infrastructural detritus
January 9, 2018 8:43 AM   Subscribe

"The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been." Unbuilt Cities: the outrageous highway schemes left as roads to nowhere
posted by everybody had matching towels (28 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Before this gets all New York City/Robert Moses-y: please make sure you look at the World's Largest Vuvuzela on the Foreshore Freeway Bridge, it is truly something.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:43 AM on January 9, 2018 [7 favorites]


Of all the mistakes made by city planners in the postwar era, the passion for highway construction has to be one of the most foolhardy. After the early success of systems like the autobahn and freeways, cities everywhere were carved up to make way for giant roads, crashing through neighbourhoods and creating opportunities for “comprehensive redevelopment”.

Wasn't a large part of building the national highway/interstate system the perceived need for high-speed routes connecting (and going through) cities in order to quickly transport military hardware across the country? An idea inspired by the military's exposure to the German autobahn system?
posted by Thorzdad at 8:53 AM on January 9, 2018 [5 favorites]


Not included in their list was the original master plan for CA SR 2 in LA. What now just ends awkwardly at Glendale Blvd. in Echo Park was supposed to curve towards the west cutting Silver Lake in half, then run along the Santa Monica Blvd corridor all the way to the beach. Also, it had a full interchange with the 101.
posted by hwyengr at 9:09 AM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


Wasn't a large part of building the national highway/interstate system the perceived need for high-speed routes connecting (and going through) cities in order to quickly transport military hardware across the country?

In general, the military wanted the interstates to go near and around cities, not through them.
From a military perspective, putting your main supply route through the middle of a large civilian population, one likely to become an easily located and bombed target is a horrible idea.

The first interstate plan was basically ring roads, some distance from a population center, with connections to local roads to service the cities.

The push for through routes and downtown freeways almost always came from local leaders and construction companies, who thought of interstates as car railroads delivering people and shoppers and money.
posted by madajb at 9:09 AM on January 9, 2018 [7 favorites]


The town near me was a hotbed of the freeway revolt movement in the late 60s/early 70s.

For the most part, it was a good thing, I can't imagine the town as laid out in the early transportation plan, it would certainly be a less pleasant place to live and work.

On the other hand, a lot of our infrastructure was laid out with an eye to that future.
The main expressway entrance to town, the river bridges, etc were designed to feed into a system that doesn't exist.
This leads to endless congestion and unnecessary delays as people still need to get places, but are unable to do so without often awkward routing.
Large portions of town were left with inadequate transportation connections.

Moreover, because the process was a long and brutal fight, there is still to this day an adversarial stance between certain parts of the community and the transportation departments, making even minor infrastructure improvements an epic battle.
posted by madajb at 9:23 AM on January 9, 2018


> Glasgow Inner Ring Road

"What if we just made the entire city a road?"
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:26 AM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


We've got a bridge to nowhere in our town, but it's tiny compared to these.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:44 AM on January 9, 2018


I35 through Duluth does this. It was supposed to go all the way to Canada, but stops short in town. It came down the hill in the 60s, dividing a bunch of (poorer) neighborhoods, before terminating, abruptly, downtown. It took a couple of decades to go the next couple of miles, underground (its actually pretty nice), and now stops, abruptly, at the entrance to London Road through Duluth's east end.

There is a lot of old money in that end of town - Glensheen mansion is there, and so on. And so the powers that be can't afford the eminent domain required to get through those last few miles of bourgeois excess to continue the freeway up the shore to Ontario.

So you'll do 55 and 4 lanes of traffic, until you get there, and then it's 30 and 2 lanes. I suppose the richies hope the congestion will convince hoi polloi to avoid that route to Canada and find some other way instead.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:44 AM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]


The push for through routes and downtown freeways almost always came from local leaders and construction companies, who thought of interstates as car railroads delivering people and shoppers and money.

And as tracks to put certain neighborhoods and people on the wrong side of.
posted by 7segment at 9:49 AM on January 9, 2018 [9 favorites]


Two more great examples: Seattle's rampus-interruptus at the west end of the SR520 bridge, now mostly demolished to make way for the new bridge, and, my favorite, the over-provisioning of roadway along Marine Drive south of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. This one is of historical significance because a planned freeway all along the Vancouver West Side waterfront was instrumental in catalyzing a scrappy, unknown organization called Greenpeace. Fortunately for Vancouver, Greenpeace was successful in blocking that plan.
posted by simra at 9:51 AM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


I35 through Duluth does this.

I still can't believe that they allowed the extension up to London Road. Aside from having to tear down the Lemon Drop, it really hurt downtown and that stretch of London Road south of where 35 now ends, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, and for little gain.
posted by Ickster at 9:54 AM on January 9, 2018


Not included in their list was the original master plan for CA SR 2 in LA

I'm typing this four houses away from Alvarado Blvd, which is now where all the cars go since the 2 doesn't connect. The entire area is a shit show most of every day, so the NIMBYs just made their lives miserable anyway. Although most of them are dead by now.
posted by sideshow at 10:04 AM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've been looking for more info on a planned highway for Lake Tahoe. Or rather, over Lake Tahoe, as The Range Podcast described it. Some terrible 70s plan. The closest I've found was a plan for a bridge across Emerald Bay, which while that would be pretty gross isn't quite the 10 mile concrete causeway I'm imaging in my horror dreams. I'm told the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency knows more but haven't looked it up.
posted by Nelson at 10:31 AM on January 9, 2018


When I was a little girl just moved to Milwaukee in 1973, there was a huge amount of land across the road from our flat on Cherry Street that lay fallow. Turns out the land was meant to become two freeways: the Park Freeway and the Fond du Lac Freeway.

