Why American Cities Are Removing Their Highways [Documentary]
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- American cities allowed highways to be built through their downtown areas. This seemed like a good idea at the time, yet it amounted to numerous problems. With increasing traffic, pollution, and limiting walkability, cities are finally realizing the negative impact these roads have had on city life.
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Remove highway
Traffic
Public backlash
Installs tram, park, mixed use affordable housing
Nobody wants highway back
Nobody in the States is willing to suffer for 5 years to figure this whole thing out..
Too used to getting everything on demand.
You forgot to add parking lots so the city can make a lot of money and the local criminals can strip your car of anything they can sell. Now no one can drive into town so they go else where to do shopping and business.
@@theroamingsavage8813 5 years just to do the plans, 15 years for the union companies to milk the job out as long as possible. Just look at how long it took for a simple carpool lane thru S Seattle.
This would not work at all in any Texas city.
@@FINAL-B0SS America was built on rail and was bulldozed for cars.
It wouldn't be easy because it was building demolished and it's expensive to rebuild even if you do this.
But if people recognize that car infrastructure costs $20,000 per person to repave a road and mid rise and mixed use building is 1/10th that, the push would be uncomfortable but worth it in the end.
Anybody who's ever driven through Atlanta during any daylight hour can tell you that carving a major highway through the dead center of town was a bad bad bad idea. 🤦♂️
If the Atlanta Freeway Revolts didn’t happen, you might have a viable option to remove the downtown connector as I485 would have placed traffic on the outskirts of downtown.
true
They are covering i75 in Midtown with a new 27 acre park between 10th and 14th. So that sounds fun
@@typaul4859 Not unless you are the benefactor to allow the shortfall of $698 Million to be raised
Totally. It’s zombieland even in broad daylight, and it gets worse at night!..
Very interesting that public transport wasnt mentioned once
Neither was homeless eencampments
Yeah, i found that odd. Both light rails and metros are more efficient and cheaper to maintain than industrial highways, not to mention not relying on distracted strangers for your safety and that of others. Having that be the the main point of transportaion for suburbs to cities is clearly the best option if handled correctly. Seems odd that this video would not mention it, even in passing.
@@danieldaniels7571 True, that also ties into too much single-family exclusive zoning.
@@DAK4Blizzard from what I’ve seen it mostly ties into people who would rather smoke fentanyl than lead productive lives.
@@danieldaniels7571 The correlation isn't fentanyl (which I don't think is ever smoked) so much as it is housing supply and high cost of living. Otherwise, we'd see some camps in other US towns as well.
Build mixed-use development in their place, then improve public transport in the city and suburbs.
In The 21st Century, NOBODY NEEDS CITIES & it's time to abandon them!
Ya, Lets just put a petro refining facility next to your house, or a factory and hear you complain about the noise and truck traffic. There is a reason we have industrial areas separated from housing. Mixed use does not work. As a trucker, I can tell you that thoughs are the hardest areas for me to get my big truck into.
No one wants my truck there.
@@sleuer66 Congratulations on showing off your *_AMAZING_* ability to look at a situation and come to *_exactly the wrong conclusion._*
@electric7487 spoken like someone, that has never spent a day, in the life of a truck drivers shoes.
@@sleuer66 I'm referring specifically to shops over apartments and offices and things of that nature.
Obviously we can't have an oil refinery right next to a suburb or apartment complex but we can't afford to have everything being so sprawled out like it is now.
I think a public transit system would be a good way of getting commuters from suburbs into the city. I live near New York, one of the few cities in the US with actually decent public transport, and also one of the few cities in the US without a highway running through it's urban core. Of course there's still plenty in Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens, but Manhattan is mostly free of them, and most commuters are adapted to just not driving into work at all, but instead taking the train to Penn Station or Grand Central, and then taking the subway from there if they need to get anywhere else. Of course not all cities can support subway systems, but what's stopping them from creating light rail, trams, or even just a better bus service.
I live in town in New Jersey about twenty miles from Manhattan. Passenger rail serie to my town was ended when Lyndon Johnson was President, and the local commuter bus line to the city is shutting down permanently due to lack of ridership
Seattle is the only city in America that is improving its infrastructure.
"what's stopping them"
that most of their budget goes to motorways
(so, paradoxically, to 'solve traffic' we need to spend less than we did in the 20th century)
It'd be even better if not only we destroy the highways that run right through the cities, but also replace them with mixed-use, multi-family, mid-density residential and and commercial areas, leisure like parks and plazas, and add a giant train station and a commuter railway public transportation network right into the middle of the highways that used to stand there.
Seattle did'nt eliminate it's waterfront front highway (US 99) .. it buried the highway underneath the old one before it tore down the 50's concrete monstrosity
that's that point of a tunnel....
Rochester’s Inner Loop infill is basically the ONLY successful urban development that city has seen in the last 50 years, but it is a massive success and could mark a turning point in Rochester’s revitalization.
I completely disagree with the best of both worlds statement about MV tunnels. As long as a city is so reliant on private automobiles it will fail to reach its full potential and will always be burdened with unnecessarily high costs. Cars can never be the best urban transportation mode. There are just way too many down sides. Will you tunnel the entire system as the urban core expands? A car is noisy, heavily polluting, leads to sprawl (urban and waistline) and dangerous. They are about 0.5% efficient at turning potential energy into the work they are usually doing: moving a single individual.
