OK, so I didn't actually think through how it would feel to schedule a video for release the morning after election day in the US. If you were on Nebula you could've watched it yesterday, I guess...not sure that really helps! But you should sign up for a membership anyway, just in case this platform goes the way of Twitter. I haven't really framed it this way before, but being on Nebula is a bit of a diversification/risk management strategy for me, so really, the more people who watch me over there, the better. Link: go.nebula.tv/citynerd
@@rapidmarkets3051There was no censorship. Platforms have the right to regulate their own content as they see fit. Don't be upset you identify with toxic and unpopular opinions. There is one political side that made transportation and urban planning a partisan issue and that is the side that will be in the White House for upcoming term.
I haven't watched this yet (just liking for now since CityNerd is great) and decided to troll the comments and now after reading yours I look forward to being reminded how heinous the downtown SD interchange was/is. 😅
that highway blasting through balboa park is such a tragedy. george marsten, the philanthropist who initially developed the land and later helped a committee create the park wanted to beautify the area and create an excellent common space- then, at the end of his life, he had to know a huge ass freeway was going to be laid right through it, disrupting views and walkways and creating noise pollution like nothing else in the area could.
I mean obviously it's highly illogical to add a highway that cuts your urban core in half designed for the needs of 80% of vehicles who are just passing through and the 20% of people who are just getting on the freeway for one exit because of all of the detours required to take surface streets to their destination now that there is a highway in the way. But once a city has started to provide this luxury for everyone who passes through and pays taxes elsewhere they seem endlessly committed to solving other people's problems and catering to their extremely expensive preferences and wishes. It's like cutting your house in half so that your neighbors can all take a short-cut though your property and then having to wait for traffic before you can cross over and use the bathroom.
You're assuming that the city has the power to decide where the roads go. That's usually not true, the state govt decides where roads go. And in many states, the state govt is hostile to the people of the largest city in the state, because the state govt is biased toward rural interests, and they want to disrupt life in the city so that the rural regions have more power. The people of the city aren't cutting their house in half to please their neighbors, their neighbors are saying "you have no choice but to let us use your house as a pathway to get where we want to go."
@@perfectallycromulent some cities (usually the more affluent) do have the power to stop state siting of roads that cut their communities up. South Pasadena stopped a freeway for decades and ultimately the state backed down. San Francisco not only opposed an already built freeway, they forced the state to tear it down. The analogy is a good one; but it’s usually the poor communities that get their houses cut in half so that the neighbors can use the shortcuts.
I don't dwell on it but there's plenty of research out there on the differing health outcomes of people who live right next to a freeway and those who don't
Worth noting that the I-95/US 6 interchange in Providence was illegally built because it's built on top of a Narragansett tribe burial ground and it's illegal to build on top of tribal burial grounds in Rhode Island. They also just added 2 new lanes to the interchange. Truly cursed stuff!
Let's not forget that one of the most powerful arguments against urban freeways and interchanges is the economic double-whammy: Not only are these rights of way forever removed from the property tax rolls (and a great deal of adjacent property is devalued), but the rights of way are an endless money vacuum, sucking down civic treasure year after year after year with no end in sight.
That largely depends on how the tax structure where you live works. I live in metro Phoenix, arguably a poster-child for anti-mass-transit with two interstates, one federal highway as a freeway, three 'loop' freeways, and a smattering of other freeways. I was honestly surprised that Phoenix didn't make the cut, since *_two_* I-10/I-17 interchanges and an I-10/AZ-202/AZ-51 interchange surround downtown Phoenix, and just about every major city within the metro area is in proximity to at least one interchange. Our freeways are maintained at the state level. State taxes rather than city taxes pay for them. Additionally particularly along the federal freeways, lots and lots of industrial and commercial business occurs and happens as a direct result of the existence of those freeways. Contrast the growth of greater Phoenix to Greater Tucson and the size and vibrancy of Phoenix and surrounding cities is a direct result of the ease of transportation around here. Tucson shows us what happens when there aren't freeways and corresponding interchanges. This isn't to say that I dislike Tucson, but it's a much harder city to get around quickly, even outside of commuting hours.
@@TWX1138 The loss of taxable property is universal in the USA. Phoenix or another valley city loses that local tax revenue every year forever and ever and ever. You also pay more state income tax and/or state gas tax to maintain the state highways AND the Interstates. You pay more FIT and/or federal gas tax to fund the federal matching share for the Interstates and various federal grants allocated to state roads. ALL of that "could be" allocated to transit and local street improvements instead. I'll argue your "anti mass transit" point. Valley Metro built and aggressively extended their starter line. It's still being extended. The junctions/turnouts for two (if I observed and counted correctly while I was there in October) new lines and one (or two) downtown loops have already been built downtown and appear to be nearly ready for extension. The Tempe streetcar is well-utilized. Metrocenter Mall is being redeveloped as a TOD. A shit-ton (pardon the highly technical jargon) of housing is erupting from the ground along both rail lines. A new Central Station is coming soon(ish). PHX seems determined to diversify their transportation infrastructure. In the 22 years since my previous visit, they have dramatically changed the fabric of a significant swath of the city!
Actually, the Orlando one with I-4/408 used to be A LOT worse. Its previous configuration WRAPPED AROUND a whole housing development. You should look at historic aerial images of the area before 2016, it was insane.
I was about to point this out too. The new interchange is massive, yes, but it's also more space efficient than the previous one that was there since the 70s. The housing complex it used to wrap around is a bit better connected now and they have more green space, and heavy air pollution is just coming from two sides now instead of all 4 sides. It's better for the residents and people using the interchange, it was a nightmare to use previously. The I-4 Ultimate project also added some new street connections that weren't there before. Now the city of Orlando and FDOT have to fulfill the promises of building a public park under the elevated sections downtown. It's objectively worse right now but can be so much better.
@@cyclicmusings2661 I find those older 70s interchanges fascinating because it was during a time when flyover ramps didn’t exist so all interchanges had to be sprawling and only single-level. Much like Golden Glades.
For what it is worth, your channel is one of the first places I turned to when the election started to go sideways. Knowing that there are other options out there where people might be able to escape (at least some of) what is coming is a small ray of hope in a very dark time. Thanks for all of your efforts in bringing this information together for everyone. Without people like you I wouldn't even know where to start.
I will never forget being in Denver, maybe it was on Federal?? Just needed to cross the street but no crosswalks with the street feeding into the freeway. There was a sign “honoring” someone who had obviously been killed at that location with the closest signal crosswalk three blocks out of my way. A better honor would have been to add a signal crosswalk or even overpass. Being a pedestrian in a major city should have some support
I was staying in a hotel once. There was a supermarket and other shops on the other side of the stroad. I wanted to walk to the supermarket because it's so close. What a naive fool I was. I couldn't. There was no way for pedestrians to get to the other side for as far as I can see in both directions. So I had to drive. I had to fucking cross the stroad in my car just to get to the other side. Fucking insane. People who prefer this are screwed up.
I get that this is a U.S. focused video, but honorable mention to Dubai’s massive interchange of Sheikh Zayed Rd & Finance Center Rd. Absolutely massive roads (both are about 14 lanes wide each). Within 3km is likely over 100 skyscrapers, including some of the most valuable square footage in the world in the Burj Dubai. At least the metro stations serve as pedestrian bridges making it slightly more feasible to cross east to west.
Urbanism absolutely is politics. Thanks for pointing this out. With this new administration, what’s going to happen to rail infrastructure and the housing crisis?
I'd like to be wrong, but I strongly suspect that the housing crisis will get much worse as Trump and Co. work to weaken or eliminate the regulations on the predator class.
Regarding your recent Caltrain video I am happy to inform you that Measure T in San Mateo easily passed. It will allow taller and more dense housing close to the three Caltrain stations and downtown.
@@EdwardM-t8p Local transit is and should be largely funded by local governments. And you are much more likely to be able to actually build things of any kind with a Republican administration cutting permitting regs.
Yes! One small measure of hope. I lived in the Ryan Towers apts until I was priced out when it gentrified and it is an example of the kind of high rises could be built again. San Mateo could be the ideal small city if it grows upward in the downtown area.
Honestly? Probably won't change much, if at all. It's been almost entirely a grass roots movement in the US, and funded almost exclusively by local municipalities. It just means that federal funds won't be allocated as much for the larger public transit infrastructure projects, but there wasn't exactly a large cash flow happening there anyways so its not exactly a giant loss for anything other than high speed rail projects.
@@orthrus4490Your hope is admirable. No more pedestrian grants to cities, no more Amtrak grants anywhere, etc etc. Some good ballot measures last night supporting transit but the urbanist movement is going to be set back a decade.
It wouldn't make an iota of difference because Harris's campaign was largely funded by corporate donors who are diametrically opposed to progressive issues. Urbanism, sustainability, and public transportation were jettisoned (and clearly stated as such) by the current administration in favor of corporate/industry friendly policies.
I remember when the Interstate system was being built. And the trade-off lots of towns had to make when considering whether to let the Interstate come through their towns or bypass it. If it came through, you gave up a lot of valuable land to transportation and lost a lot of your city fabric but your town survived. If you insisted on it bypassing your town, you ran the risk of all business bypassing you as well and your town might die. In some cases I can recall towns that were bypassed, abandoning their original locations and moving out to the interchange to recapture their vitality.
In my hometown of Halifax, for 50 years there was a highway interchange right next to downtown that connected to no highways - protests stopped the project before it was built beyond the interchange (but not before poor and minority neighbourhoods were demolished for it), so instead the overbuilt behemoth was just connected to some medium-sized regular roads that could have been handled by a decent roundabout. Thankfully its finally in the process of being torn down today and the land redeveloped for useful purposes.
We've got some ugly interchange spaghetti in Edmonton southwest of downtown, across the river, the first stage of what was to be an huge three-level stack where the Muttart Conservatory is now. I'm glad the METS freeway plan didn't go any further than it did.
Don't forget the Africville bypass they plowed right through the historic freed slave homes by the bridge named after the godfather of indian residential schools. Truly a 10/10 for concentrating their worst ideas to the far corner of the downtown core, haha
@@Jacksparrow4986 They're actually doing a lot more bike lanes on the main roads, and we have a pretty good bike path network. It's just geared more towards recreation than getting from point A to point B.
The sad thing is Columbus has a walkable downtown and plenty of amenities to the north within easy reach...but once you hit the highway/concrete moat to the south, it's like a wall. Nobody crosses it, totally hateful to be outside of a car. German Village could be so much more vibrant if it were actually connected to downtown with foot traffic like the Short North is.
Truly a shameful history of people outside of cities, via state DOTs, inflicting these monstrosities on the cities themselves despite whatever the people living there might have wanted at the time. And then talking about how noisy, dirty, and undesirable the cities are!
Right! The list of bad things about the Twin Cities is extremely short but this is on mine. These interchanges basically create a moat around downtown.
