such industrial activities are gone from most of it, closure from Oregon north to roughly Girard or Allegheny (and the Vine Street Expwy. link to it along with it) is very much merited, technically speaking. There's just this teeny issue of it being signed I-95, the principal road from Maine to Georgia; closure of this link will require relocation of this particular Interstate (I've suggested I-295/NJ Tpk in the past).

[Nexis]

Originally Posted by Penn's Woods

Very nuanced point of view you've got there....

EDIT: Also, some of those supposedly-canceled expressways in Boston were in fact built.

Yes they were built , but used for Transit instead of Highways...

Originally Posted by Nima-Farid

This is how Lower and mid Manhattan Exp would have looked like on google earth
image hosted on flickr

image hosted on flickr

That would have been devastating , thankgod that was stopped. Robert Moses was a good suburban man , but his Urban ideas lacked a soul and he didn't seem to care unlike some of the other great NY/NJ region designers of the 21st century.

[Penn's Woods]

Originally Posted by Nexis

Yes they were built , but used for Transit instead of Highways...



That would have been devastating , thankgod that was stopped. Robert Moses was a good suburban man , but his Urban ideas lacked a soul and he didn't seem to care unlike some of the other great NY/NJ region designers of the 21st century.

Re Boston: assuming that the roads shown in red on his map are the ones he thinks are canceled, they actually include the Mass. 2 freeway from the west end of Cambridge out past Concord, and a part of I-93 just north of downtown Boston. Roads that were in fact built (and at least 30 years ago).

Re Robert Moses: you're 100 percent right! Everyone who admires him unthinkingly (or condemns him unthinkingly, for that matter) should read The Power Broker, a biography of him that came out probably in the '80s. (I forget the author's name.) He did good in the '20s and '30s - and was ahead of his time in developing the parkways on Long Island and north of the city, but then he started to think be very inflexible about, say, the routing of the Cross-Bronx.

Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a must-read as well. She was a leading opponent of his plans to lace Manhattan with freeways (and of soulless public housing and the like) - a leading proponent of human-scale urban life.

[Penn's Woods]

Originally Posted by hammersklavier

...Although I submit that the express lanes of the Roosevelt Boulevard should be depressed and made into a freeway. The road as it exists today is a danger to everybody and absolutely suicidal for pedestrians.

When the Delaware Expressway (I-95 through Philadelphia) was first proposed, it was to be a freight trunk route along a highly industrially active waterfront. Now that such industrial activities are gone from most of it, closure from Oregon north to roughly Girard or Allegheny (and the Vine Street Expwy. link to it along with it) is very much merited, technically speaking. There's just this teeny issue of it being signed I-95, the principal road from Maine to Georgia; closure of this link will require relocation of this particular Interstate (I've suggested I-295/NJ Tpk in the past).

Well, 95's there, so we don't save anything by tearing it down. And I don't think it or Vine is useless. (A second crosstown expressway parallel to Vine would not have come close to benefiting us enough to outweigh the neighborhoods destroyed. In fact, I'm not sure it would have had any benefit at all.) I'm not against all highways. Some are necessary. But just salivating over never-realized plans on the theory that all highways are good is a phase I was past about 30 years ago. And salivating over never-realized plans for communities you're not actually a part of is, well, a bit out of line.

[Suburbanist]

A city is not meant to have a soul, that is for humans, and humans alone. A city is, most and foremost, a functional place.

This being said, my issues with the lack of connectivity for cross-town traffic don't have anything to do with the built-up environment of Manhattan. Indeed, it is because it is so dense that it requires more freeways to accommodate traffic! Currently, there is only one freeway crossing Manhattan up north near George Washington bridge. That is not enough.

I also think they should select one of the north-south avenues that don't carry subways to build a semi-buried expressway with exits and entrances to local lanes. Those traffic lights in most of Manhattan sucks and rarely I was able, within the prescribed speed limits, to cross more than 3 lights at once. Which means a mere drive to the Cloisters Museum, for instance, took me almost 1h40 from Staten Island where I was staying. Good N-S and crosstown freeways would speed up traffic, and could even be dynamically tolled.

[Haljackey]

London, Ontario freeway plans:

Nothing was built.








With reference to the rest of the uncompleted freeway network in Toronto and southern Ontario:

[mgk920]

The routes to Sudbury and North Bay are under construction.

I have heard some chatter in recent years about possibly developing a route (sometimes referred to as the 'Mid-Penn Expressway') from the Fort Erie area to ON 402 not far west of its interchange with ON 401 in the London area roughly following ON 3.

As for NYC, I'm also glad that the cross-Manhattan freeways were not built. Instead, I would love to see a deep-bored bypass tunnel drilled from the NJTP at about interchange 16E, under Manhattan to emerge and feed into the LIE (I-495) at about its interchange with the BQE (I-278), with the existing Lincoln and Midtown Tunnels to then become 'odd' three-digit interstate spurs off of it to handle traffic actually bound to and from Manhattan.