Vancouver has no freeways anywhere near its core and it doesn't miss them at all. The lack of freeways is strongly correlated with its high quality of life. We made the same suburban development mistakes as everywhere but we are recovering from them by building satellite urban centres connected by rapid transit. So while we still have too much sprawl, we have more and more options to eschew that expensive, energy hogging and highly polluting development pattern. Vancouver's transit ridership is currently about the same as Chicago, a city three times the size. We have higher ridership than Seattle and Portland combined. What we don't have is enormous swaths of high value land decimated by freeways and parking lots. Tunnels should be for trains, not cars. They'd be far far smaller yet carry way more people.
I have been to Vancouver BC a number of times. Lots of neat things about it. But it’s can’t get there from here road network and highway systems are really terrible.
I am also very familiar with Seattle and Portland and their transportation systems. Bothe Seattle and Portland metro areas are gradually growing their public transit systems and they are getting better, but at the end of the day, they still need their cars and trucks.
As battery electric cars and trucks begin to displace gas and diesel cars and trucks, metro area air pollution problems will decrease significantly, and noise levels will probably come down some.
But a big amount of the noise vehicles make comes from the wheels and tires rolling on the road surface. At speeds above 25 to 35 mph, often the largest amount of noise from the vehicle is not from the engines, but from wheels and tires.
At speeds above about 45 mph, wind noise of air flowing around the vehicle starts to make a larger and larger footprint.
What gets left out of these get rid of the freeway arguments is the logistics of supporting the city. The transporting all the goods and services into, out of and around the city. And they tend to also leave out the need to get from one side of the city to the other, or to pass through the city itself on your way to your destination. Rail, both heavy and light, are important transportation infrastructure components, but not the end all. Busses are also an important part of the solution. Biking, not so much. At the end of the day, bicycles have to many limitations overall. They have avid if not fanatical supporters, but there are reasons cars outnumber bicycles for daily use.
@@americanrambler4972 You can get everywhere by car in Vancouver - just not on limited access divided highways into the core. This has had two very positive results: it constrained rampant suburban sprawl and it grew dense residential neighbourhoods in and around the city core. No city that built freeways through the core has had these positive outcomes and all have become far more reliant on cars as a result. Their transit ridership is abysmal and they will need a half a century to catch up - if they even try. This is a big problem because cars are the least efficient mode of urban transportation ever devised and they are the most expensive for both owners and taxpayers.
We all recognize the need for goods movement and we have no problem with that in Vancouver. Vancouver is a port city after all - the second biggest port on the west coast of the Americas. International and domestic trucking are a big part of our economy. Freeways into the core are not required.
A big problem with those who have been forced into car dependent lifestyles by bad urban design spurred by excessive freeways is they behave like a hammer and every problem a nail. Cars are useful tools for certain trips. But those who are forced into car ownership seem incapable of understanding that walking, cycling and transit are easier, cheaper and more convenient for many, if not most, trips. The reason they can't see it is because they've been coerced into lifestyles that make them dependent on cars. They live far away from EVERYTHING. More car dependence creates more sprawl which creates more car dependence. I live happily without a car and book a car share several times a year when I need one. I save a fortune. I can go out for drinks without having to plan my transportation around it. I'd never ever go back to owning a car. I walk and cycle for most trips but transit is excellent when I need it.
Maybe you need to spend a few weeks in the Netherlands where bicycles outnumber cars. Car dependence is not a given. It is by design. In Vancouver, cycling makes up only about 6% of trips. But if those people all got in cars it would only add to congestion. Even as population, jobs and amenities have grown dramatically in Vancouver, car traffic has been declining for decades. That's a great thing! But it's only because we don't have urban freeways, we've built dense walkable neighbourhoods and we have an expanding metro system and expanding safe cycling network. As the video claims: urban freeways are a bad idea.
Not one word on Buses, trams and trains.... moving people not cars?
Buses run on highways.
@@stevenlitvintchouk3131 yes, Bus stops on a freeway?
Busses hold more people trams and trains hold more people and those are faster than highways
That’s because normal people who drive cars have no interest in getting on those things with all the nasty homeless people inside them and would rather drive directly to their destination when they’re ready to go.
@@danieldaniels7571 In a place where transit is used by everyone they are better.
Is there a way to reudce and eliminate personal cars from downtown areas? Make subway or metro trains so ubiquituous, and increase parking inside cities while providing cheaper parking just outside so people don't have to drive anywhere within a city.
This. Seattle is doing this very thing. We can't have any more cars.
Edit: Ok, what I meant to say was we can't rely solely on cars/we would benefit a lot more from transit-oriented infrastructure rather than car infrastructure. Honestly, as much as I hate to say it Seattle isn't growing fast enough to warrant faster improvements. And I have a car that I don't want because Seattle is so expensive.
@@DefineDeft Yet it's still cheaper and faster to rent a car if you're in a group, even when we all have ORCA cards. There used to be "free" parking down near Elliott but buses are still far and few between, people would still pay that $30 an hour parking in downtown just for convenience. If public transport were more frequent downtown I'd park outside the city any day, just getting to I-5 from downtown is still a big waste of time.
Have fun putting up with the unwashed and the piss and shit you encounter in public transportation.
No, because most people love their cars and prefer to drive.
Only people that will agree with this are those who either are green people or just people who can’t drive or people who are from other places that are heavily dependent on public transportation .