I hope the growing support of removing I-94 between the two downtowns doesn't falter. It would be great to reclaim that very valuable land and turn it into a narrower boulevard lined with new development. It would also allow Highway 280 to end at Territorial Road, providing 20+ acres of land to develop in the Westgate area.
Just a few days ago, for Halloween, a french channel did a scary video, starring scary violins musical background, a deep slow otherworldly voice-over, some sudden change of camera/sound, and google street-views of big American cities for a post zombies apocalyptic scenery (contrasting with same views of french downtowns, full of lively people )
Here in Denver there's a plan to remove a massive cloverleaf interchange between two major downtown stroads and replace it with a normal intersection. I really hope this happens, and another funny thing about it is that the interchange is right next to the new CDOT Headquarters. As with the recent election news, it is now even more imperative to keep up the urbanist fight. Some good news is that here in Colorado, Ballot Issue 7A, which will give more funding (through over collected taxes) to public transit passed in a landslide. Good day for Colorado, not so good for the nation as a whole.
The Children's Hospital was there before the interchange build-out. If it makes you feel any better, the hospital has displaced numerous homes and businesses in the area during the last fifteen years or so ...
I think there are also lots of cities that wouldn’t make this list BECAUSE of a terrible interchange. For example, I think of Hartford, CT which has an interchange next to downtown and a highway along its waterfront. Pre-highways, Hartford was a bustling city, so much so that Mark Twain said of Hartford, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief.” It would be a depressing list, but what about the smaller cities like Hartford that got hit worst by the interstate system?
@@kevinwoolley7960 While tax policies can affect industrialization, I think the bigger culprits are going to be technical, and more generally, the societal changes that technology wrought. The rise of containerization and growth of trucking made shipping much cheaper and easier, which eliminated benefits of the old rail-centric industry of the northeast. When tooling or factories needed re-investment, it made more sense to move the industry entirely, whether domestically to the central US or offshore to Japan and then China. Blaming decisions made by local officials for broad trends that cause regions to rise and fall is easy because that's who we can vote for, but often those trends are global in nature, and all politicians or bureaucrats can do is steer the boat into the wind and hope to ride out the storm. As to how well those officials did in Hartford's case, you're going to need someone who knows a lot more local history than I.
Most of the lanes you see in urban freeways are ONLY designed for rush hour traffic. Outside of that, they are mostly under-utilized and a huge waste of concrete. But even during rush hour, downtown freeways simply don't work. The reason is forced merges (or worse suicide merges) means dangerous driving conditions or extremely slow traffic. There is a solution that is space efficient and moves traffic well...and that is one-way roads with synced lights. Madison Wisconsin has an example of this (University Ave through the isthmus) and it works incredibly well.
@@Demopans5990 the only issues with that are cost and security concerns. The Big Dig was legendarily expensive. Also, you have the hazardous materials question, since trucks carrying those usually aren’t allowed through tunnels, for safety reasons.
Atlanta’s downtown connector never achieves 60mph through downtown because even at 18 lanes or something atrocious like that, traffic is so bad speeds are virtually always
It used to be that you could pass through Atlanta (and Chicago) in the middle of the night to avoid a lot of traffic. That's not necessarily true anymore.
I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle and my family tries to visit, staying in South Lake Union. They seem like they're next door, only a couple miles apart, but SLU is an absolute hellhole of stroads with poorly-implemented only semi-exclusive bus lanes and one-way streets one has to cross their fingers navigating just to get to one of only a few overpasses of I-5 which are also single-lane on-ramps backed up for blocks. It takes requires 20 minutes and 20 lords prayers to get from SLU to Cap Hill. It's utterly vile.
@@papilgee4evaeva Ah right, forgot that was one of the new ones that NC's been adding. Though I don't know why they didn't label it something like I-32 instead, considering it mainly goes east-west.
I drive that stretch all the time. I know exactly which lane I need to be in and when to signal, and still I sometimes get crowded out of the 87 exit northbound and have to take Race Street/Southwest Expy which is tricky. Frankly the 280 - 880 interchange, even after a big rebuild which addressed some problems, is worse than 280 - 87. It's a lower density area, though, since it's not in downtown.
Id like to add some context to the Dallas interchange because most people dont realize some things about it. 1. While yes it uses a lot of land, large chunks of that land are unsuitable for development because its on the banks of the trinity river, which is a floodplain. 2. The trinity river also doesnt smell great due to several reasons (mainly runoff and some problems with dead foliage during the dry season) so the land around it is always going to be less valuable. Every once in a while trininty river smells gives off this aweful rotting smell, and while it isnt constant it happens pretty often which is going to keep the land value around it low regardless of the highway interchange. 3. Unlike most of the interchanges on this list, this one was designed to wrap around downtown rather than cut through it, and it does so on the edges where the downtown couldnt expand anyways due to geographic (trinity river) reasons.
For the most part, these interchanges aren't build on top of prime real estate - they were built on land that happened to get more valuable after the interchange was built. There are some exceptions though like Kansas City and Cincy
@Stripbolt Forget the interchange, Rodgers existence at all is the biggest travesty. On a side note, is it just me or does he hate DFW with some kind of prejudice? Like, we're not perfect, but he defended houston and then in the same video said that the Dallas rail network wasn't extensive. Like, as far as Texas cities go DFW probably has the most urbanism roots and is making substantial progress. Well, was making substantial progress. Prop S just passed so there's no telling how bad that'll get. NIMBYs are bout to have a field day in Dallas😮💨
@@orthrus4490 Tbh, as someone who grew up in Dallas but moved to more urbanist pastures a long time ago, I don't think he gives it a disproportional amount of hate. His defense of Houston definitely bothers me more, lol. It does surprise me that more people don't talk about how extensive DART has become. And when I was back in town this year I really liked all the new development I saw, especially around Bishop Arts and Lower Greenville. Hopefully someday soon the political will materializes to redevelop more neighborhoods across the Metroplex in that style.
Brit here, love the channel. Our motorways in the UK are quite bad but most of these interchanges are found on the fringes of cities and not right next to the nice walkable downtown cores. Probably the most infamous candidate that stands out as being the most American looking monstrosity is what is officially called the Gravelly Hill Interchange in Birmingham, but everyone calls it Spaghetti Junction, the confluence of the M6 motorway and A38 dual carriageway➡️motorway. It covers 30 acres, serves 18 routes and includes 2.5 mi of slip roads, but only 0.6 mi of the M6 itself. Across five different levels, it has 559 concrete columns, reaching up to 80 ft high looming over several railway lines and historic canals. Every time I feel like having my soul crushed, Google Earth conveniently has imagery for Houston going back to the 40s and 50s and the difference between then and now for both the I-45/10 and I-69/10 interchanges and what they used to be is so stark. P.S. Love that mug. Where did you get it? I find myself immediately wanting one!
Thanks for mentioning Vancouver. As you probably know a freeway was proposed in the late 60's that would've cut right through downtown and also would destroy Chinatown and Strathcona, the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver. The plan was meant to not only provide a freeway, to bascially nowhere, but also get rid of 'blight', which was the craze of the day. Fortunately grassroots movements by people in those hoods were able to stop it before too much damage was done, in the early 70's.
I recall reading that Rochester NY got rid of a section of freeway through the city. Maybe it'd be interesting to make a video about that, if not already.
You should look at Cincinnati’s new Brent Spence Bridge project. It’s gonna change up a good amount of the interchange, freeing up some more land for future development. As well as connecting Queensgate, West End, and Downtown through various different means, such as roads, sidewalks, and bike paths. Creating a more connected feel, as well as hopefully making it look better in the process.
The Birmingham AL one SUCKS. Literally made me curse at my computer when you alluded to how "unnecessarily big" it is and then showed the map of the area before it went in... Evil stuff.
I've run/walked through most of the land around that I35/I30 interchange in Dallas, and you're absolutely right about the surrounding area being devalued by the interchange itself. The sheer noise from all those lanes makes running on adjacent bridges extremely loud, and the whole area is basically a development desert as a result. The trinity levee trails could be a nice urban amenity if there were any decent connections for pedestrians downtown, but having to cross massive stroads or walk under a bunch of underpasses makes it a nonstarter mostly.
Chicago’s Jane Byrne interchange is one of the worst in the country. It was actually meant to be the site of the Civic Center designed by Daniel Burnham but never got built sadly
I was thinking it was actually one of the best! It used to be called "the circle" correct? The interchange is small and tight, and was recently rebuilt and improved.
Watching this makes me happy that, although my city commits the sin of having an urban freeway, there just the one, and no system interchanges to take up massive amounts of space. What a nightmare... it's bad enough that sprawl could eventually reach these structures that should be built far from people, but actually designing a city infrastructure around them is downright criminal. Edit: built over minority areas, because of course
counterpoint: as often as not, it is the city being built around the highway - which grows into a freeway. and if the road department tries to reroute the freeway around the city - the city builders build more city around the freeway.
@@Laszlo429 How is this hate? I'm just doing a victory lap. Feels damn good! Popular Vote means the MAJORITY of America wanted this, didnt need the Electoral College at all. Maybe your ideology is wrong? Maybe you arnt the "good guys"? Maybe you're on the wrong side of history? That ever occur while you're on reddit?
I dream of the twin cities highways being turned into commuter rail corridors and capped and then that interchange south of downtown MPLS could be a great transit hub
Did you fill out the survey? Non-locals: There's a survey available to the public that covers choices for making I-94 into something more useful than an overcrowded highway in a ditch.
I've been meaning to mess around in a sim making some regional rail routes in the area. So far my ideas have been Cities-St. Cloud on the modern-day Monticello Sub., and Cities-Duluth via the old Northern Pacific line. I should really sit down and do this
So I live in Downtown Houston and work at the University of Houston-Downtown. You actually cycle through our campus in your b-roll in your footage here. Our campus is split in half by I-10, and I walk underneath I-10 every day in-between classes. I try to wear a mask, and I have an air-purifier in my office, but I do still feel terrified about the amount of carcinogens and micro-debris I breathe in on a daily basis.
Happy New Year! As usual, you've got me thinking... With this video, I'm finally starting to see what we've traded away for the car-as-only-solution-to-mobility... thing that we did. Your observation that public transit doesn't work on the weekends shows that even transit planners don't think transit is for real... This is an "aha! moment" for me because it exposes some of the unspoken (and stupid) assumptions of the system designers... And where there's one, there will be others! 🧐 I'm watching this video in tandem with the one that looks at transit access to airports -- They mostly don't run on the weekends!!! (What the cuss?!) For my "aha!" I'm seeing that if you really wanted to make public transport primary, you'd have to start with where people begin and end in every normal day... (and a majority of their exception days too.) We simply don't have a metaphor for effective roads... Do we? Rivers? Those existed before cities, and usually ended up as sewers, as well as transport. Yeah you want to live close to the sewer, BUT NOT TOO CLOSE! (See Paris Olympics again!) So if we're using motors or engines to replace the "flow" in the river or the wind over the ocean... What's a good metaphor for mass transit? Blood flow has to carry oxygen to every cell in the body... Blood vessels get down to capillaries, then converge again for the return loop... There's a math to their branching, it seems...? But I'm not seeing blood flow as any approximation of my commute to work, carpool, groceries, grandma's house, and the dentist office... What do you guys use for thought process in the trade, Ray? ...I think we're done using World War II logistics as our driver for interstate highways... What's going to get us out of this cavalry warfare mentality?