The land was cleared of houses years before we came to the area, but the roadways were never built and that part of town was really poor when I lived there. I know today that some of it is parkland, and when I left for uni in the late 80s, there was talk of building apartment blocks on some of the land, but I have no idea if any of that has happened.
posted by droplet at 10:43 AM on January 9, 2018


The Spadina Expressway - know to locals today as Allan Road - is kind of a funny one. Jacobs is right, it would have destroyed communities. From the perspective of a person on the ground, it's a terrible place to build a highway. But on a map... it almost makes sense. Toronto could sort of use more feeders into the 401, well, it could have in the days before the 401 was mostly a round-the-clock parking lot. It certainly show how prescient Jacobs was because while I'm sure it would have seemed like a great road at the time (if we ignore the destruction of houses & communities) today it would just be another clogged highway making the 401 even busier.
posted by GuyZero at 10:49 AM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


Of all the mistakes made by city planners in the postwar era, the passion for highway construction has to be one of the most foolhardy.

As a former certified* planner, I feel compelled to dispute the notion that highway construction was driven by the passions of city planners. The construction was fueled by the availability of federal dollars for these projects. Had that money been available for public transportation, there would have been precious few of these "outrageous schemes".

*I let the membership lapse years ago.
posted by she's not there at 10:51 AM on January 9, 2018 [7 favorites]


The entire area is a shit show most of every day

Indeed. Once the rest of the highway was cancelled, the should have shut the whole thing down at the 5. A narrow local street is a terrible place to terminate a freeway.
posted by hwyengr at 11:38 AM on January 9, 2018


In downtown SF, the ferry building is a major tourist and local attraction. Right on the water, at the end of Market street. It's really nice. It used to be blocked by a large freeway. What happened to the freeway? the 1989 earthquake happened! Whole thing had to be demolished, and no one had the stomach to rebuild it. Now the area in front of the ferry building is a plaza and transit hub, with local artists and hawkers setting up tents most days.

Ironically the ferry building was one of the only things left standing after the 1906 earthquake- and while it's been rebuilt since, the damn thing does happen to have good luck during a good shake.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 11:45 AM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've walked over and across the freeway in Glasgow. It's uncanny that freeway development was allowed to happen.
posted by Annika Cicada at 12:11 PM on January 9, 2018


Related: Never Built New York is an exhibit at Queens Museum that looks at a multitude of ill-conceived and/or impossible projects across the five boroughs that never got beyond the planning stage. Catch it before it closes on February 18. Includes architectural plans and models of everything from floating airports to a weatherproof dome over midtown Manhattan.
posted by bassomatic at 12:18 PM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


We have one of these in Kansas City - though pretty small potatoes compared to some of those others . . .

It's just a little freeway overpass going from a field to another field, inaccessible from anything. Cost I would guess somewhere in the $10-$20 million range in today's dollars.
posted by flug at 4:24 PM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


In downtown SF, the ferry building is a major tourist and local attraction. Right on the water, at the end of Market street. It's really nice. It used to be blocked by a large freeway.

Just as significant (or moreso, depending on your perspective), the Embarcadero Freeway blocked your view of the City from the Bay. I grew up in the East Bay, but moved away before the Loma Prieta quake. I distinctly remember the first time I crossed the Bay Bridge into the City after the freeway came down, and being absolutely astonished at how beautiful the view of the waterfront was! I never realized what an eyesore the Embaradero Freeway was until it was gone.
posted by ogooglebar at 4:39 PM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]


Once the rest of the highway was cancelled, the should have shut the whole thing down at the 5. A narrow local street is a terrible place to terminate a freeway.

I mean, Glendale Blvd is 6 lanes across where the 2 feeds into it (but it is a cramped 6 lanes). The Glendale Blvd/Alvarado bit connecting Sunset and the 2 can be a mess, but I used to do a reverse commute from Silver Lake to Pasadena, and the 2 felt like my own private freeway most of the time.
posted by jjwiseman at 4:55 PM on January 9, 2018


The images are not as dramatic but I submit I-70, a 2000 mile highway that runs from Cove Fort, Utah to a park-and-ride lot near Baltimore, Maryland.
posted by TheLateGreatAbrahamLincoln at 6:33 PM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


Mt. Hood Freeway, which effectively raised up Portland’s neighborhood associations and gave us incredible public transit.

You can still see some of the spurs for this hanging off the few freeways in the city center.
posted by drfu at 11:30 PM on January 9, 2018


I have some friends who make an excellent series of videos called Unfinished London.
Here's Episode 2 on the North circular motorway in London.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 3:08 AM on January 10, 2018


The Spadina Expressway - know to locals today as Allan Road - is kind of a funny one. Jacobs is right, it would have destroyed communities. From the perspective of a person on the ground, it's a terrible place to build a highway. But on a map... it almost makes sense.

If they had built the Spadina Expressway, they would also have to have built the Crosstown Expressway to move traffic through the downtown core. (As the link states, the Bayview-Bloor exit from the Don Valley Parkway was actually the start of the Crosstown.)
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 8:49 AM on January 10, 2018


One other (possibly cynical) thought about expressway building in Toronto: it's possible that expressways stopped being built in Toronto because the proposed routes went through several upscale neighbourhoods:
  • The Spadina Expressway would have cut through the Annex (where, as the article pointed out, urban activist Jane Jacobs lived)
  • The Crosstown Expressway would have cut through Rosedale
  • The Scarborough Expressway would have cut through or cut off the Beaches
And, at the time that the Spadina Expressway was killed, the Toronto suburbs had not expanded to a large enough extent to enable suburbanites to outnumber downtown residents. So the suburbs didn't have enough clout to ram the expressways through.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 9:22 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


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