The area around the new crosstown highway. Will there be substantial new development?

[Just the facts]

And what would you do about the 3--4 hours traffic jams.

What traffic jams? An interesting thing happened when cities starting removing urban freeways - they found traffic congestion actually went down. Counter-intituive I know but traffic counts speak for themeselves. It turns out freeways create was is called 'induced demand'. It is truely a build and they will come scenario. Conversely, don't build it and the traffic congestion won't come.

http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/

And Yes Rover, cities have removed urban freeways - New York City is one of them.

When these freeways run through downtowns, there are huge economic benefits to tearing them down. For example, we have seen that:

•Milwaukee spent $25 million to demolish the 1-mile-long Park East freeway, while it would have cost $100 million to rebuild that 30-year-old freeway. Removing the freeway opened 26 acres of land for new development, including the freeway right of way and surface parking lots around it, which have already attracted over $300 investment in new development, in addition to stimulating development in surrounding areas.

•San Francisco increased nearby property values by 300 percent by tearing down the Embarcadero Freeway and opening up the waterfront was opened up, stimulating the development of entire new neighborhoods.

Of course, it is more radical to tear down mainline freeways rather than just freeway spurs, because this reduces capacity on the entire freeway system. Nevertheless, cities are beginning to remove mainline freeways:

•Niagara Falls is removing the Robert Moses Parkway in order to slow people down and encourage them not to drive as far. Just as building this parkway encouraged tourists to take longer trips and drive right through to Niagara Falls, Canada, removing this parkway is meant to encourage tourists to take shorter trips and stop in Niagara Falls, New York.

•Paris is considering closing the Pompidou Expressway as one element of a larger plan to reduce automobile use by reclaiming land from the automobile. It is also converting traffic lanes on major streets to bus lanes, as part of the same plan.

•Seoul has removed the Cheonggye freeway and restored the river that it covered in order to stimulate the economic revival of central Seoul's Dongdaemun district. It has built busways to replace the freeway capacity, and it the goal of this plan is to reduce automobile use from 27.5 percent to 12 percent of all trips.

and some more

Planned Freeway Removals
The following freeway removals are being planned by city and state governments:

•Rochester, NY, Innerloop: The Inner Loop completely circles downtown Rochester, and the city has planned to remove it since 1990, when it completed its "Vision 2000 Plan" for downtown. In addition to this official city support, there is strong citizen backing to "demote the moat." The city is now studying the impact of this plan on traffic, and then will try to get funding for it.

•Trenton, NJ, Route 29: The freeway was initially designed to remove trucks from local streets, but truck traffic was banned from it before its completion. In response to complaints from the city, the state Dept. of Transportation is now planning to remove this freeway and replace it with a boulevard and local street grid, freeing up 18 acres of land for development. This plan is one of NJDOT's “smart growth corridor studies.”

•Akron, OH, Innerbelt: Inspired by the example of Milwaukee, Akron mayor Don Plusquellic has proposed removing the Innerbelt freeway to promote economic development. The city is now conducting a $2 million study of this freeway removal.

•Washington, DC, Whitehurst Freeway: City officials are discussing plans to remove this three-quarter-mile-ling freeway, which divides Georgetown from its waterfront, and to replace it with a boulevard. There are also preliminary discussions of removing other elevated freeways, including Southeast Freeway near the Capitol and part of the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway near the Lincoln Memorial.

•Cleveland, OH, Shoreway: The Connecting Cleveland 2020 city-wide plan calls for this freeway to be converted to a boulevard, removing the barrier between Cleveland and its Lake Erie waterfront.

•New Orleans, LA, Claiborne Expressway: The New Orleans draft master plan calls for removing the elevated Claiborne Expressway (I-10) between the Pontchartrain Epxressway and Elysian Fields Ave.

•Nashville, TN, Downtown Loop: Nashville's fifty-year plan, adopted in 2004, calls for gradually removing the eight-mile downtown loop made up of three interstates - Interstate 65, Interstate 40 and Interstate 24 -- and replacing it with parks, boulevards and mixed-use communities to reconnect downtown with adjacent neighborhoods.

•New Haven, CT, Route 34 Connector: New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr.’s Future Framework 2008 plan proposes removing this 1.1 mile freeway stub, restoring the street grid, and rebuilding the neighborhood that was removed when over six hundred families and businesses were removed to build this freeway in 1955-1957.

•Montreal, Quebec, Bonaventure Expressway: The Société du Havre de Montréal (Montréal Harbourfront Corporation), a non-profit organization with financial support from three levels of government, has created the Montreal Harbourfront Vision 2025, which calls for replacing the Bonaventure Expressway with a boulevard to encourage development of adjacent areas.

•Tokyo, Japan, Metropolitan Expressway: Since the year 2000, citizens have talked about removing the Metropolitan Expressway viaduct,which is built over the Nihombashi River in the center of Tokyo. As a result, the city and national government have incorporated the removal of this freeway and restoration of the river in their policies and are conducting planning studies of this issue.