@@CityNerd At this point, I m pretty convinced we do NOT return to office... Arguably we need to get better at unforced social stuff. For example, most of my life, I've done my best to create social networks out of the forced random groups at college and work (or dance lessons, or...) literal random strangers in that moment before the first intro at the conference table. Slack and Zoom work differently but they can provide that forced social network effect...🤔
I live in San Francisco. There's nothing like a 6.9 EARTHQUKE, to wake the powers-that-be to "re-think" these horrendous structures. The LOMA PRIETA quake, in October of '89 was refreshingly welcome ... if only because -- IN RETROSPECT -- that it resulted in the removal of an outrageous multi-level structure, that took more than its share of property, in a relatively small city. We STILL have to use some multi-level roadways. We live at the tip of a peninsula, and that geography means that our only means of driving OUT of the city ... without bridges ... is to the south. Yes, we have approaches to the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, that must be elevated, for reasonable convenience, over a heavy "downtown." The Golden Gate Bridge doesn't doesn't lead through the downtown area, and its approaches are well, and proficiently designed to take us to the north of the city
This is your regular reminder that San Jose, CA has no rail connection to the airport or even a direct bus line from downtown as a place with its own MSA with a population of 2 million.
Which part? Uptown/West Village or Legacy Town Center? Those are highly regarded New Urban neighborhoods. Maybe you meant the longest light rail system in North America, the three regional rail networks, or the two streetcar lines? You could easily aspire to emulate far worse examples!
I can see Amtrak sacrificed to the car and plane gods which means the states will have to pick up the slack. So we're looking at intercity train service being reduced to the Northeast, the Chicago / Great Lakes area, and California. 😢 And forget high speed rail. ☹️
@@Demopans5990 say goodbye to the high speed rail dream. That’s probably delayed another decade for funding, and say goodbye to any zoning and regulation changes
Louisville, KY, would also be a great location to analyze (especially in comparison to Cincinnati.) The way my hometown destroyed their waterfront with interchanges is especially insulting when you know about the historical rail & tram system. So many beautiful old photos!
It looks like my area of Northern Virginia didn't make the cut, but the Springfield interchange (495/95) is truly awful. A huge amount of money was recently spent expanding the number of lanes going through it and making it easier to travel at speed. This interchange is immense.
Perhaps not close enough to downtown, but the 580/80/880 interchange just west of the 580/980 is so atrocious it has earned the nickname "the maze". A spectacular set of flyovers and merge lanes filtering commuters in several distinct directions through a tiny area.
Another dishonorable mention in my opinion: I-95/VA-195 in Richmond. It's huge, it separates the office part of downtown from the restaurant/entertainment district (aka Shockoe Bottom) and it basically only serves commuters who live in the southeast suburbs of Richmond.
Cincinnati mentioned!! That interchange used to be way worse but the city did some great stuff moving I-71 below grade and reconnecting the city grid to the riverbank. BridgeForward project will hopefully do the same to Queensbridge.
Excellent as always. I just got back from a trip to Japan and really enjoyed the transit systems in Tokyo and Osaka. The trains were calm, there were protective barriers to stop people from falling onto the track, and trains arrived every 2 minutes! If funds allow, you should consider a trip to either city to explore their transit systems. Be well :)
I'll never understand why they put a cancer center, children's hospital, and a regular hospital next to the 95/10 interchange in my local downtown. Ridiculous.
14:45 fun fact .One of the businesses that Caltrans allowed to operate underneath I-10 had a major fire which did structural damage to that interstate. Causing it to have to be temporarily shut down.
At 0:55, we see the I-75 I-375 interchange next to Ford Field in Detroit. This is an interesting case because MDOT plans to replace 375 with a surface-level boulevard. Construction should start soon. I hope the footprint of that interchange will end up smaller by the end of the project in a few years.
Was this Detroit freeway removal project funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law? The Inflation Reduction Act? What's the risk? Are the new congress and president likely to kill the funding for projects that will slow a few cars and add a few protected bike lane miles?
Houston actually has two downtowns, the other being uptown/galleria which sits on Loop 610 between the Katy and Southwest Frwys with 290 just to the north. During rush hour it turns into a massive parking lot. A trifecta of a mess if you may say surrounded by high rises and high density living.
cincinnati mentioned 😭 but parts of cincinnati are fr so beautiful it’s just such a shame that they demolished so many neighborhoods for that damn highway and we can’t have functional transit 😭
Ray, a lot of Trans people (myself included) and people from other groups targeted by Project 2025 are worried for our future, and for many of us, part of preparing for the worst is Relocating. Immigration is expensive, and so is living in California. Can you make a video about Cities in the US that are friendly to the LGBT community, affordable, and walkable?
I think Chicago is pretty good! It and the state have passed many protections for LGBTQ, relatively affordable and fairly easy to be car-free, depending on where you are
Quick note on Canada not having system interchanges near its city centers - we were spared because we just couldn't afford them. Every single city had plans to build highways right through the core, and many got dangerously close. You can see the where they were "supposed" to be in some cases because some sections were built before being canceled (Edmonton is a really good example of this). There was also a lot of opposition to them (just like in most American cities when these were being built), so that opposition combined with the eye watering cost. The impact is pretty significant. Calgary, a city of just 1.4 million people has a more dense urban core than almost every city in the United States. There are 85k-ish people in the 3km radius around the core. The only cities in the US I could find that beat that were New York, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, LA, and Miami. Calgary's metro area wouldn't even be top 50 in the United States. Technically, Seattle had more too - but its 90k, so I'm calling that a tie. It's even more crazy considering that Calgary developed mostly after WWII, and is often considered an example of sprawl and auto dependent planning.
Great video, also completely agree with i45/i-10. Texas is choosing to expand i-45 too unfortunately. It will only exacerbate the housing prices in the inner loop. Median $500k housing price in that zipcode is great when compared to the entire nation, but median houses in houston are ~300-350K
they're tearing down that interchange and rerouting i45 which currently bisects downtown from the western neighborhoods along the east side next to the eastern bisecting highway i69. It sucks they keep expanding highways but it does mean the west side will be freed.
We need to talk about portland. In oregon, we have "interchanges". Whoever designed them really didn't know what they were doing. It's a mess, and it's hard to get around if you don't have navigation. I'm surprised we didn't make your top ten.
I'd like to offer a dishonorable mention to Hartford CT, not as bad as the ones on this list but it's still got freeways slicing the city in very sad ways.
relieved to see portland not on this list, but also curious how you think it stacks up. not the biggest hassle, but trying to navigate around 405 on the west side and 84 on the east can definitely turn into a bit of a headache
10:20 Me playing Cities Skylines, building my towns like these examples and wondering how my friends (who build highways through the urban core) end up with unsolveable traffic problems.
“Build more trains.” San Jose kind of lacks ways to get _to_ the trains. The light rail was designed to fail-slow, infrequent, and never where you want it-and there's no practical access to the airport by transit (87, one of the highways you mention, is the intended access to the airport, as well as a bypass [?-given that it runs through the middle] for the city centre). I mean, if we actually replaced the highways with trains, and put back the grid of trams that I understand once existed, we might get somewhere. But right now we're a big city where you need a car just to get a loaf of bread or a coffee and … it sucks. Not to mention that you can't walk to anywhere because even if there isn't a highway in the way you can bet that there's a fence. They've put trails along the sides of what's left of the rivers-very nice!-but do they provide pedestrian access to those trails? No they don't. In most places it's systematically blocked. There are small signs of improvement all around, but not of anyone going, you know what? Let's get this fixed.
I used to live in a second story apartment (basically at freeway level) in Oakland, surrounded by 580 and 24 on 3 sides. The amount of car soot that built up over a week was incredible. The Children's hospital is right next to that 580-980 exchange and I have to say, people from all over northern CA bring children there for specialists and appreciate the convenience of it being right off the freeway.
The reason there's fewer people around the Jane Byrne in Chicago is because very few people live downtown. It's the financial district. Same reason Brooklyn is more densely populated than Manhattan.
I know this is off-topic for the video, but I was wondering if you would ever consider doing a video about incremental approaches to 'reclaiming' car infrastructure for public transit/pedestrian uses? Maybe with a specific case study of how it could be done for a given segment of road? The "Tactical Urbanism" folks and the "Strong Towns" folks advocate this approach, figuring out the minimum disruption to existing use possible to demonstrate the potential efficacy of alternative uses, then gradually implementing permanent solutions. I think it's overall a great idea in that it not only makes road reclamation initiatives more palatable to the people who don't already agree with us about this stuff, but it also means we can experiment and determine the biggest wins with very little risk. I was thinking about this as I was walking through a beautiful park in my city that butts right up against a major six-lane road, on the other side of which are several dense, walkable neighborhoods with an attractive mix of buildings from various time periods, and it struck me how nice it would be if that road passed underground, for example, so that the park could connect directly to the neighborhoods instead of only being accessible to them via pedestrian overpasses spaced nearly 3/4 of a mile apart, and would it be possible to convince the motorist population of the city to permit it if the change to a tunnel were gradual? I think someone with your practical experience could do a very interesting analysis of this kind of work, and in the process teach other urbanists how to examine similar possibilities in their own cities/towns.
This won't work. Incremental change doesn't happen. You keep pushing a change for as long as it takes until not enough people notice you're doing it and you get it done because as soon as the change happens, it's nearly impossible to undo because people will just say "what's done is done" or "that's just the way it is now," then all you have to do is wait for them to whine themselves out and get used to it so much they start to consider it normal. This is always how change happens. It may look incremental over a length of time, but any one point of it is sudden. Someone forces something to happen, usually by way of physical or monetary force, deception, or technicality, and then it becomes entrenched, only able to be changed by another such effort in the future. That's how roadways were made, and it's the only way they'll be unmade.
I was expecting the Jane Byrne Circle Interchange to make the list, but I was initially surprised that less people lived near it than Minneapolis (though it makes sense because it’s mostly office and commercial around it)
Speaking as a Dallas-hater, who keeps being forced to move back there for nonsense work reasons over and over, CityNerd's hatred of Dallas is lukewarm at best. He probably doesn't think about Dallas at all.
@crowmob-yo6ry DART is surprisingly good, at least for the neighborhoods it covers. Love walking off the red line at Tyler Vernon right into Oak Cliff Brewing.
You should take a look at Madison, WI which has several rail lines used only by freight, which could've been used by Amtrak or even local commuter rail for its massive public university and thriving tech worker community. Instead, Madison has things like left lane exits on I-90, and sadly, incredibly expensive bus rapid transit (which is not rapid at all) with its electric engines prone to failure in cold weather. BRT also creates endless frustration and confusion with drivers and the red boxes and triangles the city has painted on various portions of streets, along with lots of rules to follow which no driver actually understands.