Mike

[Cedar Teeth]

Originally Posted by poshbakerloo

London has a lot of propose motorways...

AKA London Ringways...

I'm glad they didn't get built although I do think that some of it could have been completed...such as North Circular Motorway and a further ring outside the M25

Lol why are you glad they didn'tget built? London's road network is probably the most outdated and poorly planned of all large cities in the developed World. You know there is something ridiculously wrong with that city when you drive from central London to one of its main airports (Gatwick) OUTSIDE the rush hours and see how long it takes for that relatively short journey. In most European countries you could travel 200km in that same time span.

I thin they should make an inner M25 which would include the N. Circular Road and the S. Circular Road (which is a bad joke really as it doesn't even exist phisically) plus transform the Ring Road into a propper 2 or 3 lanes avenue and not a bunch of streets stitched together.
Not to mention other infrastructure abominations such as the Blackwall Tunnel which should have been replaced by either a new bridge or a wider tunnel a long time ago as it is the ONLY North-South connection for East London (Rotherhithe Tunnel and the Woolwich Ferry - two other bad jokes) don't count.

I still have trouble understanding why one of the World's wealthiest cities neglects its road infrastructure so much. Soon enough even Mumbai will have a better traffic than London.

[Nima-Farid]

Originally Posted by Penn's Woods

Have you ever been in New York? Do you know what that would have done to the city and do you care? And do New Yorkers have a right to a say in this?

I am not saying they should have built those plans. Of course those plans would have cut the city's south and north. I am just shwing them. But instead they can build an underground double decker tunnel expressway under one of the existing avenues.

[ChrisZwolle]

There should be a six-lane bored tunnel from the New Jersey Turnpike to the Long Island Expressway. Long Island has 7.5 million inhabitants but the only way to get out of it is via outdated New York Expressways.

[poshbakerloo]

Originally Posted by Cedar Teeth

Lol why are you glad they didn'tget built? London's road network is probably the most outdated and poorly planned of all large cities in the developed World. You know there is something ridiculously wrong with that city when you drive from central London to one of its main airports (Gatwick) OUTSIDE the rush hours and see how long it takes for that relatively short journey. In most European countries you could travel 200km in that same time span.

I thin they should make an inner M25 which would include the N. Circular Road and the S. Circular Road (which is a bad joke really as it doesn't even exist phisically) plus transform the Ring Road into a propper 2 or 3 lanes avenue and not a bunch of streets stitched together.
Not to mention other infrastructure abominations such as the Blackwall Tunnel which should have been replaced by either a new bridge or a wider tunnel a long time ago as it is the ONLY North-South connection for East London (Rotherhithe Tunnel and the Woolwich Ferry - two other bad jokes) don't count.

I still have trouble understanding why one of the World's wealthiest cities neglects its road infrastructure so much. Soon enough even Mumbai will have a better traffic than London.

The reason why a south circular road never got built was due to the fact that it would require removing loads of houses and cutting up neighbourhoods. All the roads leading to the south circular would just become jammed and then the south circular itself would be jammed as 1 motorway is not enough, so then you end up building more and more to accommodate cars.

I think London could widen a few roads and upgrade others. But really it needs to focus on the rail and tube. Getting people around a large city by car is not sustainable...If you look at cities with loads of urban freeways, their congestion is just as bad as London's. More roads means more cars...

I do agree that some new river crossings are needed in the east.

[poshbakerloo]

Originally Posted by ChrisZwolle

There should be a six-lane bored tunnel from the New Jersey Turnpike to the Long Island Expressway. Long Island has 7.5 million inhabitants but the only way to get out of it is via outdated New York Expressways.

That would get instantly rammed with cars! This is the thing with motorways is that really you need about 12 lanes for inner city routes...Tunnels are hard to expand.

[city_thing]

This would have absolutely murdered Melbourne had it all been constructed...



I can't believe people are actually advocating building freeways right through the heart of Paris, London and New York. I'm sure Suburbanist is being payed off by some pro-car, big oil lobby group.

[joshsam]

Yikes! That is asking for non livable city.

This was the Highway plan for Belgium in 1972. It only shows highways, no expressways,no freeways and no national roads that are sometimes up to highway standards to.

Sometimes the missing links like in the ringroad of Brussels can still be 2x2 or 2x3 roads, but are not up to highway standards.

The red ones are not constructed and probably never will be.


http://home.scarlet.be/~si650495/sne...sch/be1972.png

[Rebasepoiss]

Originally Posted by Suburbanist

A city is not meant to have a soul, that is for humans, and humans alone. A city is, most and foremost, a functional place.

Therefore I argue that a sense of (humane) city space is a necessity for people which makes it functional to have no elevated motorways through densley populated areas. (a bit confusing, I know)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against motorways in cities as such, I just think that it's unacceptable by today's standards to demolish large areas in a densely populated city to build them.

[blogen_]

Budapest 1940-2011:

[Nima-Farid]

of course Melbourne is not that dense but they can build for example F2, F5, F7 and F9