•Sydney, Australia, Cahill Expressway: Sydney Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, proposed removing this freeway for aesthetic reasons. The Sydney Morning Herald immediately editorialized that "experience overseas shows pulling down motorways can also help ease traffic congestion," so it would not be necessary to replace it with an underground road. This editorial is an important sign that the idea of freeway removal has become mainstream.
Proposed Freeway Removals

The following freeway removals have been proposed by citizens:

•Baltimore, MD, Jones Falls Expressway: In 2005, the late Walter Sondheim, a civic leader who promoted the revival of downtown Baltimore through projects like Charles Center and the Inner Harbor redevelopment, proposed removing the portion of the Jones Falls Expressway that leads into downtown and replacing it with an extension of President Street. City officials have expressed some support for this project, and it will probably be implemented when the current elevated structure becomes obsolete in about 2020.

•Seattle, WA, Alaska Way Viaduct: The powers that be thought that a referrendum would settle whether an underground freeway or a new elevated structure alternative would be used to replace this double-decked elevated freeway, which cuts Seattle off from its waterfront. But the voters surprized the politicians and rejected both alternatives. Now, some politicians are backing removal. People's Waterfront Coalition was the first group fighting for this freeway removal.

•Bronx, NY, Sheridan Expressway: Neighborhood residents and environmentalists have called for removal of this freeway and restoration of the Bronx River as a park. Despite widespread support, the Bronx borough president is resisting the idea because he wants the traffic capacity available for the Hunt's Point market, though studies have shown it is not needed. South Bronx Watershed Alliance is fighting for this freeway removal, and you can get the latest news about it from their blog.

•Buffalo, NY, Route 5: New York State Dept. of Transportation is proposing an expansion of Route 5 along Buffalo's waterfront, and citizens are saying that, instead, they should remove this freeway and replace it with a boulevard. The Congress for the New Urbanism is the most prominent proponent of this alternative.

•Hartford, CT, Aetna Viaduct: The Aetna Viaduct, an elevated portion of I-84 that goes through the center of the Hartford, reached the end of its projected life in 2005. When the city proposed repairing the freeway, citizens groups called for its removal. Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez has worked with these groups and gotten funding for a study of alternatives, including converting the freeway into a boulevard.

•Syracuse, NY, I-81: The elevated portion of Interstate 81 that goes through the center of Syracuse is nearing the end of its useful lif. The Onadoga Citizens League has issued a report named "Rethinking I-80," which calls for the I-81 alternatives study to include "a pedestrian-friendly boulevard in the European tradition" as one alternative studied.

•Louisville, KY, Interstate 64: The state freeway planners are proposing an $4.1 billion expansion of this freeway along the Ohio River waterfront, which would increase the interchange known as Spaghetti Junction to 23 lanes. The group called 8664 wants to remove this freeway instead. (86 is slang for remove.) They have produced an excellent graphic presentation about the issue at http://www.8664.org/.

•Portland, OR, I-5: The first freeway removal was Portland's Harbor Drive, on the west bank of the Willamette River. Now Riverfront for People is calling for the removal of I-5, on the east bank of the Willamette.

•Chicago, IL, Lakeshore Drive: A grassroots coalition called The Campaign for a Clear and Free Lakefront, is calling for the removal of Lakeshore Drive from Grant Park and ultimately from the entire waterfront. Without this eight-lane superhighway, the park would be an open, free, and clear space for Chicagoans to enjoy.

[Lafferty Daniel]

This is OKC. Not New York, Boston, San Francisco, etc. Total apples to oranges when you compare us to cities with 5-10x more people and especially since their downtowns are much more condensed.

[Rover]

What traffic jams? An interesting thing happened when cities starting removing urban freeways - they found traffic congestion actually went down. Counter-intituive I know but traffic counts speak for themeselves. It turns out freeways create was is called 'induced demand'. It is truely a build and they will come scenario. Conversely, don't build it and the traffic congestion won't come.

http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/

And Yes Rover, cities have removed urban freeways - New York City is one of them.

Guess you don't get to NYC. There are MANY expressways in NYC. If by any chance you are referring to Manhattan, then that is true if you don't count the main streets that carry the traffic along the rivers. If you are comparing transit infrastructure with NYC that isn't remotely the same or ever will be.

Boston has many freeways and lots of traffic jams. They didn't eliminate expressways, they added them underground and built tunnels at OUR expense in a very controversial project. If you think Maps is controversial, you should see what they went through spending federal money by the truckload. They spent billions not to eliminate cars but to increase flow and let them get in, out and through the city faster and easier. Still, Boston is nowhere like OKC.

[rcjunkie]

Guess you don't get to NYC. There are MANY expressways in NYC. If by any chance you are referring to Manhattan, then that is true if you don't count the main streets that carry the traffic along the rivers. If you are comparing transit infrastructure with NYC that isn't remotely the same or ever will be.

Another problem your not considering is that in the areas you reference, your talking local traffic, here it's probably at least 50 % through traffic.

[Rover]

Looks like lots of studies and little real projects. Also lots of conversions to boulevards. Lol. We rerouted 40 to increase property values and open up new neighborhoods and are making the old route a boulevard. Guess we are actually at the forefront of this.

[Just the facts]

Boston has many freeways and lots of traffic jams.

Many freeways AND lots of traffic jams. Ask yourself how that is possible.