As a Twin Cities resident I was a bit surprised that the I94 I35W interchange was so high up the blast radius population list (number 9 overall rank 4:46 in video). One of the main reasons it still isn’t one of the most “visually appalling” is that not all direction changes are supported. Southbound I35W doesn’t connect to eastbound I94, and westbound I94 does not connect to northbound 35W (from Wikipedia, though I also remember dealing with it when I first moved to the metro). So a tradeoff against at least some flyover ramps was made. That being said, the core cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul are undeniably on the high freeway burdened side of cities. Which is one of the big and fair reasons that Minneapolis didn’t do better than a D on the main tier list. I’ve lived in Los Angeles and Baltimore which mostly earned their E grades, but are each better in some noticeable areas (just Baltimore on this subject though, lol).
Another important aspect is the shear cost of “improving” the interchanges in these areas. The Cincinnati interchange + bridge is being rebuilt at an estimated cost of $3.6 billion and then there’s the whole $13 billion Houston highway expansion which while not all directly due to that interchange, it’s all connected to each other. The fact we’re spending enough money to build multiple light rail lines (or a pretty good BRT system) at each interchange to just maintain these harmful and dreadful interchanges is insane.
How is freeway construction getting that expensive? ADOT’s Broadway Curve project, which is the largest project in the agency’s history, by their own words. By their estimates, the total construction cost of that project is $832 million, and it’s still under construction. The project involves a complete overhaul of I-10 between the I-17 split and the I-10/SR-202 interchange in Chandler, which is a 10-mile stretch. They’re adding one general purpose lane in each direction throughout the entire zone, and more in the busiest stretches. The area between the Split and US-60 will have an extra HOV lane as well. The area between 40th Street and Baseline Road will also have “collector-distributor roads,” which are 2- or 3-lane one-way freeway stretches on each side that will handle the traffic getting on and off at local exits. Multiple interchanges have also received partial or complete redesigns (the 40th Street interchange being transformed from a diamond/ParClo hybrid to a normal diamond, and the 48th Street/SR-143/Broadway Road complex being changed into more of an actual system interchange).
In Cincinnati the group Bridge Foward is trying to influence the design of the new bridge approach to reconnect the adjacent Queensgate neighborhood to downtown. I would love to hear Ray's thoughts on their proposal.
@@grahamturner2640 same reason transit is expensive in the US, construction as a whole is expensive. But more specifically, on interchanges often the big expense is bridges/overpasses. The Cincinnati project is building an insane number of bridges/overpasses in a compact area (meaning some overpasses are very high) which leads to the high cost. The compact area likely also increases the mitigation during construction which also increases costs. On the other hand, the Broadway Curve project is really only building a handful of bridges while the rest is “just” a widening project on mostly existing ROW. Which is why calling the Broadway Curve project a “complete overhaul” is a little misleading on the cost side as only 1 relatively standard interchange is being substantially overhauled.
@@PaulFisher yep, but it also speaks a lot about priorities that we expect transit improvements to be funded by ballot measures whereas the highway interchange can be funded by general funding. Columbus just passed a much less ambitious funding measure so hopefully that success can spread to Cincinnati but Metromoves failing set Cincinnati back a good 3-4 decades at this point.
One downtown interchange in the US which makes it an engineering marvel is the one in Dallas. You know, the Dallas Mixmaster which was upgraded as part of the Horseshoe Project. It was bad before the upgrades because of congestion and in the 2010s, it was upgraded very well. Another downtown interchange that got upgraded was the Jane Bryne Interchange in Chicago.
Yeah, would be cool to see a list of the top movies where the city feels like a character. Got to be some great NYC, SF, or LA movies that just have to be there because the story doesn’t make sense if the movie is set somewhere else.
My city did something very interesting. They built this huge cloverleaf interchange about 30 years ago and as the city grew, they built a network of small streets and roads that weave through the interchange (all at ground level) and built a small market into it. The place now has a metro interchange next to it and it really challenges the idea of "highway interchanges are hostile to people."
I'm surprised Milwaukee didn't make the cut with the I-94/I-43 monstrosity near downtown, though that one converges near a lot of more or less industrial uses.
In Queens, NYC is the GCP & I-495 interchange along with a few others around Flushing Meadows Park that have around 150,000 people living in a 3km radius around them. Zillow home prices in Queens are over $700,000.
A less existential thought in these trying times… every time I fly into O’Hare, I’m pretty shocked how painful it is to find the Blue Line into the city. Which is a shame, as it should be a no brainer to take as it’s almost identical in travel time to ride share, at like… a tenth of the cost (not to mention the emissions). The signage is really quite obscure until you’re already inside of the pedestrian tunnel that leads to the platform. Especially disappointing is the lack of signage on the airport tram platforms, it’s really not clear which of the terminals have access to the city train. Feels like a very easily solvable problem - better signage and guidance would go a long way!
mass transit is sustainable but you have to drown the streets in bus rapid transit. the last thing anyone wants is to have to plan their day around waiting 30 minutes for a bus transfer. bigger roads and interchanges are the next best alternative. either way, it's great for the economy
Thank you for including Orlando on this list. I live just west of Orlando and the endless car-centric infrastructure, combined with the massive population growth, then add tens of millions of tourists visiting every year, has reached its breaking point. 15 years ago we basically never had any traffic but its is INSANE now, the whole region comes to a complete standstill between 3-6PM every day. We have spent billions on road projects and re-doing I4, adding toll lanes, massive stroads, etc...the traffic still just keeps getting worse. We have become just like LA and Atlanta where you have to plan your life around it.
OK, so I didn't actually think through how it would feel to schedule a video for release the morning after election day in the US. If you were on Nebula you could've watched it yesterday, I guess...not sure that really helps! But you should sign up for a membership anyway, just in case this platform goes the way of Twitter. I haven't really framed it this way before, but being on Nebula is a bit of a diversification/risk management strategy for me, so really, the more people who watch me over there, the better. Link: go.nebula.tv/citynerd
Ray, keep up the good work. This video was a nice reprieve today after the onslaught of news the past 24 hours.
@@rapidmarkets3051There was no censorship. Platforms have the right to regulate their own content as they see fit. Don't be upset you identify with toxic and unpopular opinions.
There is one political side that made transportation and urban planning a partisan issue and that is the side that will be in the White House for upcoming term.
Did you really just turn the election into an ad for Nebula
Never thought of using Nebula as risk management before. That is actually a good idea.
I think I like the bit of normalcy.
CityNerd putting San Diego on a list: 🤩
The list is not good and you live within the blast radius of the interchange: 😰
lol I also grew up in that SD blast radius. Not the SD interchange I thought would make the list. Likely due to it being adjacent to downtown.
I haven't watched this yet (just liking for now since CityNerd is great) and decided to troll the comments and now after reading yours I look forward to being reminded how heinous the downtown SD interchange was/is. 😅
that highway blasting through balboa park is such a tragedy. george marsten, the philanthropist who initially developed the land and later helped a committee create the park wanted to beautify the area and create an excellent common space- then, at the end of his life, he had to know a huge ass freeway was going to be laid right through it, disrupting views and walkways and creating noise pollution like nothing else in the area could.
Good zoo access tho
@@CityNerd 🎵 Always Look on the Bright Side of Life 🎵
ray i need doomer content rn
Yea. I need to hear about how fucked we are and how dire things are
Same
@@jonathandb91 We're not. They aren't. Happy now?
Eeeh things are already kind of dumpy. The Donald's just gonna add some nice flare to that.
TRUMP WON THE POPULAR VOTE TOO!!! hahaha
I mean obviously it's highly illogical to add a highway that cuts your urban core in half designed for the needs of 80% of vehicles who are just passing through and the 20% of people who are just getting on the freeway for one exit because of all of the detours required to take surface streets to their destination now that there is a highway in the way. But once a city has started to provide this luxury for everyone who passes through and pays taxes elsewhere they seem endlessly committed to solving other people's problems and catering to their extremely expensive preferences and wishes. It's like cutting your house in half so that your neighbors can all take a short-cut though your property and then having to wait for traffic before you can cross over and use the bathroom.
This is the exact same thing as people living outside NYC complaining and lobbying to get congestion pricing delayed.
Lovely metaphor.
You're assuming that the city has the power to decide where the roads go. That's usually not true, the state govt decides where roads go. And in many states, the state govt is hostile to the people of the largest city in the state, because the state govt is biased toward rural interests, and they want to disrupt life in the city so that the rural regions have more power. The people of the city aren't cutting their house in half to please their neighbors, their neighbors are saying "you have no choice but to let us use your house as a pathway to get where we want to go."
@@perfectallycromulent some cities (usually the more affluent) do have the power to stop state siting of roads that cut their communities up. South Pasadena stopped a freeway for decades and ultimately the state backed down. San Francisco not only opposed an already built freeway, they forced the state to tear it down.
The analogy is a good one; but it’s usually the poor communities that get their houses cut in half so that the neighbors can use the shortcuts.
It's like the most vicious example of sunk cost fallacy
Throwing children’s hospitals and children’s museums right next to a noisy, polluting waste of space is American as it gets
I don't dwell on it but there's plenty of research out there on the differing health outcomes of people who live right next to a freeway and those who don't
It has big vibes of "I tore down a cancer research center.... to build an Applebee's"
And here I (as a European) was, thinking it was putting discount gun stores next to schools...
(Sorry)
That means the children hospital is connected to the entire area quickly
@@bjornnilsson1827 Trust me, I know Bjorn Borg, Bjorn Borg, In Texas, where I live, the discount gun stores are CONNECTED to the schools! Crazy.
Worth noting that the I-95/US 6 interchange in Providence was illegally built because it's built on top of a Narragansett tribe burial ground and it's illegal to build on top of tribal burial grounds in Rhode Island. They also just added 2 new lanes to the interchange. Truly cursed stuff!
lmao. this guy still things the pieces of paper we call laws matter to the men with guns.
O wonder traffic on I 95 in Providence is such a shitshow
@@tann_manhow enlightened and civilised.
@@TAP7a The people with money don't care what a TH-cam comment says about them.
Yeah, the expansion is visible in the Google Earth aerials I grabbed! Just insane stuff
Let's not forget that one of the most powerful arguments against urban freeways and interchanges is the economic double-whammy: Not only are these rights of way forever removed from the property tax rolls (and a great deal of adjacent property is devalued), but the rights of way are an endless money vacuum, sucking down civic treasure year after year after year with no end in sight.
That largely depends on how the tax structure where you live works.
I live in metro Phoenix, arguably a poster-child for anti-mass-transit with two interstates, one federal highway as a freeway, three 'loop' freeways, and a smattering of other freeways. I was honestly surprised that Phoenix didn't make the cut, since *_two_* I-10/I-17 interchanges and an I-10/AZ-202/AZ-51 interchange surround downtown Phoenix, and just about every major city within the metro area is in proximity to at least one interchange.
