Having some trouble swallowing this paragraph:
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The richest metropolitan areas in the US are San José, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington, Houston, New York, Portland, Hartford and Salt Lake City. Areas with relatively few urban highways are overrepresented in that list, with Houston being the one big exception.
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When I need to get anywhere in New York, most of the time I am better off grabbing the west side highway or the FDR rather than going through the grid and hitting traffic lights and gridlock constantly. So that's two highways, one on either side of a 2.3 mile wide (at most) island and then 95 crosses it at the top.
San Francisco similarly has elevated 280 and 80, and 101 mostly on the ground with some lights slowing it. At least SF is much bigger than Manahattan for similar amount of highways to help his point.
I get the feeling he just isn't from the US and doesn't know anything about our cities, though, so that paragraph is just way off.
With respect to San Jose, it's a crock. The only remotely "urban" area is downtown, and that is fully served with highways (880, 280/680, 87). Light rail is a joke, with routes having been chosen for political reasons rather than true demand, and it is useless for transporting goods.
This article, like many on the topic, also take a one-dimensional view of highways -- as people movers. The flow of goods and services (especially emergency services) is at least as important. Throughout the Bay Area, highways are critical infrastructure just to move goods and supplies, if nothing else. 880/17 in Oakland became a chokepoint after the 1989 earthquake took down the Cypress structure, for example, and that would have been even worse had 980 not been completed not long before.
FWIW, the sentence quoted above says that cities with fewer urban motorways are overrepresented in that list of the richesty urban centres, it doesn't say every city listed meets that criteria.
The article also discusses goods and services in the case study it's looking at - comparison between the Montreal subway and highway built for the Expo. i.e. about how moving passengers onto underground subways leaves more space for movements of goods or services on the surface. A similar argument applies to any shift towards more space-efficient modes of transport for passengers.
Also, I don't quite see the argument on emergency services. Inner city highways/motorways are mostly for moving from the centre into and out of the suburbs. Emergency services need to go from any random point to the nearest hospital, which is a different thing. Sending hundreds of thousands of highly space inefficient cars into city centres (which have a fundamental limit on street space, and their capacity to handle traffic) is highly likely to increase congestion and make it more difficult, not less difficult, to move around on the surface streets from one point to another in the centre. You'd have to introduce some congestion charging system, or perhaps bus lanes, otherwise building the road is likely to make the situation worse.
Where highways really shine is in moving goods into and out of cities. If you have high-volume industry in the centre of a city, or for instance a port, you clearly need some way of getting the inputs and outputs into and out of the city. But there does seem to be a continuous, long standing trend of moving this kind of infrastructure out of city centres. Modern container ports and factories need greater economies of scale, and tend to be situated on the outskirts of, or outside, cities where land is cheaper. And Western economies are moving more towards services rather than manufacturing. A big part of this debate is about what a city is for, and how to reconcile that with changes in transport and industry.
"it doesn't say every city listed meets that criteria"
But it does list San Jose first, implying that it is (most?) representative.
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"Also, I don't quite see the argument on emergency services... Emergency services need to go from any random point to the nearest hospital"
Exactly! And what is the fastest way to the nearest hospital with an open emergency room (let alone a real trauma center) in such areas? I don't know, but I assume that most cities lack real hospitals within fast access of downtown by surface streets (due to traffic, if not also distance). In the San Jose case, you're talking VMC, which would be 20+ minutes away by surface streets but maybe 8 minutes using 280.
In San Francisco, the only hospital South of Market is SF General. (Technically South or East of Market, but SOMA is a well-known term).
Excellent point. To that end it appears that 101 is much heavier on "move goods and services" than 280. (which makes sense because it is a much more direct route up and down the peninsula, whereas 280 is a much more pleasant drive.
Trucks are big but are dwarfed by the number of single-occupant passenger cars. Other models that work well are freight trains and local trucks, without huge highways. Surface streets work fine for emergency services if they aren't clogged and hospitals are well distributed.
And two of those highways (87 and 280) are pretty decent sized barriers between neighborhoods and downtown. Ever try walking from Diridon to SJSU or the Federal Building? There's also a lot of historic housing south of SJSU cut off by 280.
Diridon to SJSU is straight down Santa Clara St. I'm missing something with that example. That stretch of Santa Clara is more walkable than before 280 existed... if you wanted to walk it then.
Significant portions of 87 and 280 ringing downtown San Jose are elevated. That doesn't spell critical infrastructure to me, in event of an earthquake.
When I think of major US cities that are under-served with urban highways, the one that immediately comes to mind is Baltimore (granted, I-95 goes thru, and I-83 (81?) dead-ends near downtown, but otherwise good luck).
For the ones he's mentioned DC's got big sections that aren't well served by highways, but there is still the beltway, the BW parkway/I295, I395, the southeast freeway. I don't know Hartford that well, but it's got two major interstates going thru.
I wonder what "relatively few" means, and what some examples of cities with "relatively many" highways would be.
> When I think of major US cities that are under-served with urban highways, the one that immediately comes to mind is Baltimore (granted, I-95 goes thru, and I-83 (81?) dead-ends near downtown, but otherwise good luck).
I-83 ends downtown. There's also 695 (the beltway), 395 (from 95 to the stadiums/downtown), 895 (Harbor tunnel), and 195 (BWI airport connector).
It's never felt underserved highway-wise to me, but I've never actually lived there, just visited a lot.
When I need to get anywhere in New York, most of the time I am better off grabbing the west side highway or the FDR rather than going through the grid and hitting traffic lights and gridlock constantly. So that's two highways, one on either side of a 2.3 mile wide (at most) island and then 95 crosses it at the top.
San Francisco similarly has elevated 280 and 80, and 101 mostly on the ground with some lights slowing it. At least SF is much bigger than Manahattan for similar amount of highways to help his point.
I get the feeling he just isn't from the US and doesn't know anything about our cities, though, so that paragraph is just way off.