Being in the military gave me an eye opener that yes it’s important to have a pov ,believe me I’m naturally a walker I use to walk up to 15 miles before I purchase a vehicle I didn’t mind because I was a kid I didn’t have money or a career at the time
Build enough public transit, then you can remove any highway due to lower traffic levels
Public transportation impedes traffic levels. It does not help it.
@@markluhman8940 how?
He works in DC, don’t bother
No, thanks. I'd rather not share my travel space with addicts and people who are violently mentally ill.
@@markluhman8940 You're deranged. LMAO
Those aerial views of the highways made me realize that we have a lot more in common with ants than I think. We are literally ants on this planet going back and forth. 😳
Why did these cities agree to this in the first place? Well, when your telling everyone to hate communists, and the Soviets are building dense walkable cities with great transit, it's very easy to tie the car to "our way of life" and "the very heart and soul of America".
Just take a look at this comment section for evidence. So many people here have been brainwashed by the automotive industry that I don't even know how the damage will be undone. Car culture is so ingrained into American culture that it'll take several generations to fully heal from it.
Get rid of the monstrosity called I95 thru Miami. Might be problem since the voters of Miami Dade County keep voting for "public transportation" and all they do is to buy some buses that goes nowhere. Cities in America are built wrong. Suburbia means you need a car to get a sandwich. Your home is far away from localized commerce. No pedestrians, no bicycles, no bodegas close by.
they built it to run through BLACK neighborhoods. (So keep that monster energy) The reason coconut grove did not get MOWED over. is it because whites start moving into Coconut Grove. Coconut Grove is the oldest black community in Miami started in the 1900's. that community ends at the water so they could not move the highway to the beach side either. white gentrification is why there is no 1-95 to the Keys.
Carol City was all white. the City of Miami moved all the black professionals over to Miami Gardens . then still ran another highway over there and expanded Golden Glades.
so the highways + white flight out of Dade county are linked.
========== Now that downtown is going back white.. (cough WYNWOOD) and ) Overtown... they want to do something about 1-95. but the Federal government gave the state the option to use the land next to the outer rail road tracks.. which made more sense and ran straight. but they wanted to be aggressive + racist. oh well.
🌊 hope all of it goes in the OCEAN 💅🏾 the flooding is karma
Theres a 3rd option for cities too - Atlanta is planning 3 highway capping projects to reconnect Downtown and Midtown, Midtown and Georgia Tech, and the 2 sides of Buckhead. So instead of boring tunnels underground, a cheaper option could be to just build over the highway.
Seattle is doing the same
columbus did that with high street over I-670. would be cool if they did that in a couple other parts of town
I do not think tunnels eliminate all reprecussions of having a highway go through the downtown. It still creates car dependency and all of the repercussions that come with that.
Car dependency? So transport is all pedestrian, cyclist, and airplane?
Honestly this is one of those things that we just need to send someone to Switzerland or Germany to study and research how they do their roads and highways.
Just send a team of city developers and engineers there for a full year. All we do is just keep expanding highways. Pretty soon America will be one giant 100 lane highway.
You didn’t mention the most important solution and alternative for this cancerous issue: INVEST IN RAPID TRANSIT!!!
Tunneling an urban highway still leaves you with too much road capacity like the one we've been building for the whole 20th century
It's time to get rid of most if not all superfluous cars from our city centers, so the options should be:
1. Convert most urban highways to sustainable transport corridors, wherever possible
2. Tear them down, wherever it's not (due to low connectivity, steep gradients, etc)
In Hamburg where I live they bury the highway A7 under a tunnel and make space for parks and housing on the surface level. It’s a great way to reunite neighborhoods which have been divided through the road.
utrecht did the same with the A2 highway. there is no highway trough utrecht wich is very pleasent :)
It is time for the US to finally embrace public transportation on a national scale. Just have to defy the various special interest groups first.
I'm from Rochester, and after 3 years in Richmond VA, 10 years in Houston, and about 35 years in Atlanta, I'm moving back.
Roc native also in Atlanta. I’ll also be moving back eventually. Won’t be for another 5 years at minimum but I’m getting sick of ATL every day. Not sure why people flock here in droves.
@@redcomic619 Because it’s a big city.
I would agree that the projects that has been established in the 50's era in many cities around the world might have missed the long term futuristic vision , on the other hand i see this particular matter as a population growth issue rather than disconnection, which is the reason why removing these highways has been seen as an investment opportunity due to the high demand on housing in the major cities , however! it remains a temporary solution simply because the population won't stop growing unless people decide not to have children , therefore developing new residential areas and new cities is inevitable for sustainability
Well news flash, the US population is somewhat stagnating because birth rates are declining. While the US birth rates are not catastrophically low (like Japan or South Korea) and are unlikely to drop that far in the foreseeable future, we have been consistently below the replacement rate for the past 3-5 years (and will likely remain so). Although immigration is still leading to population growth, that too is stabilizing and will likely decrease as the birth rate in Latin America also drops below replacement level. So most cities will start to see population stagnation and population decline by the end of the century. The days of limitless growth on a finite planet are coming to an end and we will see more stable and sustainable development patterns.
Highways can be turned into train tracks! I would argue that America doesn't necessarily have an "addiction" to highways, the addiction is to fossil fuels, specifically petroleum, and once oil is coupled with the US dollar, the petro-dollar economic system is created to wreck havoc on the world, unfortunately.