Our freeways are maintained at the state level. State taxes rather than city taxes pay for them. Additionally particularly along the federal freeways, lots and lots of industrial and commercial business occurs and happens as a direct result of the existence of those freeways. Contrast the growth of greater Phoenix to Greater Tucson and the size and vibrancy of Phoenix and surrounding cities is a direct result of the ease of transportation around here. Tucson shows us what happens when there aren't freeways and corresponding interchanges.
This isn't to say that I dislike Tucson, but it's a much harder city to get around quickly, even outside of commuting hours.
@@TWX1138 The loss of taxable property is universal in the USA. Phoenix or another valley city loses that local tax revenue every year forever and ever and ever. You also pay more state income tax and/or state gas tax to maintain the state highways AND the Interstates. You pay more FIT and/or federal gas tax to fund the federal matching share for the Interstates and various federal grants allocated to state roads. ALL of that "could be" allocated to transit and local street improvements instead.
I'll argue your "anti mass transit" point. Valley Metro built and aggressively extended their starter line. It's still being extended. The junctions/turnouts for two (if I observed and counted correctly while I was there in October) new lines and one (or two) downtown loops have already been built downtown and appear to be nearly ready for extension. The Tempe streetcar is well-utilized. Metrocenter Mall is being redeveloped as a TOD. A shit-ton (pardon the highly technical jargon) of housing is erupting from the ground along both rail lines. A new Central Station is coming soon(ish). PHX seems determined to diversify their transportation infrastructure. In the 22 years since my previous visit, they have dramatically changed the fabric of a significant swath of the city!
Actually, the Orlando one with I-4/408 used to be A LOT worse. Its previous configuration WRAPPED AROUND a whole housing development. You should look at historic aerial images of the area before 2016, it was insane.
I was about to point this out too. The new interchange is massive, yes, but it's also more space efficient than the previous one that was there since the 70s. The housing complex it used to wrap around is a bit better connected now and they have more green space, and heavy air pollution is just coming from two sides now instead of all 4 sides. It's better for the residents and people using the interchange, it was a nightmare to use previously. The I-4 Ultimate project also added some new street connections that weren't there before.
Now the city of Orlando and FDOT have to fulfill the promises of building a public park under the elevated sections downtown. It's objectively worse right now but can be so much better.
@@cyclicmusings2661 not to mention they REMOVED a park under I-4 when they rebuilt it 💀
@@GamingBren yeah, Beaver Geography made a video abt that
@@cyclicmusings2661 I find those older 70s interchanges fascinating because it was during a time when flyover ramps didn’t exist so all interchanges had to be sprawling and only single-level. Much like Golden Glades.
Fdot and Cfx did a great job rebuilding the I-4/408 interchange, Expressways get expanded for a reason to accommodate high traffic demand
For what it is worth, your channel is one of the first places I turned to when the election started to go sideways. Knowing that there are other options out there where people might be able to escape (at least some of) what is coming is a small ray of hope in a very dark time. Thanks for all of your efforts in bringing this information together for everyone. Without people like you I wouldn't even know where to start.
Our doors are open here in Minneapolis-Saint Paul.
Ha, he's our Ray of hope.
@@tashayar75 how Trans friendly are the twin cities?
TRUMP WON THE POPULAR VOTE TOO!!! hahaha Cope and Seethe
TRUMP WON!
I will never forget being in Denver, maybe it was on Federal?? Just needed to cross the street but no crosswalks with the street feeding into the freeway. There was a sign “honoring” someone who had obviously been killed at that location with the closest signal crosswalk three blocks out of my way. A better honor would have been to add a signal crosswalk or even overpass. Being a pedestrian in a major city should have some support
Being a pedestrian in any city should be a priority. Cities are for people, not their vehicles.
I was staying in a hotel once. There was a supermarket and other shops on the other side of the stroad.
I wanted to walk to the supermarket because it's so close. What a naive fool I was.
I couldn't. There was no way for pedestrians to get to the other side for as far as I can see in both directions. So I had to drive. I had to fucking cross the stroad in my car just to get to the other side.
Fucking insane. People who prefer this are screwed up.
Yeah... some of that stuff on the west side is pretty egregious. I'm moving to Denver soon, but it's not a utopia by a long shot.
I was close to including Denver in this, teh Colfax interchange is wild but isn't really a "system" interchange
@@CityNerd Yes it was hard to decipher a "system". Confusion for peds and sidewalk in poor repair
I get that this is a U.S. focused video, but honorable mention to Dubai’s massive interchange of Sheikh Zayed Rd & Finance Center Rd. Absolutely massive roads (both are about 14 lanes wide each). Within 3km is likely over 100 skyscrapers, including some of the most valuable square footage in the world in the Burj Dubai. At least the metro stations serve as pedestrian bridges making it slightly more feasible to cross east to west.
Thank the US for the terrible urban design, and the Arab states for importing the terrible urban design.
The skyscrapers built up around the highway.
They wouldn't be there without it.
Urbanism absolutely is politics. Thanks for pointing this out. With this new administration, what’s going to happen to rail infrastructure and the housing crisis?
I'd like to be wrong, but I strongly suspect that the housing crisis will get much worse as Trump and Co. work to weaken or eliminate the regulations on the predator class.
It's likely going to crumble and get worse.
Yes it is. Always was
Thanks for recognizing Canadian superiority here.
CityNerd has one or two videos about Trump's plans. It's bad.
Regarding your recent Caltrain video I am happy to inform you that Measure T in San Mateo easily passed. It will allow taller and more dense housing close to the three Caltrain stations and downtown.
Hopefully neither the Republicans in Congress nor the Trump White House will throw a spanner 🔧 in the works. 🤞🙏
Faaaaaaantastic
@@EdwardM-t8p Local transit is and should be largely funded by local governments. And you are much more likely to be able to actually build things of any kind with a Republican administration cutting permitting regs.
Yes! One small measure of hope. I lived in the Ryan Towers apts until I was priced out when it gentrified and it is an example of the kind of high rises could be built again. San Mateo could be the ideal small city if it grows upward in the downtown area.
None of that housing will be affordable at all, thanks to Prop 33 failing.
I’d like to see you do a video on how efforts at urbanism, sustainability, and public transport would continue now that Trump is elected POTUS.
Honestly? Probably won't change much, if at all. It's been almost entirely a grass roots movement in the US, and funded almost exclusively by local municipalities. It just means that federal funds won't be allocated as much for the larger public transit infrastructure projects, but there wasn't exactly a large cash flow happening there anyways so its not exactly a giant loss for anything other than high speed rail projects.
@@orthrus4490Your hope is admirable. No more pedestrian grants to cities, no more Amtrak grants anywhere, etc etc. Some good ballot measures last night supporting transit but the urbanist movement is going to be set back a decade.
It wouldn't make an iota of difference because Harris's campaign was largely funded by corporate donors who are diametrically opposed to progressive issues. Urbanism, sustainability, and public transportation were jettisoned (and clearly stated as such) by the current administration in favor of corporate/industry friendly policies.
he already made one semi adjacent to your request; ' and you thought project 2025 was bad'
@@orthrus4490 couldn't be more wrong considering they won the house and the senate
I remember when the Interstate system was being built. And the trade-off lots of towns had to make when considering whether to let the Interstate come through their towns or bypass it. If it came through, you gave up a lot of valuable land to transportation and lost a lot of your city fabric but your town survived. If you insisted on it bypassing your town, you ran the risk of all business bypassing you as well and your town might die. In some cases I can recall towns that were bypassed, abandoning their original locations and moving out to the interchange to recapture their vitality.
In my hometown of Halifax, for 50 years there was a highway interchange right next to downtown that connected to no highways - protests stopped the project before it was built beyond the interchange (but not before poor and minority neighbourhoods were demolished for it), so instead the overbuilt behemoth was just connected to some medium-sized regular roads that could have been handled by a decent roundabout. Thankfully its finally in the process of being torn down today and the land redeveloped for useful purposes.
Good work to your predecessors blocking the highways!
We've got some ugly interchange spaghetti in Edmonton southwest of downtown, across the river, the first stage of what was to be an huge three-level stack where the Muttart Conservatory is now. I'm glad the METS freeway plan didn't go any further than it did.
Don't forget the Africville bypass they plowed right through the historic freed slave homes by the bridge named after the godfather of indian residential schools. Truly a 10/10 for concentrating their worst ideas to the far corner of the downtown core, haha
19:51 But then how could I feed you premium playtime and give you evidence of high watch through for ad reads to make you a few bucks more?
Not surprised at all by Columbus. When you have ZERO public transportation, you have to build giant highway infrastructures.
Well you could still build lots of bike paths probably :-)
@@Jacksparrow4986 They're actually doing a lot more bike lanes on the main roads, and we have a pretty good bike path network. It's just geared more towards recreation than getting from point A to point B.
Columbus is realizing its mistakes and trying to start moving towards bike-ability and a bit of public transport
Um, the COTA bus system does exist. For awhile, it was improving, but routes and length of service hours were affected by the pandemic.
The sad thing is Columbus has a walkable downtown and plenty of amenities to the north within easy reach...but once you hit the highway/concrete moat to the south, it's like a wall. Nobody crosses it, totally hateful to be outside of a car. German Village could be so much more vibrant if it were actually connected to downtown with foot traffic like the Short North is.
Truly a shameful history of people outside of cities, via state DOTs, inflicting these monstrosities on the cities themselves despite whatever the people living there might have wanted at the time. And then talking about how noisy, dirty, and undesirable the cities are!
That's LOLworthy.
As a Minneapolis resident, the only surprise here is that we weren’t higher up on this list! Look at those monstrosities 🤢
Loring Park is a wonderful area, but then there's the mess of that interchange plus the grotesquely overbuilt section of Hennepin Ave.
@@HessianHunterI agree. This is what makes the sculpture garden suck!!
And St. Paul is so much worse.
Right! The list of bad things about the Twin Cities is extremely short but this is on mine. These interchanges basically create a moat around downtown.
I hope the growing support of removing I-94 between the two downtowns doesn't falter. It would be great to reclaim that very valuable land and turn it into a narrower boulevard lined with new development. It would also allow Highway 280 to end at Territorial Road, providing 20+ acres of land to develop in the Westgate area.
Just a few days ago, for Halloween, a french channel did a scary video, starring scary violins musical background, a deep slow otherworldly voice-over, some sudden change of camera/sound, and google street-views of big American cities for a post zombies apocalyptic scenery (contrasting with same views of french downtowns, full of lively people )
Send it
Link the vid.
th-cam.com/video/FhQzLsRS_44/w-d-xo.htmlsi=sMDDU-d6CaVU5p7y
I am learning French and used this for practice 😅
I grew up in San Jose, and now live in Vancouver, BC. My quality of life has improved 10 fold!!!
Here in Denver there's a plan to remove a massive cloverleaf interchange between two major downtown stroads and replace it with a normal intersection. I really hope this happens, and another funny thing about it is that the interchange is right next to the new CDOT Headquarters.