I also provided lots of examples that are comprable to OKC and one I didn't mention which is Portland and their removal of the Harbor Freeway and stopped construction of the Mount Hood Freeway. Of course, none of this means anything to OKC because the new I-40 will be open in 10 days but the mistake will last 60 years.

Alas - riddle me this. Which part of downtown OKC is nicer, the north side where there is no freeway or the south side with I-40?

[Rover]

Many freeways AND lots of traffic jams. Ask yourself how that is possible.

I also provided lots of examples that are comprable to OKC and one I didn't mention which is Portland and their removal of the Harbor Freeway and stopped construction of the Mount Hood Freeway. Of course, none of this means anything to OKC because the new I-40 will be open in 10 days but the mistake will last 60 years.

Boston is a major commerce and tourist center with lots of people traveling to city center. Even though you have train, busses, water taxis, etc., there is a huge transportation issue. It is the New England hub and you don't fly from places like Providence, etc. Train is used, but more use cars.

And, yes you can eliminate traffic by eliminating roads and cars. But that is like a business getting rid of their warranty problems by stopping production and sales rather than improving their products. I will never argue ours or any other systems can't or shouldn't be improved, but we have to be balanced, sensible and smart.

[Just the facts]

Cities can't build their way out of traffic congestion because of two things called induced and latent demand. If building freeways resulted in less traffic Atlanta would be the poster child for a traffic-free commute. But for some reason the more lanes they build the worse traffic gets.

[Just the facts]

I posted this in the Norman thread last month. Read it if you want to - I realiize it is long but it does a pretty good job of explaining the situtation.

From Suburban Nation

WHY TRAFFIC IS CONGESTED

The first complaint one always hears about suburbia is the traffic congestion. More than any other factor, the perception of excessive traffic is what causes citizens to take up arms against growth in suburban communities. This perception is generally justified: in most American cities, the worst traffic is to be found not downtown but in the surrounding suburbs, where an "edge city" chokes highways that were originally built for lighter loads. In newer cities such as Phoenix and Atlanta, where there is not much of a downtown to speak of, traffic congestion is consistently cited as the single most frustrating aspect of daily life.

Why have suburban areas, with their height limits and low density of population, proved to be such a traffic nightmare? The first reason, and the obvious one, is that everyone is forced to drive. In modern suburbia, where pedestrians, bicycles, and public transportation are rarely an option, the average household currently generates thirteen car trips per day. Even if each trip is fairly short—and few are — that's a lot of time spent on the road, contributing to congestion, especially when compared to life in traditional neighborhoods. Traffic engineer Rick Cheliman, in his landmark study of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, applied standard suburban trip-generation rates to that town's historic core, and found that they predicted twice as much traffic as actually existed there. Owing to its pedestrian-friendly plan—and in spite of its pedestrian-unfriendly weather—Portsmouth generates half the automobile trips of a modern-day suburb.

But even if the suburbs were to generate no more trips than the city, they would still suffer from traffic to a much greater extent because of the way they are organized. The diagram shown here illustrates how a suburban road system, what engineers call a sparse hierarchy, differs from a traditional street network. The components of the suburban model are easy to spot in the top half of the diagram: the shopping mall in its sea of parking, the fast-food joints, the apartment complex, the looping cul-de-sacs of the housing subdivision. Buffered from the others, each of these components has its own individual connection to a larger external road called the collector. Every single trip from one component to another, no matter how short, must enter the collector. Thus, the traffic of an entire community may rely on a single road, which, as a result, is generally congested during much of the day. If there is a major accident on the collector, the entire system is rendered useless until it is cleared.

A typical neighborhood is shown in the bottom half of the diagram. lt accommodates all the same components as the suburban model, but they are organized as a web, a densely interconnected system that reduces demand on the collector road. Unlike suburbia, the neighborhood presents the opportunity to walk or bicycle. But even if few do so, its gridded network is superior at handling automobile traffic, providing multiple routes between destinations. Because the entire System is available for local travel, trips are dispersed, and traffic on most streets remains light. If there is an accident, drivers simply choose an alternate path. The efficiency of the traditional grid explains why Charleston, South Carolina, at 2,500 acres, handles an annual tourist load of 5.5 million people with little congestion, while Hilton Head Island, ten times larger, experiences severe backups at 1.5 million visitors. Hilton Head, for years the suburban planners' exemplar, focuses all its traffic on a single collector road.

The suburban model does offer one advantage over the neighborhood model: it is much easier to analyze statistically. Because every single trip follows a predetermined path, traffic can be measured and predicted accurately. When the same measurement techniques are applied to an open network, the statistical chart goes flat; prediction becomes impossible and, indeed, unnecessary. But the suburban model still holds sway, and traffic engineers enjoy a position of unprecedented infiuence, often determining single-handedly what gets built and what doesn't. That traffic can occupy such a dominant position in the public discourse is indication enough that planning needs to be rethought from top to bottom.

WHEN NEARBY IS STILL FAR AWAY

Another paradox of suburban planning is the distinction that it creates between adjacency and accessibility. While many of the destinations of daily life are often next to each other, only rarely are they easy to reach directly.