Explain to me how products you buy from an Internet website will be delivered from a thousand miles away to your home. Instead of an Amazon or UPS or Fedex truck, there will be--what? A Star Trek transporter? FedEx overnight delivery and Amazon Prime 48-hour delivery will become impossible.
@ Steven Litvintchouk
Trains are pretty efficient at hauling for long distances but obviously trucks are still required. I don’t see how having a freeway helps trucks though. Usually freeways just induce more traffic for trucks to get stuck in, not exactly the most efficient transportation
Also I don’t really get what argument you are aiming to counter
@@ianjames8140 Freeway allow the interdiction of traffic at speed and leave at speed. Show me something else that does.
I never been both to these cities but Atlanta has a pretty interesting skyline
I"m glad that Raleigh residents/activists defeated even putting a freeway through its downtown 50+ years ago. There's nothing to remove!
maybe it did not have enough black neighborhoods downtown... they are called "urban" for a reason. ITS ALSO WHY 1-95 does not go to the keys in Florida.
1-95 stops at downtown Miami because Coconut Grove became whiter and no longer the oldest black neighborhood is Miami
And it hurt Raleigh’s growth a lot. Also city planners definitely did not invision how fast the city grew, neither did anyone back then either.
@@cinnamonstar808 Raleigh wasn’t big back then, we are a planees city and we have problem from it.
The proposed freeway most certainly would have decimated and cut off black neighborhoods on the eastside from the very core of the city of Raleigh.
@@gavinproduction7433 Really? Raleigh and Wake County have been one of the fast growing areas in the country for the last 50 years. The growth has been staggering. Lacking a downtown freeway didn't hurt Raleigh, but its core was hurt (like others) from neglect in favor of rapid suburbanization in post WW2 America. Fortunately for the city, its core never completely died due to it being the state's capital. Today the city's core is growing like a weed and doing just fine.
What's the third way? You outlined only two, tunnels and boulevards.
the other one is parks
@@meowforever330 Ok.
The Dutch city of Utrecht also built a tunnel for the A2 highway; the Leidsche Rijn tunnel. It works great, I can cycle from the suburb to the center without seeing the highway at all. Only a 10 meter/ 33 feet high hill to climb.
The Dutch city of Utrecht is a mere joke, compared to a US metropolis. You live in a small countryside town, by US standards
@@kaloogarele On the contrarily, Utrecht city is part of the Randstad Metropolis: consisting of capital Amsterdam, Rotterdam the biggest port of Europe and The Hague, the Washington DC of the Netherlands. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad
The A2 highway connects Amsterdam to Maastricht, Liege Belgium and Luxemburg.
to many fat Americans can not do anything but drive a big SUV can not cycle or walk anywhere very sad
@@kaloogarele 360k people is not a "small countryside town" by anyone's standards, except maybe China.
@@kaloogarele More excuses from car-brained weirdos. What else is new.
Mass transit systems like in japan and china and upcoming India are the way to go.
The reason cities agreed to these highways because there was no money available for mass transit in 1956 and so this was the only way urban U.S. House districts could get transportation funding.
? So there was no money, so they went with the more expensive option? It's the politics, not the economics that shifted. America wanted to be completely different than the Soviets, and we now know the dystopia that resulted.
Bury the highway?
You take it up as needed, crush it and save money and Energy by using the already made concrete.
Put a train over the highway and it's done
I really enjoyed your video! Very interesting facts, I do there is something to be said that there seems to be a large population against these issues, but most of the fastest growing metros usually are more car centric. lol
Highways are not bad for long distance but shouldn't run through cities.
Maybe the US should look at European cities for inspiration.
Seattle has by far the worst traffic, the tunnel was necessary to take down a deadly waterfront section of hwy99. We need like four more tunnels going north/south.
largest government subsidy for corporations ever!
It should say
Why Americans are leaving this city
Nah. /
It's because the suburbs are a Ponzi scheme that makes them artificially less expensive than they really are. The system that creates them will crash. They'll either adapt by becoming denser cities themselves or go bankrupt.
The reality is, cities subsidize the suburbs, and when you create an economic imbalance that punishes one and benefits the other, people will take advantage of it. People once left cities because they were so polluted. Then a few generations experienced nothing but the excruciating dullness, expense and inconvenience of the suburbs and know nothing else. People will defend their way of life no matter how bad it is.
I swear I’ll die of old age before Atlanta finishes construction
Why did American’s think it was a good idea to have major high ways run through their cities?
Eisenhower didn’t pass the highway act, congress did 🤦🏽♂️
I never knew about Rochesters highway removal, thats a great example to cite for other cities considering what to do with portions of their eleveted highways (cough Milwaukie).
It’s America so there’s never going to be a serious discussion about public transit…
Maybe in the 1940s and 50s you might have managed to have one. We literally had the best rail service and passenger trains in the world, the 20th Century Limited, the Super Chief, the City of Los Angeles, the Daylight, the Hiawatha, the list is endless. And many of them were faster than today's Amtrak trains! The airlines didn't destroy them, the Interstates did.
This was an awesome video, really well researched and solid conclusions made. Important to remember that public transit can move a much higher volume of people in a smaller space.
Also, by looking at the comments it would appear that the algorithm has brought it people that are not yet Orange-pilled.
Hopefully NotJustBikes, CityNerd, Armchair Urbanist and the like are recommended to them next!
How do we move tractor trailers full of stuff on public transit. Real well researched.