As with the recent election news, it is now even more imperative to keep up the urbanist fight. Some good news is that here in Colorado, Ballot Issue 7A, which will give more funding (through over collected taxes) to public transit passed in a landslide. Good day for Colorado, not so good for the nation as a whole.
can't missed them, very bright orange lol
The Children's Hospital was there before the interchange build-out. If it makes you feel any better, the hospital has displaced numerous homes and businesses in the area during the last fifteen years or so ...
I think there are also lots of cities that wouldn’t make this list BECAUSE of a terrible interchange. For example, I think of Hartford, CT which has an interchange next to downtown and a highway along its waterfront. Pre-highways, Hartford was a bustling city, so much so that Mark Twain said of Hartford, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief.” It would be a depressing list, but what about the smaller cities like Hartford that got hit worst by the interstate system?
I came here to bring up my home city of Hartford. I-84/I-91 destroyed that whole side of the city.
@@THEJimCase Pretty sure the de-industrialization of the northeast did way, way more to destroy Hartford than any road.
@@phytonso9877 I wouldn't agree with that.
@@phytonso9877 Yeah, that and local and state tax policy.
@@kevinwoolley7960 While tax policies can affect industrialization, I think the bigger culprits are going to be technical, and more generally, the societal changes that technology wrought. The rise of containerization and growth of trucking made shipping much cheaper and easier, which eliminated benefits of the old rail-centric industry of the northeast. When tooling or factories needed re-investment, it made more sense to move the industry entirely, whether domestically to the central US or offshore to Japan and then China.
Blaming decisions made by local officials for broad trends that cause regions to rise and fall is easy because that's who we can vote for, but often those trends are global in nature, and all politicians or bureaucrats can do is steer the boat into the wind and hope to ride out the storm. As to how well those officials did in Hartford's case, you're going to need someone who knows a lot more local history than I.
Most of the lanes you see in urban freeways are ONLY designed for rush hour traffic. Outside of that, they are mostly under-utilized and a huge waste of concrete. But even during rush hour, downtown freeways simply don't work. The reason is forced merges (or worse suicide merges) means dangerous driving conditions or extremely slow traffic. There is a solution that is space efficient and moves traffic well...and that is one-way roads with synced lights. Madison Wisconsin has an example of this (University Ave through the isthmus) and it works incredibly well.
Also looking at usage patterns, these highways should be Big Digged. Bury the through traffic, and turn local traffic into an interstate business road
@@Demopans5990 the only issues with that are cost and security concerns. The Big Dig was legendarily expensive. Also, you have the hazardous materials question, since trucks carrying those usually aren’t allowed through tunnels, for safety reasons.
@@grahamturner2640 Why are trucks filled with hazardous materials driving through the downtown of a city?
@@agilemind6241 interstate highways are supposed to be able to carry them for defense and economic reasons.
@@grahamturner2640 the point is that they can go around cities
Atlanta’s downtown connector never achieves 60mph through downtown because even at 18 lanes or something atrocious like that, traffic is so bad speeds are virtually always
Only seen it drivable at speed during Covid or dead-of-night on a holiday weekend.
Otherwise, yeah - spot on with the slow-as-molasses observation.
I've hit 60 through there several times, albeit around 2-3 AM.
It's a tale of two highways.
During rush hour, you're lucky to hit 25.
Outside of rush hour, driving the speed limit is liable to get you run over.
It used to be that you could pass through Atlanta (and Chicago) in the middle of the night to avoid a lot of traffic. That's not necessarily true anymore.
Calling Chili's Tex-Mex is a criminal offense
Regards, Corpus Christi
T'was a joke!
I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle and my family tries to visit, staying in South Lake Union. They seem like they're next door, only a couple miles apart, but SLU is an absolute hellhole of stroads with poorly-implemented only semi-exclusive bus lanes and one-way streets one has to cross their fingers navigating just to get to one of only a few overpasses of I-5 which are also single-lane on-ramps backed up for blocks. It takes requires 20 minutes and 20 lords prayers to get from SLU to Cap Hill. It's utterly vile.
Be thankful they capped even part of I-5. It also massively devalues the apartments misfortunate enough to face the car gutter.
That I-87/I-280 in San Jose is pretty bad and worse at high peak traffic times. I try to avoid this interchange at all costs
Amazing that Interstate 87 is somehow in both New York and California! (Video's mistake to mislabel the road, not yours.)
@@Zalis116 and don't forget North Carolina!
@@papilgee4evaeva Ah right, forgot that was one of the new ones that NC's been adding. Though I don't know why they didn't label it something like I-32 instead, considering it mainly goes east-west.
I drive that stretch all the time. I know exactly which lane I need to be in and when to signal, and still I sometimes get crowded out of the 87 exit northbound and have to take Race Street/Southwest Expy which is tricky. Frankly the 280 - 880 interchange, even after a big rebuild which addressed some problems, is worse than 280 - 87. It's a lower density area, though, since it's not in downtown.
Id like to add some context to the Dallas interchange because most people dont realize some things about it.
1. While yes it uses a lot of land, large chunks of that land are unsuitable for development because its on the banks of the trinity river, which is a floodplain.
2. The trinity river also doesnt smell great due to several reasons (mainly runoff and some problems with dead foliage during the dry season) so the land around it is always going to be less valuable. Every once in a while trininty river smells gives off this aweful rotting smell, and while it isnt constant it happens pretty often which is going to keep the land value around it low regardless of the highway interchange.
3. Unlike most of the interchanges on this list, this one was designed to wrap around downtown rather than cut through it, and it does so on the edges where the downtown couldnt expand anyways due to geographic (trinity river) reasons.
For the most part, these interchanges aren't build on top of prime real estate - they were built on land that happened to get more valuable after the interchange was built.
There are some exceptions though like Kansas City and Cincy
Glad someone mentioned it. While it might not be as gargantuan, the Woodall Rogers/75 interchange is probably the actual worst offender in Dallas.
@Stripbolt Forget the interchange, Rodgers existence at all is the biggest travesty.
On a side note, is it just me or does he hate DFW with some kind of prejudice? Like, we're not perfect, but he defended houston and then in the same video said that the Dallas rail network wasn't extensive. Like, as far as Texas cities go DFW probably has the most urbanism roots and is making substantial progress. Well, was making substantial progress. Prop S just passed so there's no telling how bad that'll get. NIMBYs are bout to have a field day in Dallas😮💨
The liquor store mentioned was a filming location for RoboCop. 😂
@@orthrus4490 Tbh, as someone who grew up in Dallas but moved to more urbanist pastures a long time ago, I don't think he gives it a disproportional amount of hate. His defense of Houston definitely bothers me more, lol.
It does surprise me that more people don't talk about how extensive DART has become. And when I was back in town this year I really liked all the new development I saw, especially around Bishop Arts and Lower Greenville. Hopefully someday soon the political will materializes to redevelop more neighborhoods across the Metroplex in that style.
Brit here, love the channel.
Our motorways in the UK are quite bad but most of these interchanges are found on the fringes of cities and not right next to the nice walkable downtown cores. Probably the most infamous candidate that stands out as being the most American looking monstrosity is what is officially called the Gravelly Hill Interchange in Birmingham, but everyone calls it Spaghetti Junction, the confluence of the M6 motorway and A38 dual carriageway➡️motorway. It covers 30 acres, serves 18 routes and includes 2.5 mi of slip roads, but only 0.6 mi of the M6 itself. Across five different levels, it has 559 concrete columns, reaching up to 80 ft high looming over several railway lines and historic canals.
Every time I feel like having my soul crushed, Google Earth conveniently has imagery for Houston going back to the 40s and 50s and the difference between then and now for both the I-45/10 and I-69/10 interchanges and what they used to be is so stark.
P.S. Love that mug.
Where did you get it? I find myself immediately wanting one!
Damn, and I thought Glasgow was bad for having motorways carved through it.
Thanks for mentioning Vancouver. As you probably know a freeway was proposed in the late 60's that would've cut right through downtown and also would destroy Chinatown and Strathcona, the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver. The plan was meant to not only provide a freeway, to bascially nowhere, but also get rid of 'blight', which was the craze of the day. Fortunately grassroots movements by people in those hoods were able to stop it before too much damage was done, in the early 70's.
Biggest mistake Vancouver ever made was cancelling the freeways. One day they will be built at much higher cost and disruption.
San Jose is finally #1 at something
I recall reading that Rochester NY got rid of a section of freeway through the city. Maybe it'd be interesting to make a video about that, if not already.
Such videos already exist. Just search for Rochester Inner Loop.
there are plenty more interesting examples (including SF and seattle) of highway removal projects! agreed that it would be very cool
You should look at Cincinnati’s new Brent Spence Bridge project. It’s gonna change up a good amount of the interchange, freeing up some more land for future development. As well as connecting Queensgate, West End, and Downtown through various different means, such as roads, sidewalks, and bike paths. Creating a more connected feel, as well as hopefully making it look better in the process.
The Birmingham AL one SUCKS. Literally made me curse at my computer when you alluded to how "unnecessarily big" it is and then showed the map of the area before it went in... Evil stuff.
I've run/walked through most of the land around that I35/I30 interchange in Dallas, and you're absolutely right about the surrounding area being devalued by the interchange itself. The sheer noise from all those lanes makes running on adjacent bridges extremely loud, and the whole area is basically a development desert as a result. The trinity levee trails could be a nice urban amenity if there were any decent connections for pedestrians downtown, but having to cross massive stroads or walk under a bunch of underpasses makes it a nonstarter mostly.
Chicago’s Jane Byrne interchange is one of the worst in the country. It was actually meant to be the site of the Civic Center designed by Daniel Burnham but never got built sadly
I was thinking it was actually one of the best! It used to be called "the circle" correct? The interchange is small and tight, and was recently rebuilt and improved.
I'm surprised Miami's I95/836 interchange didn't make the cut. Huge population right by some of the most expensive real estate in Florida.
Watching this makes me happy that, although my city commits the sin of having an urban freeway, there just the one, and no system interchanges to take up massive amounts of space. What a nightmare... it's bad enough that sprawl could eventually reach these structures that should be built far from people, but actually designing a city infrastructure around them is downright criminal.
Edit: built over minority areas, because of course
counterpoint: as often as not, it is the city being built around the highway - which grows into a freeway. and if the road department tries to reroute the freeway around the city - the city builders build more city around the freeway.
Great timing to post this video….
Even the neutral channels are posting video this time, because everyone is online looking for the results.
@@francikaa1I'm online avoiding the results.
Try not to cry too much
@@RandomRabbit007so you’re just on every comment spreading this hate? Your party won, what more do you want to churn out of this comment section?
@@Laszlo429 How is this hate? I'm just doing a victory lap. Feels damn good! Popular Vote means the MAJORITY of America wanted this, didnt need the Electoral College at all. Maybe your ideology is wrong? Maybe you arnt the "good guys"? Maybe you're on the wrong side of history? That ever occur while you're on reddit?