For example, even though the houses pictured here are adjacent to the shopping center, in experience they are considerably more distant. Local ordinances have forced the developers to build a wall between the two properties, discouraging even the most intrepid citizen from walking to the store. The resident of a house just fifty yards away must still get into the car, drive half a mile to exit the subdivision, drive another half mile on the collector road back to the shopping center, and then walk from car to store. What could have been a pleasant two-minute walk down a residential street becomes instead an expedition requiring the use of gasoline, roadway capacity, and space for parking.

Supporters of this separatist single-use zoning argue that people do not want to live near shopping. This is only partially true. Some don't, and some do. But suburbia does not provide that choice, because even adjacent uses are contrived to be distant. The planning model that does provide citizens with a choice can be seen in the New England town pictured here. One can live above the store, next to the store, five minutes from the store, or nowhere near the store, and it is easy to imagine the different age groups and personalities that would prefer each alternative. In this way and others, the traditional neighborhood provides for an array of lifestyles. In suburbia, there is only one available lifestyle: to own a car and to need it for everything.

THE AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION MESS

THE HIGHWAYLESS TOWN AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY;
WHY ADDING LANES MAKES TRAFFIC WORSE;

THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY
During the height of automania, a zoologist observed that in animal herds excessive mobility was a sure sign of distress and asked whether this might not be true of his fellow human beings. Perhaps it was distress but what historian can list all the causes that led twentieth century man to race from highway to byway, tunnel to bridge? Suffice to say that he seemed to be constantly going from where he didn't want to be to where he didn't want to stay.
- PERCIVAL GOODMAN, COMMUNITAS (1960)

Redesigning streets and roads for pedestrian viability is a first step toward making our neighborhoods more livable, but there is a larger problem still to be addressed: this country's fundamentally misguided approach to transportation planning as a whole. Because settlement patterns depend more than anything else upon transportation Systems, it is impossible to discuss one without discussing the other.

While we do enjoy the benefits of an effective system for the national distribution of goods—nobody is lining up outside shops with empty shelves—it would still be difficult to overstate the degree to which transportation policy has damaged both our cities and our countryside. This outcome was by no means inevitable; in fact, we knew better all along. By 1940, the rules that should govern the development of a transportation network for the healthy growth of society were well known. They were widely acknowledged, thoroughly disseminated, and, apparently immediately forgotten.

THE HIGHWAYLESS TOWN
AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY

The most significant of these rules is illustrated, alongside its violation, in the accompanying diagram. This drawing, more than any other, depicts the greatest failure of American postwar planning, and helps to explain why our country faces both an urban and an environmental crisis. Titled "The Townless Highway and the Highwayless Town," the upper half illustrates the proper relationship between high-speed roadways and places of settlement. Highways connect cities hut do not pass through them. Norman Bel Geddes, the designer of the U.S. Interstate system, declared in 1939, "Motorways must not be allowed to infringe upon the City." Where they do provide access to the City, highways must take on the low-speed geometries of avenues and boulevards. In exchange for this courtesy, the city does not allow itself to grow along the highway. Where high-speed roads pass through the countryside, roadside development is not permitted. The results of these rules are plain to see in much of Western Europe: cities, for the most part, have retained their pedestrian-friendly quality, and most highways provide views of uninterrupted countryside.

This country has allowed the exact opposite to occur. As depicted in the lower half, highways were routed directly through the centers of our Cities, eviscerating entire neighborhoods—typically, African American neighborhoods—and splitting downtowns into pieces. Meanwhile, the commercial strip attached itseif like a parasite to the highway between cities, impeding through traffic and blighting the countryside in the process. The damage is not yet complete, for we continue to let this happen, with predictable results. How obvious and damaging does an error need to be before it is addressed and corrected? Jane Jacobs may have answered this question in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "The pseudo-science of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success."

WHY ADDING LANES MAKES TRAFFIC WORSE

There is, however; a much deeper problem than the way highways are placed and managed. It raises the question of why we are still building highways at all. The simple truth is that building more highways and widening existing roads, almost always motivated by concern over traffic, does nothing to reduce traffic. In the long run, in fact, it increases traffic. This revelation is so counterintuitive that it bears repeating: adding lanes makes traffic worse. This paradox was suspected as early as 1942 by Robert Moses, who noticed that the highways he had built around New York City in 1939 were somehow generating greater traffic problems than had existed previously. Since then, the phenomenon has been well documented, most notably in 1989, when the Southern California Association of Governments concluded that traffic-assistance measures, be they adding lanes, or even double-decking the roadways, would have no more than a cosmetic effect on Los Angeles traffic problems. The best it could offer was to tell people to work closer to home, which is precisely what highway building mitigates against.

Across the Atlantic, the British government reached a similar conclusion. Its studies showed that increased traffic capacity causes people to drive more — a lot more — such that half of any driving-time savings generated by new roadways are lost in the short run. In the long run, potentially all savings are expected to be lost. In the words of the Transport Minister, "The fact of the matter is that we cannot tackle our traffic problems by building more roads." While the British have responded to this discovery by drastically cutting their road-building budgets, no such thing can be said about Americans.