@@sleuer66 I'm not sure if you saw something that I missed, but where exactly did he mention motor vehicles being completely banned from cities?
Motor traffic is still facilitated in the vast majority of these highway removal schemes.
It's important to remember that not everyone needs to move around a truck load of 2x4s every day. Most people just need to from A to B with a small number of items.
Using car travel for every use is like using a torque wrench to not only tighten up the wheel nuts on your car, but also to mount something into your wall, and to take apart your phone. It's all about having the most appropriate tool for the job.
@matthewcornfield2150 What brought you those small items? A tractor trailer and a truck driver. You probably think a gallon of milk comes from a grocery or convenience store. Well, it actually comes from a cow on a farm and big trucks brought it to your shifty city, w/o any highways
@matthewcornfield2150 bcs when you take out the highways, you have mixed use surface street. These roads treat truckers like second class citizens. These highways are designed for big trucks. You attitude is f**k the ppl that bring me my groceries. All I drive is this tiny car. Whatever
@@sleuer66 Did you read my comment? Where did I say that all motor vehicles should be banned?
I work in a Highways Agency, and deliver food on the side in a truck. Trust me - I know how our transportation system works.
We need more choice for the types of transport that we have. Private motor vehicles are (by quite a margin) the most inefficient and socially/ environmentally damaging way to move people and goods. Therefore, where alternatives are employed in the right cases - huge savings can be made, and living standards improved.
The Interstate system is the best idea ever with some of the most hopeless consequences ever.
Honestly don't get why the American government thought building highways would help it only made things worse in the end. Less roads more public transport and actual places to live shop and learn and build.
Factorys and schools library's public spaces and proper infrastructure meant to tend tword humans. Not vehicals.
Stop building roads. Sure build roads were you obsolutly need roads. But realistically a good railroad system and a good public transport system means less financial burden on the masses and the government and more jobs. Less room taken up by roads means more public spaces for people to go and a better life for most. I'm sure it will result in less crime because only cops would have access to use their cars on public walkways and therefore reduce the time it takes to respond. Not to mention fire fighters and paramedics. Less cars more public infrastructure meant to help the public go about their lives.
What a city was supposed to be and not a dystopia catastrophe of traffic and hit and runs not to mention car theft.
The majority of one's income goes into their car and car insurance payment. Not to mention gas and other fees accumulated. In reality this causes less profit to be had for said individual that usually leads to a worse quality of life. Stick them in a conjested city with poor liveing conditions due to less space because of h8ghways and roads. This will lead them to become more extreme in there actions or make them b3come weaker mentally and physically. Kinda depends on the individual.
Essentially highways and roads are bad. Public walkways and parks along with public transport is good.
The only think anyone should need to buy for transport is a bike. Anything more is essentially extra and unessesary.
You can tell the person who made this video is American when you realize public transport didn't even make it into the discussion.
Something is off with your documentaries. You have 125k views and only 2.35k subscribers. The editing is really good. The audio is just good. I think the story telling needs improvement. Good luck and keep at it!
I enjoyed driving on that Alaska way viaduct, had to drive on it whenever I wanted to go to vashon Island 🏝️🏝️🏝️
Seattle still has I-5 though and it's awful
What an unintelligent thing to say. Tell us why it's awful and what you would do about the thousand of people in buses and cars who use it daily are supposed to do? Knock on your door and hitch a ride?
@@johannesbols57 I-5 is awful because there's just no alternative. The only way other options for bypassing downtown Seattle on the North/South axis is to take a toll road (highway 99) or go way out and around Bellevue. The exits in downtown are an absolute mess of spaghetti. Light rail exists, but there are zero park-n-rides south of downtown. There's few express bus routes and the normal bus routes are slower than sitting in traffic (and more expensive, $2.75 one-way). Seattle, in general, is peak "faux progressive". They pretend to care about progressive values, govern outside of that, resulting in residents getting the worst of both options with little upside. I'm moving ASAP.
6:20 Traffic has worsened in Boston because of this. Since the Big Dig costed so much, Boston has to cut much of the maintenance spending on the T, which left the system into disrepair with the trains barely being on time and catching fire every now and then. This caused more people to drive since it was much more reliable for being on time, and in turn Boston now has the worst traffic in the country.
every subway system in the country (save maybe nyc) has had derailments and has--at some point or another--put off funding important maintenance until it reached a crisis point. DC had an entire summer where they shut down entire lines for weeks at a time. They actually just shut down an entire line for 7 months. i dont think the big dig caused funding issues for the T. we just dont fund public transit very well in general
na bro just add one more lane bro it'll fix all the traffic lets just add one more lane bro it makes it all better
Seattle traffic is a nightmare. It’s as if they go out of their way to cause traffic congestion.
Great video! I wish we would start replacing urban highways with circumferential ones. Then replace the right of way with metro trains ❤
Finally about Damm time they are removing highways make the removal nationwide
Do you like to eat, no highway not eat stupid.
@@markluhman8940 there’s these locomotives called trains. Just build the highway’s outside city centers.
Better public transportation and walkability are the ultimate solutions.
Turning highway into a railway.
The wild part is… y’all know what neighborhoods highways ran through, and now that a certain “type” of person is moving back to the cotie and now the want to remove em… 😂
In everyone's perceived new Utopia there would be no highways. All workers would be in their twenties and commute to work from their downtown high-rise and loft apts on foot or by scooter. In the real world, however, commuting from the 'burbs to your job downtown using only surface streets would take the better part of the day.