I dream of the twin cities highways being turned into commuter rail corridors and capped and then that interchange south of downtown MPLS could be a great transit hub
Did you fill out the survey?
Non-locals: There's a survey available to the public that covers choices for making I-94 into something more useful than an overcrowded highway in a ditch.
Oh please please, I also dream of this. It would take one of our only bad traits and further improve one of our best ones.
I kept thinking how amazing they'd be as regional rail stations, but I didn't even think about capping and building on top!
I've been meaning to mess around in a sim making some regional rail routes in the area. So far my ideas have been Cities-St. Cloud on the modern-day Monticello Sub., and Cities-Duluth via the old Northern Pacific line. I should really sit down and do this
So I live in Downtown Houston and work at the University of Houston-Downtown. You actually cycle through our campus in your b-roll in your footage here. Our campus is split in half by I-10, and I walk underneath I-10 every day in-between classes. I try to wear a mask, and I have an air-purifier in my office, but I do still feel terrified about the amount of carcinogens and micro-debris I breathe in on a daily basis.
Happy New Year!
As usual, you've got me thinking... With this video, I'm finally starting to see what we've traded away for the car-as-only-solution-to-mobility... thing that we did.
Your observation that public transit doesn't work on the weekends shows that even transit planners don't think transit is for real...
This is an "aha! moment" for me because it exposes some of the unspoken (and stupid) assumptions of the system designers... And where there's one, there will be others! 🧐
I'm watching this video in tandem with the one that looks at transit access to airports -- They mostly don't run on the weekends!!! (What the cuss?!)
For my "aha!" I'm seeing that if you really wanted to make public transport primary, you'd have to start with where people begin and end in every normal day... (and a majority of their exception days too.)
We simply don't have a metaphor for effective roads... Do we?
Rivers? Those existed before cities, and usually ended up as sewers, as well as transport. Yeah you want to live close to the sewer, BUT NOT TOO CLOSE! (See Paris Olympics again!)
So if we're using motors or engines to replace the "flow" in the river or the wind over the ocean... What's a good metaphor for mass transit?
Blood flow has to carry oxygen to every cell in the body... Blood vessels get down to capillaries, then converge again for the return loop... There's a math to their branching, it seems...? But I'm not seeing blood flow as any approximation of my commute to work, carpool, groceries, grandma's house, and the dentist office...
What do you guys use for thought process in the trade, Ray? ...I think we're done using World War II logistics as our driver for interstate highways... What's going to get us out of this cavalry warfare mentality?
I'm still trying to figure out the best metaphor for a good transit network
@@CityNerd At this point, I m pretty convinced we do NOT return to office... Arguably we need to get better at unforced social stuff. For example, most of my life, I've done my best to create social networks out of the forced random groups at college and work (or dance lessons, or...) literal random strangers in that moment before the first intro at the conference table. Slack and Zoom work differently but they can provide that forced social network effect...🤔
Yes!! Come visit Cincinnati, there are a ton of beautiful buildings and neighborhoods here. We'd love to have you visit for a video
I live in San Francisco. There's nothing like a 6.9 EARTHQUKE, to wake the powers-that-be to "re-think" these horrendous structures.
The LOMA PRIETA quake, in October of '89 was refreshingly welcome ... if only because -- IN RETROSPECT -- that it resulted in the removal of an outrageous multi-level structure, that took more than its share of property, in a relatively small city.
We STILL have to use some multi-level roadways. We live at the tip of a peninsula, and that geography means that our only means of driving OUT of the city ... without bridges ... is to the south. Yes, we have approaches to the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, that must be elevated, for reasonable convenience, over a heavy "downtown." The Golden Gate Bridge doesn't doesn't lead through the downtown area, and its approaches are well, and proficiently designed to take us to the north of the city
This is your regular reminder that San Jose, CA has no rail connection to the airport or even a direct bus line from downtown as a place with its own MSA with a population of 2 million.
Do they still call it "Man Jose" because of the tech?
you can see the planes as they fly over downtown but g-d forbid you try to get to the airport on transit. good stuff, thanks san jose
Can't wait for all of America to look like Dallas Texas 💀
Which part? Uptown/West Village or Legacy Town Center? Those are highly regarded New Urban neighborhoods. Maybe you meant the longest light rail system in North America, the three regional rail networks, or the two streetcar lines? You could easily aspire to emulate far worse examples!
That’s what Trump and Vance want: endless sprawl
@@ecurewitz [Citation Needed]
and a Trump tower in Nuuk, Greenland, USA!
@@ecurewitz [Citation Needed]
gee thanks Robert Moses
Yep! I really think Justin Herman gets a pass. Another disaster of a city planner
Moses split the cities so the American people could drive across.
@@roevhaal578 💀
Imagine if the intercity highway routes were rail lines instead. Pipe dream now that all the fed funding is gonna get cut.
I can see Amtrak sacrificed to the car and plane gods which means the states will have to pick up the slack. So we're looking at intercity train service being reduced to the Northeast, the Chicago / Great Lakes area, and California. 😢 And forget high speed rail. ☹️
@@EdwardM-t8p
Eh, states rights and whatnot.
@@Demopans5990 say goodbye to the high speed rail dream. That’s probably delayed another decade for funding, and say goodbye to any zoning and regulation changes
Louisville, KY, would also be a great location to analyze (especially in comparison to Cincinnati.) The way my hometown destroyed their waterfront with interchanges is especially insulting when you know about the historical rail & tram system. So many beautiful old photos!
not like other countries don't have highways with interchanges around their cities but it is very rare to find them that close to the downtown
Yay! My hometown of Kansas City was only a dishonorable mention! 🎉
The bridge on Summit street by the FBI is actually a really nice, relatively unknown area! An overpass that actually works.
It looks like my area of Northern Virginia didn't make the cut, but the Springfield interchange (495/95) is truly awful. A huge amount of money was recently spent expanding the number of lanes going through it and making it easier to travel at speed. This interchange is immense.
Perhaps not close enough to downtown, but the 580/80/880 interchange just west of the 580/980 is so atrocious it has earned the nickname "the maze". A spectacular set of flyovers and merge lanes filtering commuters in several distinct directions through a tiny area.
Another dishonorable mention in my opinion: I-95/VA-195 in Richmond. It's huge, it separates the office part of downtown from the restaurant/entertainment district (aka Shockoe Bottom) and it basically only serves commuters who live in the southeast suburbs of Richmond.
The I-90 interchange in Seattle is actually a lifesaver for the unhoused.
Calling a toxic spewing construction a lifesaver is ambitious.
Cincinnati mentioned!! That interchange used to be way worse but the city did some great stuff moving I-71 below grade and reconnecting the city grid to the riverbank. BridgeForward project will hopefully do the same to Queensbridge.
Oh ya, our 85/20 interchange in ATL is f*ckin rough. Just proud we weren't #1
I feel like a (dis)honorable mention would’ve been the Brookwood interchange a couple miles north
Excellent as always.
I just got back from a trip to Japan and really enjoyed the transit systems in Tokyo and Osaka. The trains were calm, there were protective barriers to stop people from falling onto the track, and trains arrived every 2 minutes! If funds allow, you should consider a trip to either city to explore their transit systems. Be well :)
I'll never understand why they put a cancer center, children's hospital, and a regular hospital next to the 95/10 interchange in my local downtown. Ridiculous.
no one wants toklive right by the freeway so makes sense but still silly
In a way, it makes sense to have a cancer center right next to the cause of the cancer.
95/10. So, Jacksonville, eh??
I am thankful that Raleigh doesn't have a downtown freeway at all.
14:45 fun fact .One of the businesses that Caltrans allowed to operate underneath I-10 had a major fire which did structural damage to that interstate. Causing it to have to be temporarily shut down.
At 0:55, we see the I-75 I-375 interchange next to Ford Field in Detroit. This is an interesting case because MDOT plans to replace 375 with a surface-level boulevard. Construction should start soon. I hope the footprint of that interchange will end up smaller by the end of the project in a few years.
Was this Detroit freeway removal project funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law? The Inflation Reduction Act? What's the risk? Are the new congress and president likely to kill the funding for projects that will slow a few cars and add a few protected bike lane miles?
Houston actually has two downtowns, the other being uptown/galleria which sits on Loop 610 between the Katy and Southwest Frwys with 290 just to the north. During rush hour it turns into a massive parking lot. A trifecta of a mess if you may say surrounded by high rises and high density living.
OMG, Columbus OH with the Children's Hospital right AT THE INTERCHANGE!!!!! Your ironic tone when showing that fact was both hilarious and sad.
cincinnati mentioned 😭 but parts of cincinnati are fr so beautiful it’s just such a shame that they demolished so many neighborhoods for that damn highway and we can’t have functional transit 😭
Ray, a lot of Trans people (myself included) and people from other groups targeted by Project 2025 are worried for our future, and for many of us, part of preparing for the worst is Relocating. Immigration is expensive, and so is living in California. Can you make a video about Cities in the US that are friendly to the LGBT community, affordable, and walkable?
It's a pretty safe bet to live somewhere near a border in general. Even in Texas. What, deny a couple wishing to vacation in Cancun?
I think Chicago is pretty good! It and the state have passed many protections for LGBTQ, relatively affordable and fairly easy to be car-free, depending on where you are
@@isaacanderson5083yuck
Washington state is pretty good. And near a border
@@ADDIPOP Just go be Canadas problem
Quick note on Canada not having system interchanges near its city centers - we were spared because we just couldn't afford them. Every single city had plans to build highways right through the core, and many got dangerously close. You can see the where they were "supposed" to be in some cases because some sections were built before being canceled (Edmonton is a really good example of this). There was also a lot of opposition to them (just like in most American cities when these were being built), so that opposition combined with the eye watering cost.
The impact is pretty significant. Calgary, a city of just 1.4 million people has a more dense urban core than almost every city in the United States. There are 85k-ish people in the 3km radius around the core. The only cities in the US I could find that beat that were New York, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, LA, and Miami. Calgary's metro area wouldn't even be top 50 in the United States. Technically, Seattle had more too - but its 90k, so I'm calling that a tie. It's even more crazy considering that Calgary developed mostly after WWII, and is often considered an example of sprawl and auto dependent planning.
Great video, also completely agree with i45/i-10. Texas is choosing to expand i-45 too unfortunately. It will only exacerbate the housing prices in the inner loop. Median $500k housing price in that zipcode is great when compared to the entire nation, but median houses in houston are ~300-350K
they're tearing down that interchange and rerouting i45 which currently bisects downtown from the western neighborhoods along the east side next to the eastern bisecting highway i69. It sucks they keep expanding highways but it does mean the west side will be freed.
We need to talk about portland. In oregon, we have "interchanges". Whoever designed them really didn't know what they were doing. It's a mess, and it's hard to get around if you don't have navigation. I'm surprised we didn't make your top ten.
I was hoping for a Jet Lag reference when you showed the Dallas interchange where the "spot that Elvis stood" from S8 E5 occurred.