There is no shortage of hard data. A recent University of California at Berkeley study covering thirty California counties between 1973 and 1990 found that, for every 10 percent increase in roadway capacity, traffic increased 9 percent within four years' time. For anecdotal evidence, one need only look at commuting patterns in those cities with expensive new highway systems. USA Today published the following report on Atlanta: "For years, Atlanta tried to ward off traffic problems by building more miles of highways per capita than any other urban area except Kansas City... As a result of the area's sprawl, Atlantans now drive an average of 35 miles a day, more than residents of any other city." This phenomenon, which is now well known to those members of the transportation industry who wish to acknowledge it, has come to be called induced traffic.

The mechanism at work behind induced traffic is elegantly explained by an aphorism gaining popularity among traffic engineers: "Trying to cure traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt." Increased traffic capacity makes longer commutes less burdensome, and as a result, people are willing to live farther and farther from their workplace. As increasing numbers of people make similar decisions, the long distance commute grows as crowded as the inner city, commuters clamor for additional lanes, and the cycle repeats itself. This problem is compounded by the hierarchical organization of the new roadways, which concentrates through traffic on as few streets as possible.

The phenomenon of induced traffic works in reverse as well. When New York's West Side Highway collapsed in 1973, an NYDOT study showed that 93 percent of the car trips lost did not reappear elsewhere; people simply stopped driving. A similar result accompanied the destruction of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway in the 1989 earthquake. Citizens voted to remove the freeway entirely despite the apocalyptic warnings of traffic engineers. Surprisingly, a recent British study found that downtown road removals tend to boost local economies, while new roads lead to higher urban unemployment. So much for road-building as a way to spur the economy.

If traffic is to he discussed responsibly, it must first be made clear that the level of traffic which drivers experience daily, and which they bemoan so vehemently, is only as high as they are willing to countenance. If it were not, they would adjust their behavior and move, carpool, take transit, or just stay at home, as some choose to do. How crowded a roadway is at any given moment represents a condition of equilibrium between people’s desire to drive and their reluctance to fight traffic. Because people are willing to suffer inordinately in traffic before seeking alternatives — other than clamoring for more highways — the state of equilibrium of all busy roads is to have stop and go traffic. The question is not how many lanes must he built to ease congestion but how many lanes of congestion you want. Do you favor four lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic at rush hour, or sixteen?

This condition is best explained by what specialists call latent demand. Since the real constraint on driving is traffic, not cost, people are always ready to make more trips when the traffic goes away. The number of latent trips is huge—perhaps 30 percent of existing traffic. Because of latent demand, adding lanes is futile, since drivers are already poised to use them up.

While the befuddling fact of induced traffic is well understood by sophisticated traffic engineers, it might as well be a secret, so poorly has it been disseminated. The Computer models that transportation consultants use do not even consider it, and most local public works directors have never heard of it at all. As a result, from Maine to Hawaii, City, county, and even state engineering departments continue to build more roadways in anticipation of increased traffic, and, in so doing, create that traffic. The most irksome aspect of this situation is that these road-builders are never proved wrong; in fact, they are always proved right: "You see," they say, I told you that traffic was coming."

The ramifications are quite unsettling. Almost all of the billions of dollars spent on road-building over the past decades have accomplished only one thing, which is to increase the amount of time that we must spend in our cars each day. Americans now drive twice as many miles per year as they did just twenty years ago. Since 1969, the number of miles cars travel has grown at four times the population rate.' And we're just getting started: federal highway officials predict that over the next twenty years congestion will quadruple. Still, every congressman, it seems, wants a new highway to his credit.

Thankfully, alternatives to road-building are being offered, but they are equally misguided. If, as is now clear beyond any reasonable doubt, people maintain an equilibrium of just-bearable traffic, then the traffic engineers are wasting their time—and our money on a whole new set of stopgap measures that produce temporary results at best. These measures, which include HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lanes, congestion pricing, timed traffic lights, and "smart streets," serve only to increase highway capacity, which causes more people to drive until the equilibrium condition of crowding returns. While certainly less wasteful than new construction, these measures also do nothing to address the real cause of traffic congestion, which is that people choose to put up with it.

We must admit that, in an ideal world, we would be able to build our way out of traffic congestion. The new construction of 50 percent more highways nationwide would most likely overcome all of the latent demand. However, to provide more than temporary relief, this huge investment would have to be undertaken hand in hand with a moratorium on suburban growth. Otherwise, the new subdivisions, shopping malls, and office parks made possible by the new roadways would eventually choke them as well. In the real world, such moratoriums are rarely possible, which is why road-building is typically a folly.

Those who are skeptical of the need for a fundamental reconsideration of transportation planning should take note of something we experienced a few years ago. In a large working session on the design of Playa Vista, an urban infill project in Los Angeles, the traffic engineer was presenting a report of current and projected congestion around the development. From our seat by the window, we had an unobstructed rush-hour view of a street he had diagnosed as highly congested and in need of widening. Why, then, was traffic flowing smoothly, with hardly any stacking at the traffic light? When we asked, the traffic engineer offered an answer that should be recorded permanently in the annals of the profession: "The computer model that we use does not necessarily bear any relationship to reality."