I couldn’t see freeway removal or tunnel construction working in Texas cities. There’s way too much development along the corridor that needs expedient access to the freeways. Plus, replacing the freeways with more development will induce the demand for more roads.
I hope Tx will NEVER take any kind of example from the tent village called erroneously the "city" of Portland. It's like taking Detroit as example.
@@kaloogarele trump lost 😂
@@kaloogareleok in 20 years when the growth stops and the areas are sprawling and there isn't a good tax base you will end up like Detroit.
@@bruhbutwhytho2301 you really have no better argument than just "WAAAGH"? Well, whatta surprise ... Dude, you can't predict the price of gas in 5 years time, and you know for sure what's gonna happen in 20 ... you're really entertaining. waagh :))))
@@Ambrose05 he did. And your Portland is much more of a shithole today than it was when Trump was president. But rejoice ... Portland will be even worse in 2 years, so you will remember the pandemics as the "Happy days", when you didn't have to go outside and face reality. Your future looks really, really, really bad ... luckily for you, there is this, Trump lost. One light spark in the ocean of desperation. This and Xanax, of course. Or whatever you guys consume there.
Thanks for sharing.😀✌
Urban sprawl, poor urban planning, greed, and bad government decision making. Tunnels are an option provided there is technology, time and voters willing to go along with the change. I would mention that the previous video on urban vs suburb living, the con on residential living is that costs of road maintenance is expensive, wouldn't the cost of maintaining a tunnel road be also high? It is not just the road, ceiling, lighting, and traffic congestion in the tunnel itself. Tunnels can be blocked for massive accidents or damage to the infrastructure of the tunnel itself. Those costs can be unscalable due to knowing how often it occurs and what it entails to resolve the situation. Correcting bad planning is neither easy, cheap, nor quick, which planners/users must all participate in but also once done has to be completed whether good, bad, or indifferent. Citizens/voters cannot be silent or leaving decisions and not taking responsibility for their actions. It might not be the same, but the Florida Condominium collapse is a micro example of bad decisions, apathy or silence about people leaving decision making in other people's hands and then ignoring their role in what happened. Can ignoring the fiduciary responsibility of being a board member and not following up for years, not be irresponsible? Can owners who owned the property not attend/read the minutes and ask questions of accountability?
Convient selective ommision. To wit Portland Oregon's Harbor Drive, removed yes, but a new parallel route for I-5 was built along the opposing side of the river.
Good
Chicago has the worst expressways in the country and worst traffic on top bad construction
The city of Vancouver has never had a freeway running through it
Bridge! Bridge! Omg, for god sake, why north American just don’t like building bridges? They r cheap, and efficient af.
Coming from a Asian who’s been living in Toronto for 7 years. I found that for some particular reason, North American just never like to build bridge. Toronto has some of the worst traffic on 401 highway and if the same cases happened in Asian countries, we would have built a 2-3 levels of bridge to fix it. And it also makes the damn empty kinda feeling of an average North American cities look somewhere more prosperous. Also, in some busy cities center, build bridge for people to walk across in stead of sharing the same cross as automobiles! Separate people, cars, and public transportation on different level, stop using bullshit stuff like trams, if wanna build public transportation, either make them on sky by building a sky train, or make them into the ground level by building a subway. Jesus, how can such easy question get so complicated in NA.
Bridges are ugly, expensive to maintain, and still cause dividing issues in cities. I'm from Montreal, Canada. until a few years ago, we had a small section of urban freeway cutting through our downtown core - in the form of a viaduct. It was noisy, smelly, ugly, and divided that portion of downtown. A few years ago it was torn down and merged with the existing surface-level boulevard that it ran right next to. The difference is immeasurable. That entire area is now completely revitalized and a park was built where the old viaduct was located. It's better in every way for city life.
@@mikeamber2528 no, the only thing that is dividing your cities is the city management which is building so many separated far away sub-urban neighborhoods, it really has nothing to do with highway, bridges or whatever the reason that some of you guys keep on talking, in which case can’t really be fixed anymore now since it’s already been done. To make it easier for understanding, even if you demolished the entire 401, it’s still not gonna make it walkable, I’d still drive a car anywhere I go. The term walkable itself is kinda a funny ideology to me. I used to think that when we thinking on building city, we just make it easier for everything, we need to make sure that car and people can both get around, it just happens naturally instead of right now that u guys actually need to come out a term or idea to describe such a thing.
There’re countless bridges in my hometown or most of other Asian countries and they look great, Tokyo looks amazing with their city round tour which is a bridge surrounded the entire center Tokyo.
And honestly I really don’t care much of a park. There’re too many parks in Canada anyway, the only thing Canada that is not lacking is trees, there’s really no point of making so many parks in the center of most busy urban areas. I’d rather they make a city actually looks like a city instead of making it so empty anywhere.
And btw, I’ve been live in Montreal DT for 7 years. I know how it is and I couldn’t say I agree with u on that. I personally think that Montreal is a worse city compared with Toronto in many case, especially on city management.
American urban planning has permeated the car dependency statewide and bulldozed cities into constructing the massive interstate systems.
Wouldnt it be better cities move their jobs out to the suburbs to reduce congestion?
By the way, Seattle HAS NOT REMOVED ANY FREEWAYS. They did relocate one underground, but it was not removed.
The Boston one looks pretty sad even after removing the highways and spending 22 billion 🤦🏼♂️.
