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There are plenty of cases where Freeways tore through existing residential neighborhoods, like I-94 in St Paul Minnesota, despite there existing an alternative through railroad industrial land.
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Mar 21, 2014 23:23
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FISHMANPET posted:There are plenty of cases where Freeways tore through existing residential neighborhoods, like I-94 in St Paul Minnesota, despite there existing an alternative through railroad industrial land. That happened too of course, but most in-city freeways either followed existing congested routes, went close along utterly industrialized riverbank/shore areas, or were routed through existing commercial/industrial land.
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Mar 21, 2014 23:33
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Install Windows posted:
No continous cross-Canada freeways? Trans-Canada Highway. Realistically, highway speeds do not affect emissions nearly as much as congestion does.
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Mar 22, 2014 00:50
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Jewcoon posted:No continous cross-Canada freeways? Trans-Canada Highway. Realistically, highway speeds do not affect emissions nearly as much as congestion does. Trans-Canada Highway is not even controlled-access all the way, let alone fully grade separated at intersections. How can you consider this a freeway?  
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Mar 22, 2014 00:56
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Given that most Canadian citizens live in a handful of cities that are well connected by air/rail travel and most freight is handled by railroads instead of freight trucks, why would Canada even need a controlled access cross-country freeway?
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Mar 22, 2014 01:12
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Install Windows posted:A ton of Canadian cities have also only recently grown to sizes where all-surface-roads systems can't handle the traffic anymore at that, where comparable size American cities had reached that point decades and decades ago and done the building while building was cheap. Plus there isn't any continuous cross-Canada freeways , or even freeways at all in large swathes of populated Canada. I don't disagree with you at all, I'm just saying that Vancouver isn't in an "extreme minority" for lacking freeway access to the city core, since it's in a country where that is very rare.
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Mar 22, 2014 01:15
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Varance posted:Given that most Canadian citizens live in a handful of cities that are well connected by air/rail travel and most freight is handled by railroads instead of freight trucks, why would Canada even need a controlled access cross-country freeway? Uh, Canada's intercity rail is actually really poo poo outside of the southern ontario/quebec axis (much like... America's northeast corridor!). Most cities outside southern Ontario/Quebec receive 2 or 3 trains a week in each direction. Not to mention the Canadian cities with good intercity rail are also the ones with freeways right to the core, like Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. The rest of that stuff, good air connections and most freight being handled by railroads is true of America. Yet America has freeways! PittTheElder posted:I don't disagree with you at all, I'm just saying that Vancouver isn't in an "extreme minority" for lacking freeway access to the city core, since it's in a country where that is very rare. It's not rare. Out of the 10 biggest cities in Canada, 7 cities have it! Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Edmonton, Mississauga, Calgary, and Brampton. And of the smaller ones that still justify being called cities, many also have it. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 01:33
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Install Windows posted:Uh, Canada's intercity rail is actually really poo poo outside of the southern ontario/quebec axis (much like... America's northeast corridor!). Most cities outside southern Ontario/Quebec receive 2 or 3 trains a week in each direction. Not to mention the Canadian cities with good intercity rail are also the ones with freeways right to the core, like Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Varance fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 01:39
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Varance posted:Given that most Canadian citizens live in a handful of cities that are well connected by air/rail travel and most freight is handled by railroads instead of freight trucks, why would Canada even need a controlled access cross-country freeway? We really don't. What we do need is more affordable rail travel. Going from say Vancouver to Toronto and back is easily a grand or more. Also a LOT of highways went through "poor" neighbourhoods (see: fairly successful black neighbourhoods) resulting in them being totally destroyed. Urban highways absolutely gutted many of america's urban black communities during the mid-cenutry. Most people were not fairly compensated for their land, structures, or businesses (which were under-valued by corrupt officials) and were shuffled off to these wonderful new "projects". Many could not qualify for mortgages or loans and countless well established black owned businesses and blocks were destroyed with little to no compensation. The highways were not specifically built to to gently caress with urban black neighbourhoods of course, they just happened to be some of the cheapest land and the locals were seen as easier to kick out. In many cases most of the neighbourhoods were left semi-intact, but the huge highway cutting through the middle slowly killed off the neighbourhood. Don't dismiss the effects of highways cutting through areas as "aesthetics", they have absolutely devastating effects on land values, business, and quality of life. This is why many cities are now trying to undo these mistakes by demolishing urban highways and tying the network back into the normal street grid. One of the biggest selling points for highway removal is "hey we can finally develop the land around the highway". Also, just because a route is congested does not mean it needs to be upgraded to a highway. This is very outdated mid-century urban planning thinking and something no contemporary schools of thought supports anymore. Provide better transit, make cycling more attractive, make walking safer and more comfortable, reduce the distance between work and housing, reduce or eliminate bylaws for offstreet parking. Anything but expanding car capacity! Congestion is often a good thing as is helps provide a "stick" to get people to drive less so long as the "carrot" of good alternatives exist.