But the real question is why so many drivers choose to sit for hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic without seeking alternatives. Is it a manifestation of some deep-seated self-loathing, or are people just stupid? The answer is that people are actually quite smart, and their decision to submit themselves to the misery of suburban commuting is a sophisticated response to a set of circumstances that are as troubling as their result. Automobile use is the intelligent choice for most Americans because it is what economists refer to as a "free good": the consumer pays only a fraction of its true cost.

The authors Stanley Hart and Alvin Spivak have explained that: We learn in first-year economics what happens when products or services become "free" goods. The market functions chaotically; demand goes through the roof. In most American cities, parking spaces, roads and freeways are free goods. Local government services to the motorist and to the trucking industry — traffic engineering, traffic control, traffic lights, police and fire protection, street repair and maintenance—are all free goods.

THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY

To what extent is automobile use a "free" good? According to Hart and Spivak, government subsidies for highways and parking alone amount to between 8 and 10 percent of our gross national product, the equivalent of a fuel tax of approximately $3.50 per gallon.
If this tax were to account for "soft' costs such as pollution cleanup and emergency medical treatment, it would be as high as $9.00 per gallon. The cost of these subsidies — approximately $5,000 per car per year — is passed directly on to the American citizen in the form of increased prices for products or, more often, as income, property, and sales taxes. This means that the hidden costs of driving are paid by everyone: not just drivers, but also those too old or too poor to drive a car. And these people suffer doubly, as the very transit systems they count on for mobility have gone out of business, unable to compete with the heavily subsidized highways.

Even more irksome is the fact that spending on transit creates twice as many new jobs as spending on highways. In fact, every billion dollars reallocated from road-building to transit creates seven thousand jobs. Congress's recent $41 billion highway bill, had it been allocated to transit, would have employed an additional quarter-million people nationwide.

Because they do not pay the full price of driving, most car owners choose to drive as much as possible. They are making the correct economic decision, but not in a free-market economy. As Hart and Spivak note, an appropriate analogy is Stalin's Gosplan, a Soviet agency that set arbitrary "correct" prices for many consumer goods, irrespective of their cost of production, with unsurprising results. In the American version of Gosplan, gasoline costs one quarter of what it did in 1929 (in real dollars). One need look no further for a reason why American cities continue to sprawl into the countryside. In Europe, where gasoline costs about four times the American price, long-distance automotive commuting is the exclusive privilege of the wealthy, and there is relatively little suburban sprawl.

The American Gosplan pertains to shipping as well. In the current structure of subsidization, trucking is heavily favored over rail transport, even though trucks consume fifteen limes the fuel for the equivalent job. The government pays a $300 billion subsidy to truckers unthinkingly, while carefully scrutinizing every dollar allocated to transit. Similarly, we try to solve our commuter traffic problems by building highways instead of railways, even though it takes fifteen lanes of highway to move as many people as one lane of track. This predisposition toward automobile use is plainly evident in the prevalent terminology: money spent on roads is called "highway investment," while money spent on rails is called "transit subsidy."

The American Gosplan is not a conspiracy so much as a culture — albeit one strongly supported by pervasive advertising — and it is probably unrealistic to hope that legislators will soon take steps, such as enacting a substantial gasoline tax, to allocate fairly the costs of driving. Pressured by generous automobile industry contributions on the one hand and a car-dependent public on the other, politicians have lately been using gas-tax elimination as an election strategy, with some success. But there is encouraging information suggesting that a gas tax may not be the political suicide that most politicians suspect. According to a recent Pew Foundation poll, 6o percent of those asked favored a twenty-five-cent-per-gallon gas tax to slow global warming.

While there are many supposedly 'anti-business" arguments for higher gas tax — from fighting global warming to supporting public transit — the real justification is economic: subsidized automobile use is the single largest violation of the free-market principle in U.S. fiscal policy. Economic inefficiencies in this country due to automotive subsidization are estimated at $700 billion annually, which powerfully undermines America's ability to compete in the global economy. Although suburban sprawl is the concern in this book, it is not the only sad result of this fundamental error.

The problems of automobile subsidization have been well documented; this is old news. And yet it is news which few people seem to understand, and which has barely begun to influence government policy in any significant way. So, to all the concerned activists nationwide who are banging their heads against the wall on this issue, we do not have very much to say except "May we join you at the wall?" Fortunately, the automobile subsidy is only one of many forces contributing to sprawl, and there are other avenues along which anti-sprawl efforts are likely to achieve meaningful results.

[dankrutka]

Knowing then what I know now, I wouldn't have built the new I-40 at all. I would have rebranded I-240 as I-40 and taken the current I-40 out between I-44 and I-35 and replaced it with the original street grid. The stretch known as Ticker Diagonal would then be rebranded I-240. Thus routing nearly all interstate traffic away from downtown.

Applying your new urbanism to every discussion just doesn't work. You have to be practical also.

[Rover]

Cities can't build their way out of traffic congestion because of two things called induced and latent demand. If building freeways resulted in less traffic Atlanta would be the poster child for a traffic-free commute. But for some reason the more lanes they build the worse traffic gets.

May be the result of increased business and population enabled by transportation. If the objective is to isolate and halt growth, then shutting off arteries is a good method. If you quit eating, it will soon eliminate hunger. Dead men don't hunger.