Some of the parks on top look beautiful and on weekends. They sometimes have festivals there I walked around there.
The problems with highways is everybody needs to do 80mph..state troopers & speed limits increase traffic
Next is cross ocean freeway is best but how to make sure food available for travel driver
Don't worry, lots of pay-offs for politicians and contractors.
Maybe 30 yrs they go back and rebuild the highways
nah
Nope, urban highways should never have been built.
I hope transit+with park and rides on the edges will replace highways through cities
You can do much better than that - but it will take some time. The Vancouver region began that journey in the 1980s and it is showing great results. Here's the plan: build a network of rapid transit from downtown to a series of new regional downtowns. Building these in shopping mall sites has avoided any serious pushback since few people live close to shopping malls in the absurd North American suburban model. So more and more people don't even need to go downtown. Downtown comes closer to them - making transit to those new centres more viable even at lower suburban densities because the distances aren't as far. And if you want to go to downtown Vancouver you just transfer to the metro.
The new regional centres will eventually create their own development pressure to increase density around themselves but there is also little pushback because there just aren't that many people to upset - and they're now living next to "downtown" which they have become used to. Their land value increase is a win that they can use to leverage into even better living arrangements, whether that's a spiffy condo in their 'hood so they can live car free or car lite or whether they choose to continue their suburban lifestyle elsewhere. The high density living in these regional downtowns is really popular.
@@ronvandereerden4714 I absolutely loved Vancouver when I visited. Their metro system reminded me a lot like mine in Washington DC, but more efficient. And you're correct, every neighborhood felt like their own little town, corner grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants, you honestly don't have to travel very far in the city to get what you need. Even side street / bike lanes that ran parallel with main avenues. When the train finally reaches all the way out to UBC, the density in that city will skyrocket. It really is a well planned city.
Tunnels are not the best of both worlds because people who drive still want parking when they get to the city. Highway removal is the correct choice (obviously you need to create viable transportation alternatives before this is implemented though).
One thing you can be sure of is that Americans believe they can have it all.
Nashville needs to change
Good video!
Replace them with public transit, green space and development
Before all of these discussed, are they actually removing highways? 😮
I wish the federal government would do 90-10 funding for public transportation projects.
Will Toronto consider burying the Gardiner Expressway for good?
I live in a suburb of Syracuse NY. There has been talk of this problem since at least 2010. The current solution seems to be eliminating some of the highway through Syracuse, but there will still be highway to get from the suburbs to Syracuse, just not through Syracuse. Next month I'm moving to a suburb of Springfield MO. My biggest concern about moving there is that there is no highway connecting my suburbs to surrounding areas. It will take me twice as long to get places. I will miss the convenience of a highway.
whether they're doing a good job replacing them is another debate, look at Seattle for example
You’ve never been to Seattle. We the public could easily reach the waterfront by walking under the viaduct down on the street level. The reason Seattle built the tunnel and tore down the viaduct is that it was damaged by earthquakes
Seattle should’ve got rid of Alaska Way all together. The tunnel is stupid
I live in suburban Philly and driving in and out of the city is a massive pain, and sadly public transportation isn't any better. I wish they would just expand the light rail system so there are more lines/stations and less stops because it takes just as long to get back in a train as it does to drive. It's also around $15 per round trip so it's not really any cheaper either. I mostly blame the rural counties in PA because they refuse to vote for extra funding so the whole infrastructure barely stays together and no substantial improvements can be made.
It should be kept in mind that the Interstates were meant to facilitate travel BETWEEN states and cities (hence, "INTER"-State), not necessarily WITHIN them. Most of the "two-digit" interstates, especially the "main" ones ending in a "0" or "5", were supposed to bypass the cities altogether, with beltways and spur routes to serve those cities. Partly due to high costs of buying built-up properties, condemned under eminent domain, and also because the purpose, as then-President Eisenhower, being impressed at the end of WWII in seeing the beginnings of the German Autobahn, was a "DEFENSE" highway network, i.e., to facilitate the rapid movement of military forces across the country. Ike had participated in a long route march across the USA in the 1920s, which was supposed to take eight days, but took as many weeks, due in part to the sorry state of the "highways" of the time.
However, anything involving the Government is of necessity "political", and the last thing local politicians want is their cities and businesses to be bypassed. Think of the 2006 movie "Cars", showing how a sleepy town, once thriving on the roadside business of the old US highway that ran THROUGH it, lost out when bypassed by a nearby interstate, as few travelers found reason to divert to it. Until then, road travel, especially east of the Mississippi, had been a travail, as one could go only, say, fifteen to twenty miles on a good stretch of highway, at most, before having to slow down through yet another 'burg. Of course, the local cops were always anxious to write tickets to out-of-state drivers, which also became a great annoyance. So, the "main" interstates were routed straight into the cities, which, of course, partially defeated the original purpose of the Interstate System.
But as far as "city life" is concerned, it's NOT freeways that cause them to be less livable, it's idiotic, DEMOCRAT politicians, beholden to special interest groups and unwilling to do anything about urban decay and crime. What's the point in having a "walk-able" town when you'll get jumped anyway? There's a REASON folks LEAVE the cities, and the freeways did help that!
yeah but small towns were also served by rail before the interstate highway system, the problem is that rail access was also cut off leaving towns unserved as passenger rail declined in the 50’s plus old us highways were never grade seperated and were mainly 2 lands wide, so your argument is competelely invalid
This could have been so much more effective with a better script. The narrator starts with the premise highways are bad because they enabled people to leave cities. Breaking the railroad monopoly on getting crops to market was also bad. Building on the less expensive land and maximizing the results from tax dollars spent was bad thing. All of this bad was a conspiracy to do evil. It was designed for an echo chamber audience rather than being designed to reach people with a different view point and convince them to change their minds.