Who could forget the Dallas Sportatorium!
I'd like to offer a dishonorable mention to Hartford CT, not as bad as the ones on this list but it's still got freeways slicing the city in very sad ways.
relieved to see portland not on this list, but also curious how you think it stacks up. not the biggest hassle, but trying to navigate around 405 on the west side and 84 on the east can definitely turn into a bit of a headache
10:20 Me playing Cities Skylines, building my towns like these examples and wondering how my friends (who build highways through the urban core) end up with unsolveable traffic problems.
“Build more trains.” San Jose kind of lacks ways to get _to_ the trains. The light rail was designed to fail-slow, infrequent, and never where you want it-and there's no practical access to the airport by transit (87, one of the highways you mention, is the intended access to the airport, as well as a bypass [?-given that it runs through the middle] for the city centre). I mean, if we actually replaced the highways with trains, and put back the grid of trams that I understand once existed, we might get somewhere. But right now we're a big city where you need a car just to get a loaf of bread or a coffee and … it sucks. Not to mention that you can't walk to anywhere because even if there isn't a highway in the way you can bet that there's a fence. They've put trails along the sides of what's left of the rivers-very nice!-but do they provide pedestrian access to those trails? No they don't. In most places it's systematically blocked.
There are small signs of improvement all around, but not of anyone going, you know what? Let's get this fixed.
I used to live in a second story apartment (basically at freeway level) in Oakland, surrounded by 580 and 24 on 3 sides. The amount of car soot that built up over a week was incredible.
The Children's hospital is right next to that 580-980 exchange and I have to say, people from all over northern CA bring children there for specialists and appreciate the convenience of it being right off the freeway.
My building finally made it into a CtiyNerd video! Kind of wish it was for any other video though💀
The reason there's fewer people around the Jane Byrne in Chicago is because very few people live downtown. It's the financial district. Same reason Brooklyn is more densely populated than Manhattan.
I know this is off-topic for the video, but I was wondering if you would ever consider doing a video about incremental approaches to 'reclaiming' car infrastructure for public transit/pedestrian uses? Maybe with a specific case study of how it could be done for a given segment of road? The "Tactical Urbanism" folks and the "Strong Towns" folks advocate this approach, figuring out the minimum disruption to existing use possible to demonstrate the potential efficacy of alternative uses, then gradually implementing permanent solutions. I think it's overall a great idea in that it not only makes road reclamation initiatives more palatable to the people who don't already agree with us about this stuff, but it also means we can experiment and determine the biggest wins with very little risk. I was thinking about this as I was walking through a beautiful park in my city that butts right up against a major six-lane road, on the other side of which are several dense, walkable neighborhoods with an attractive mix of buildings from various time periods, and it struck me how nice it would be if that road passed underground, for example, so that the park could connect directly to the neighborhoods instead of only being accessible to them via pedestrian overpasses spaced nearly 3/4 of a mile apart, and would it be possible to convince the motorist population of the city to permit it if the change to a tunnel were gradual?
I think someone with your practical experience could do a very interesting analysis of this kind of work, and in the process teach other urbanists how to examine similar possibilities in their own cities/towns.
This won't work. Incremental change doesn't happen. You keep pushing a change for as long as it takes until not enough people notice you're doing it and you get it done because as soon as the change happens, it's nearly impossible to undo because people will just say "what's done is done" or "that's just the way it is now," then all you have to do is wait for them to whine themselves out and get used to it so much they start to consider it normal. This is always how change happens. It may look incremental over a length of time, but any one point of it is sudden. Someone forces something to happen, usually by way of physical or monetary force, deception, or technicality, and then it becomes entrenched, only able to be changed by another such effort in the future. That's how roadways were made, and it's the only way they'll be unmade.
@@QuesoCookiesincremental change is called planning. And that’s the only way to get something done
I was expecting the Jane Byrne Circle Interchange to make the list, but I was initially surprised that less people lived near it than Minneapolis (though it makes sense because it’s mostly office and commercial around it)
Anticipating where Dallas is on this list before watching...
Those Fuel City tacos though
First city I thought of when I read the video title
As someone who’s lived here since the 90s I’m appalled by how low it is on this list. I hate driving lol
Speaking as a Dallas-hater, who keeps being forced to move back there for nonsense work reasons over and over, CityNerd's hatred of Dallas is lukewarm at best. He probably doesn't think about Dallas at all.
@crowmob-yo6ry DART is surprisingly good, at least for the neighborhoods it covers. Love walking off the red line at Tyler Vernon right into Oak Cliff Brewing.
You should take a look at Madison, WI which has several rail lines used only by freight, which could've been used by Amtrak or even local commuter rail for its massive public university and thriving tech worker community. Instead, Madison has things like left lane exits on I-90, and sadly, incredibly expensive bus rapid transit (which is not rapid at all) with its electric engines prone to failure in cold weather. BRT also creates endless frustration and confusion with drivers and the red boxes and triangles the city has painted on various portions of streets, along with lots of rules to follow which no driver actually understands.
"People can engage in cardio-intensive activities while they inhale benzene and microplastics, just as God intended" ROFL
As a Twin Cities resident I was a bit surprised that the I94 I35W interchange was so high up the blast radius population list (number 9 overall rank 4:46 in video). One of the main reasons it still isn’t one of the most “visually appalling” is that not all direction changes are supported. Southbound I35W doesn’t connect to eastbound I94, and westbound I94 does not connect to northbound 35W (from Wikipedia, though I also remember dealing with it when I first moved to the metro). So a tradeoff against at least some flyover ramps was made. That being said, the core cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul are undeniably on the high freeway burdened side of cities. Which is one of the big and fair reasons that Minneapolis didn’t do better than a D on the main tier list. I’ve lived in Los Angeles and Baltimore which mostly earned their E grades, but are each better in some noticeable areas (just Baltimore on this subject though, lol).
Ottawa has a freeway interchange that's pretty close to downtown.
Another important aspect is the shear cost of “improving” the interchanges in these areas. The Cincinnati interchange + bridge is being rebuilt at an estimated cost of $3.6 billion and then there’s the whole $13 billion Houston highway expansion which while not all directly due to that interchange, it’s all connected to each other.
The fact we’re spending enough money to build multiple light rail lines (or a pretty good BRT system) at each interchange to just maintain these harmful and dreadful interchanges is insane.
How is freeway construction getting that expensive? ADOT’s Broadway Curve project, which is the largest project in the agency’s history, by their own words. By their estimates, the total construction cost of that project is $832 million, and it’s still under construction. The project involves a complete overhaul of I-10 between the I-17 split and the I-10/SR-202 interchange in Chandler, which is a 10-mile stretch. They’re adding one general purpose lane in each direction throughout the entire zone, and more in the busiest stretches. The area between the Split and US-60 will have an extra HOV lane as well. The area between 40th Street and Baseline Road will also have “collector-distributor roads,” which are 2- or 3-lane one-way freeway stretches on each side that will handle the traffic getting on and off at local exits. Multiple interchanges have also received partial or complete redesigns (the 40th Street interchange being transformed from a diamond/ParClo hybrid to a normal diamond, and the 48th Street/SR-143/Broadway Road complex being changed into more of an actual system interchange).
In Cincinnati the group Bridge Foward is trying to influence the design of the new bridge approach to reconnect the adjacent Queensgate neighborhood to downtown. I would love to hear Ray's thoughts on their proposal.
time once again to get mad about the rejection of metromoves
@@grahamturner2640 same reason transit is expensive in the US, construction as a whole is expensive. But more specifically, on interchanges often the big expense is bridges/overpasses. The Cincinnati project is building an insane number of bridges/overpasses in a compact area (meaning some overpasses are very high) which leads to the high cost. The compact area likely also increases the mitigation during construction which also increases costs.
On the other hand, the Broadway Curve project is really only building a handful of bridges while the rest is “just” a widening project on mostly existing ROW. Which is why calling the Broadway Curve project a “complete overhaul” is a little misleading on the cost side as only 1 relatively standard interchange is being substantially overhauled.
@@PaulFisher yep, but it also speaks a lot about priorities that we expect transit improvements to be funded by ballot measures whereas the highway interchange can be funded by general funding. Columbus just passed a much less ambitious funding measure so hopefully that success can spread to Cincinnati but Metromoves failing set Cincinnati back a good 3-4 decades at this point.
1:22 I don’t think i’ve ever actually seen one of those Carvana buildings
Oh man... we've got one in KC. Not the pinnacle of urban architecture 😀
One downtown interchange in the US which makes it an engineering marvel is the one in Dallas. You know, the Dallas Mixmaster which was upgraded as part of the Horseshoe Project. It was bad before the upgrades because of congestion and in the 2010s, it was upgraded very well. Another downtown interchange that got upgraded was the Jane Bryne Interchange in Chicago.
10 best urbanist movies incoming.
Yeah, would be cool to see a list of the top movies where the city feels like a character. Got to be some great NYC, SF, or LA movies that just have to be there because the story doesn’t make sense if the movie is set somewhere else.
My city did something very interesting. They built this huge cloverleaf interchange about 30 years ago and as the city grew, they built a network of small streets and roads that weave through the interchange (all at ground level) and built a small market into it. The place now has a metro interchange next to it and it really challenges the idea of "highway interchanges are hostile to people."
Just build more trains!
And rail lines.
I'm surprised Milwaukee didn't make the cut with the I-94/I-43 monstrosity near downtown, though that one converges near a lot of more or less industrial uses.
16:45 you could team up with Any Austin to provide the silly
In Queens, NYC is the GCP & I-495 interchange along with a few others around Flushing Meadows Park that have around 150,000 people living in a 3km radius around them. Zillow home prices in Queens are over $700,000.
Came for the sarcastic election comments tbh
A less existential thought in these trying times… every time I fly into O’Hare, I’m pretty shocked how painful it is to find the Blue Line into the city. Which is a shame, as it should be a no brainer to take as it’s almost identical in travel time to ride share, at like… a tenth of the cost (not to mention the emissions).
The signage is really quite obscure until you’re already inside of the pedestrian tunnel that leads to the platform. Especially disappointing is the lack of signage on the airport tram platforms, it’s really not clear which of the terminals have access to the city train.
Feels like a very easily solvable problem - better signage and guidance would go a long way!
mass transit is sustainable but you have to drown the streets in bus rapid transit. the last thing anyone wants is to have to plan their day around waiting 30 minutes for a bus transfer. bigger roads and interchanges are the next best alternative. either way, it's great for the economy
Thank you for including Orlando on this list. I live just west of Orlando and the endless car-centric infrastructure, combined with the massive population growth, then add tens of millions of tourists visiting every year, has reached its breaking point. 15 years ago we basically never had any traffic but its is INSANE now, the whole region comes to a complete standstill between 3-6PM every day. We have spent billions on road projects and re-doing I4, adding toll lanes, massive stroads, etc...the traffic still just keeps getting worse. We have become just like LA and Atlanta where you have to plan your life around it.