[Just the facts]

Applying your new urbanism to every discussion just doesn't work. You have to be practical also.

New Urbanism works everytime it is tried. There is not a single failed new urbanism development because it is rooted in 10,000 years of human development. It only took 50 years for the automobile based development to prove unsustainable - but bless their hearts - people are still trying to make it work. Meanwhile back at the ranch, we might have to go to war with Iran just 2 weeks after ending the Iraq war becasue they are threatening to cut-off the fuel supply.

[metro]

I would like to see the area have new buildings and nicer looking quality of businesses than the old beaten up warehouses that it seems to go by. What are you guys hearing and what are your thoughts on this?

WHich one will you be building?

[Just the facts]

May be the result of increased business and population enabled by transportation. If the objective is to isolate and halt growth, then shutting off arteries is a good method. If you quit eating, it will soon eliminate hunger. Dead men don't hunger.

Rover, I was exactly like you less than 5 years ago. No one was able to convince me either back then and honestly, no one convinced me about new urbanism now. I had an epiphany and put the pieces together all by myself. Maybe someday that same thing will happen for you. Just know that New Urbanism is here for you when the time comes. When gasoline becomes $5 a gallon many people will be wishing they could walk to the drug store, but it won't be there - it will still be 5 miles away and you will have 6 lanes of traffic trying to get to it. My mom asked me what the price of gasoline was in Philadelphia. I told her I didn't know I don't buy gas there, but I know how much wars in the Middle East cost and the peace cost even more.

[Questor]

I don't see a solution here. It's a giant Catch 22. If you try to reroute or stop building highways, but there are no restrictions on your cities suburb's development or your neighboring townships simply don't care and want to steal away your business/tax payers/etc., the number of people building and buying new homes in surrounding communities is going to continue to increase and traffic will just become far worse. If you enforce development restrictions at the same time you do this you are going to cause a spike in real estate prices in the city core, which is going to force more people out of it not into it, which will just increase traffic again. So then the only real solution becomes starting over... redeveloping everything... building new train systems... gobbling up old properties, demolishing them, and building new housing as well as space for businesses all within the city core. You are talking quadrillions of dollars (some public, some private) over 100 years, no joke. Some of that will go towards your lawyers because so many people are going to freak out at the thought of another "urban renewal." Not to mention the gigantic inconvenience all of that would cause... it would drive businesses and people away. And after spending all that time and money what would we end up with? Towers full of tiny spaces that people live in and pay a fortune for, who still have a 45 minute commute to work because the bike ride to the nearest tube is 10 minutes, and the tube ride is 30 when you factor in all the stops, and then on the opposite side you have a 5 minute walk to your building? People who now have to pay for monthly train fees in addition to their car costs (because unless you do this on some sort of grand national scale, let alone state wide, people are still going to need automobile transportation)? So how on earth does that make anything for me the individual any better? It doesn't, in fact it makes everything a whole lot worse. For what purpose... to satisfy someone's OCD fetish on what a downtown development is supposed to look like? If city planners aren't asking themselves "how does this improve the quality of life for an individual" then they aren't thinking about the problem correctly. I am not sure if the article authors are doing that. Besides that, I just don't buy into any opinion that says the answer to all our problems is simple, we just need to do X. There are no simple solutions... there are always unintended consequences. Look at American history and it is a hilarious cycle of undoing what the last generation did about every 30 years because those guys were crazy but we know better. Carpet replaces hard wood floors because they are more modern, require less cleaning and are warmer... which are then replaced by hard wood floors with the next generation because they are more modern and require less maintenance. US Numbered Highways are built because the train systems at the time were woefully inadequate and now we are talking about replacing interstates with trains because trains are so much better. One generation flees downtown cores to get away from the rat race, and the next makes a mad dash back to get away from the boredom of the suburbs. There are a million things good and bad about all of these choices, including so called "new urbanism." I think the key is to realize that, and realize that not everyone shares the same goals as you. In fact the younger generation may even want the exact opposite of what you want. The reality is that there's going to have to always be room for choice, and so long as there is a choice you will never ever get to implement some penultimate plan of a cityscape. So then we just have to be realistic and sort of appease the monster... I think that is where we are at and unless developers understand that nothing we do is going to be a success.

[Rover]

Many Russian and Chinese cities are ideal. Poor and few good roads. Few can afford cars, so less travel. Hugh high density areas. Mass group living. Perfect.

[Skyline]

Many Russian and Chinese cities are ideal. Poor and few good roads. Few can afford cars, so less travel. Hugh high density areas. Mass group living. Perfect.

Oh Yes! That is urban living in the purest form. Where do I sign up for that? Lol

[Just the facts]

You don't have to leave the US to find walkable cities and bringing up China and Russia is bit on the extreme side. Western Europe has plenty of walkable cities and villages of all sizes.

[Snowman]

Rover, I was exactly like you less than 5 years ago. No one was able to convince me either back then and honestly, no one convinced me about new urbanism now. I had an epiphany and put the pieces together all by myself. Maybe someday that same thing will happen for you. Just know that New Urbanism is here for you when the time comes. When gasoline becomes $5 a gallon many people will be wishing they could walk to the drug store, but it won't be there - it will still be 5 miles away and you will have 6 lanes of traffic trying to get to it. My mom asked me what the price of gasoline was in Philadelphia. I told her I didn't know I don't buy gas there, but I know how much wars in the Middle East cost and the peace cost even more.