4:49 i know where this is it is in Chattanooga tennessee, I used to skate their alot
Yeah they did Atlanta wrong with 2 interstates converging right in the middle of it. They're trying to fix it though.
Only a rich country would think it is a good idea to tear down its own infrastructure. Or a foolish one. A highway can do something a street-level boulevard cannot do: allow a large volume of traffic to travel through at high speed, thus easing congestion and reducing travel time. You may have gotten rid of the highway, but you did not get rid of the need for a highway.
It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for them to start complaining about congestion, noise, long commute times and all the problems the highway was designed to solve.
Your argument is a tired one at best. Public transportation and freight rail are the solutions to moving large volumes of people and goods - in a far more efficient manner than freeways can. This isn't some pipe dream either; simply take a look at European cities, especially Amsterdam and Copenhagen. These are some of the best places to live in the world and it is because they have mixed-use zoning, combined with viable alternatives to driving, and safe, sane road design. Urban highways should never have been built, period. Cities are simply incompatible with high-speed car traffic cutting through them.
@@mikeamber2528 that is a narrow-minded view. What's worse, you seem to have inferred that I am against public transport when I never even implied that. What I said is that if you get rid of highways, you are creating problems which are not going to be solved by public transport. Stating that Copenhagen and Amsterdam are some of the best places to live is neither a settled fact nor a persuasive argument. It is an opinion, and you don't get a prize for having one.
Despite what people like you may think, private transportation is not going anywhere. Buses and trains can never offer the convenience, autonomy, privacy and sense of personal safety which a personal or family car can. You need highways to allow for mass transit within cities and between cities. A train can get you from one station to another, but it can never take you to your house. That is why it is stupid to tear down your own roads.
Nobody is suggesting getting rid of the idea of highways, just highways that disrupt urban fabric, which, by the way, many of these highways did by being used to tear down housing infrastructure in the first place. These highways have displaced over a million people and a ton of businesses as well and they don't even reduce congestion effectively. Effective public transportation is much better at moving large amounts of people and reducing travel time than personal automobiles. Also getting rid of the highway on its own does not get rid of the need for the highway on its own, yes, but it is a step in a larger process to reduce car dependency as a whole, so that the need for an inner-city highway gradually goes away.
@@oakblaze433
1. I did not criticise them for getting rid of the idea of highways. I criticised them for getting rid of an actual highway. You are the one who made that admission when you stated that this is part of a larger process to gradually make inner city highways go away. I'm just pointing out that doing so is stupid and counterproductive. By the way, have you or any of your fellow anti-highway crusaders consulted with the public to see if they want their infrastructure torn down? Or do you only talk to people who already agree with you?
2. Highways may have displaced over a million people (I'll assume you are telling the truth, but it really makes no difference), but I'm sure you are aware that much more than a million people benefit from using highways every day. Movement of people and goods is vital to an economy. Also, the government cannot just move you because it wants to. It usually has to go through a legal process which involves paying you a hefty amount of money for your troubles. So the cost-benefit ratio is firmly in favour of keeping the highways.
3. What exactly is "effective public transportation"? And what, if anything, makes it more effective than private transportation? I'm sure most car owners will attest to the effectiveness of their vehicles at getting them from their point of origin to their destination any time they want to go. They can also attest to the convenience, autonomy, privacy and sense of personal safety that their vehicles provide them. Can your "effective public transportation" provide these benefits? Once again, have you consulted with the public, or do you just want to impose your own ideology on people who are not interested in it because they can see it will make their lives worse?
Do you lefties ever stop and look at the results of your last moral crusade before you embark on yet another one? It seems to me that people who are responsible for the defund-the-police disaster among other things should have a little more humility and not be so quick to embark on yet another social engineering project.
why is my reply not being added
TIL American cities are removing their highways apparently
We had anti gravity since the 50s could imagine how much money we would have saved on roads it's trillions upon trillions
You should a video about Vancouver Canada. I think we’re the only major city in North America that doesn’t have a freeway cutting thru its downtown.
There is alot actually, alot of Canadian cities (accept for Toronto and montreal) Fort Wayne, NYC
What about highway capping, bro???
That's a tunnel. A short one perhaps, but the same thing essentially. It's way too expensive and only works well when the freeway occupies a tight corridor. Too many US cities have big interchanges alongside their cores.
It's going to be an unimaginably hard transition in the US, but it will have to come to terms with this fact: Cars do not belong in cities! Of course there will always be a need for some, but the sooner the better for your cities that the motordom mindset is defeated in favour of walkable communities, more safe cycling infrastructure and vastly better transit. The sprawl that cars induce rob cities of their vibrancy and make almost everything except minuscule pockets exceedingly dull, inconvenient and expensive.
I-280 in East Orange, NJ could use that.
to keep people in the cities dependent on public transportation
I would like JTB in Jacksonville to become a street level boulevard
just install tolls until you have the funding to remove the highways...
Removing highways from cities just gives me one more reason not to visit a city.
how do you only have 400 subscribers?