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Mar 22, 2014 01:45
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Baronjutter posted:We really don't. What we do need is more affordable rail travel. Going from say Vancouver to Toronto and back is easily a grand or more. In America, the scale is biased toward road construction. Hell, look at what's going on in Congress with the highway infrastructure fund. Now we're going to start shoveling money from the general fund into roads on a permanent basis. Transit? Guffaw, what makes you think we can afford TRANSIT? The automobile is the ultimate expression of American freedom. Transit is not. Any questions? Varance fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 01:48
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Baronjutter posted:
Yeah, it does. You need to either replace it in place, or replace most of its load with a bypass route. No one wants to hang out around a solid mass of slowly moving cars getting exhaust all up in your face. Baronjutter posted:This is why many cities are now trying to undo these mistakes by demolishing urban highways and tying the network back into the normal street grid. One of the biggest selling points for highway removal is "hey we can finally develop the land around the highway". Which is honestly pretty silly, and tends to only get done with highways that were already about to fall apart or actually did fall apart. Despite how people sell it, most of them actually can't be replaced even though a lot of money might end up spent on studies. People talk a big game about doing it, in practice it's been what, a combined total of 39 miles of urban freeway over decades? Baronjutter posted:Also a LOT of highways went through "poor" neighbourhoods (see: fairly successful black neighbourhoods) resulting in them being totally destroyed. Urban highways absolutely gutted many of america's urban black communities during the mid-cenutry. Most people were not fairly compensated for their land, structures, or businesses (which were under-valued by corrupt officials) and were shuffled off to these wonderful new "projects". Many could not qualify for mortgages or loans and countless well established black owned businesses and blocks were destroyed with little to no compensation. The highways were not specifically built to to gently caress with urban black neighbourhoods of course, they just happened to be some of the cheapest land and the locals were seen as easier to kick out. In many cases most of the neighbourhoods were left semi-intact, but the huge highway cutting through the middle slowly killed off the neighbourhood. Don't dismiss the effects of highways cutting through areas as "aesthetics", they have absolutely devastating effects on land values, business, and quality of life. Despite how people hype it, this actually true of way fewer highways than people paint it as. It's not relevant to most cities.