I doubt even if oil supplies begin noticeably affecting gas prices in the next five years it would be enough to end suburban sprawl, too many people are heavily invested in sprawl. The electric plug-ins and range extenders are already approaching the cost of standard vehicles (or at least close enough it would be far cheaper for most to replace their car than house if the price of gas continue upward, which if their are few buyers it will be hard to sell anyway). The current infrastructure and building trends have sixty years of inertia, no matter the benefits of urbanism it will take time to develop.

[Just the facts]

Questor - how many interstate style roads do you find in central London/Paris/Brussels/Zurich/Oslo/Rome/etc. Poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs are unique to America. The rest of the world is the other way around. Prior to 1945 even the US was dominated by wealthy inner cities and the poor people lived on the edge with few exceptions during time of heavy migration. The difference is that America changed to develop around the car, but that has proven to be unsustainable. We can't afford to fix roads, we can't afford to fix bridges, we can't afford to build more freeways, most people can't afford a new car - and those that can have to take out 72 months loans, and the entire economy comes to halt when gas hits $4 per gallon. In Europe gas is $10 per gallon and no one cares becasue most of them don't use gasoline. Plus we have to spend trillions policiing the Middle East and we can't afford that anymore either. Hell, even auto companies can't afford to build cars because we had to bail them out.

[Just the facts]

I doubt even if oil supplies begin noticeably affecting gas prices in the next five years it would be enough to end suburban sprawl, too many people are heavily invested in sprawl. The electric plug-ins and range extenders are already approaching the cost of standard vehicles (or at least close enough it would be far cheaper for most to replace their car than house if the price of gas continue upward, which if their are few buyers it will be hard to sell anyway). The current infrastructure and building trends have sixty years of inertia, no matter the benefits of urbanism it will take time to develop.

I think over the next 10 to 15 years you are going to see the largest migration of people within the US since the 1940s. It has already started here in Florida. People are abandoning rural subdivisions as fast as they can and many are using the housing crisis to make the move. We have really nice subdivisions down here with community pools, waterslides, acres of recreation space - but half the homes are in foreclosure because no one wants to live that far out fighting all the traffic to get back into town and spending $100/week in gas to do it.

If I owned a home in a rural subdivision I would be doing everything I could to get out of it - including walking away. We have friends that live in St Johns County in World Golf Village and they really are trapped. They thought suburbia would spread forever and while they might have to drive 10 miles to a grocery store now they thought new stores would follow them out there. It didn't happen and it isn't going to happen. Now their subdivision can't even afford to maintain the pool because they don't have enough residents paying homeowners dues to cover the costs.

Bottom line - there simply isn't enough people to create the demand necessary to make it self-sustaining.

I noticed something a while back that I found interesting and it made me think of how cities develop and last over time. After I mow the lawn I usually blow all the cut grass from the driveway, sidewalk, and street into a pile and pick it up. One time though I didn't have anything to put the lawn waste in so I left it in a pile in the gutter thinking it would just go away after few days. That week it rained, we had high winds, and cars passed by it but the grass pile didn't go away. In fact, it actually got bigger because it blocked the gutter and other lawn debris from up the street got added to it during the rain. I finally had to go pick it up.

A few weeks later I was running short on time so I didn't even blow the grass into a pile at all. I just left it where the mower deposited it. In less than 12 hours it was all gone just from a mild blowing wind.

The moral is - a high density pile of grass not only survived heavy winds, rain, cars, and whatever else Mother Nature could through at it but it actually increased in size. Meanwhile, the low density grass spread over a large area disappeared quickly with little resistance to a changing environment.

I just found that to be interesting observation.

[ljbab728]

I don't know of a single city in the US, or worldwide for that matter, that has eliminated main highways leading to the city. To move it so far away is laughable and totally impractical, not to mention would never happen. What JTF indicated about Boston cost billions and didn't reroute, just submerged. To compare the transit requirements and infrastructure to these cities is total apples to oranges. Eliminating I 40 or rerouting 10 miles away from downtown isn't a serios or practical option, IMHO.

Rover, Kerry isn't known for suggesting practical options. He just throws ideas out whenever they pop into his head.

[Rover]

There are lots of expressways in and around Paris...I drive them frequently. London has a ring of motorways and arteries into the central city that feed to major streets. Plus, London was densely developed prior to the explosion of car transportation. Nevertheless, they have many limited access arteries. Brussels has an inner ring and arteries out. Rome has a number of expressways. Zurich is a totally different layout. Oslo, I haven't been, so I don't know. The rest I have driven in many times.

[ljbab728]

Questor - how many interstate style roads do you find in central London/Paris/Brussels/Zurich/Oslo/Rome/etc.

Let me think, Kerry. When did the development of those cities start? Maybe it was a few years before most cities in the US? Could that possibly have some bearing on how they developed?

[ljbab728]

I think over the next 10 to 15 years you are going to see the largest migration of people within the US since the 1940s.

It's not going to matter, Kerry. The US is going to implode in 8 years, remember?