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Mar 22, 2014 01:56
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Install Windows posted:
You're so close but missing what the actual solution is. (hint: it's build alternatives that don't involve cars) \/ no one's proposing to ban all vehicles, just not try to solve congestion with more roads, which is proven to just quickly fill up with more cars. "just build more roads and highways" is not good planning. Many of those places you cited as "needing" to be upgraded as highways in fact did not, they could have remained as they were and the city's transport patterns adjusted. Road congested? Take the subway. Of course that subway has to exist. You can just demolish a highway and tell drivers to deal with it, the alternative has to exist. But people won't use the alternatives if driving is too fast and convenient. The inconvenience of driving is one of the biggest pushes towards alternative methods. If you keep building more infrastructure to constantly keep traffic flowing you'll never change the mode share and you'll continue to promote development patterns that exclude ever adapting to another other modes. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 02:03
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Baronjutter posted:You're so close but missing what the actual solution is. (hint: it's build alternatives that don't involve cars) We do that. You still need highways. Like you have to be really ignorant of transportation needs to think you can just get rid of all road vehicles. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 02:07
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Baronjutter posted:It's poo poo like huge elevated highways (or worse, surface) that really destroy an area. Sunken highways are still nasty but at least you can cover them over eventually. Toronto has grappled with this for decades since they built what's the busiest highway in north america straight through downtown cutting off the core from the waterfront. Just want to point out that this is blatantly untrue. You're conflating the Gardiner Expressway (Elevated highway, "cuts off the city from the lakeshore") and the 401 (busiest highway in NA, located in the north of the City of Toronto). Toronto is debating tearing down the Gardiner, and actually has already eliminated a section of it where the traffic volumes simply did not warrant having the freeway and it's expenses. The 401 is the backbone of the entire freeway network of Ontario, running from Detroit to the Quebec border, eventually reaching Montreal as the A20. The 401 is a surface highway, up to 18 lanes wide, and is not ever going anywhere.
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Mar 22, 2014 02:58
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Baronjutter posted:no one's proposing to ban all vehicles, just not try to solve congestion with more roads, which is proven to just quickly fill up with more cars. Subtract a surface road, replace it with a grade seperated highway and the cars fill up some place else. Not to mention you can't ship freight around a city on a light rail vehicle.
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Mar 22, 2014 03:04
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Baronjutter posted:We really don't. What we do need is more affordable rail travel. Going from say Vancouver to Toronto and back is easily a grand or more. It's true. I just looked up the prices, and it looks like you're spending about $900 (USD) on roundtrip tickets by train, or about $800 in gas if you're driving a 25 mpg vehicle, or $600 on roundtrip tickets by plane, It's insane. What is causing prices to be so high? I mean the industrial age was built out of railways - and it didn't cost people three weeks' wages just to travel between cities. Kaal fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 03:04
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Kaal posted:It's true. I just looked up the prices, and it looks like you're spending about $900 (USD) on roundtrip tickets by train, or $600 on roundtrip tickets by plane, or about $400 in gas if you're driving a 25 mpg vehicle. It's insane. What is causing prices to be so high? I mean the industrial age was built out of railways - and it didn't cost people two weeks wages just to travel between cities. What's causing the prices to be so high? The fact there's barely any point to it, and it is primarily sold as a vacation in itself. Like I mentioned, they don't even run once a day. Additionally VIA rail gets lesser subsidies on its long-distance routes than Amtrak does. However, uh, train travel was actually very expensive for an average worker's wages in the past. Bob Average simply didn't travel because it was too expensive.
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Mar 22, 2014 03:14
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Long distance passenger rail is a very expensive mode in both the US and Canada due to how spread out the two countries are - running multiple trains a day isn't very useful because of long distances between cities. It's only really potent in areas with multiple cities within 100 miles of each other (i.e. Northeast Corridor, Great Lakes, Pac Northwest, California, Florida, Eastern Texas). This is further complicated in the United States, as the US railways demand $Billions in subsidies and one time payments to allow Amtrak/other trains to use their tracks. States rarely have the authority or clout to force railroads into fair deals or regulations that are more favorable to passenger rail, as that interferes with interstate commerce and is easily struck down in court. The Feds won't touch it because Capitalism. Smaller railways are more accommodating and may even run their own passenger rail. Some of the big players like CN, NS, UP and BNSF are willing to play ball. CP and CSX will tell you to go gently caress yourself unless you put a gun to their head or shove a billion dollars down their throat. Another factor is that roads and airports in both countries are subsidized way, WAY more than rail. If most turnpikes and bridges went back to the days of private toll operation (not that far off in some areas) and flyers had to pay the same style of "passenger tax" that the big railways charge (ahahaha, no), you'd see a huge shift in mode usage due to how much more expensive driving and flying would become. Varance fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 05:15
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Install Windows posted:It's not rare. Out of the 10 biggest cities in Canada, 7 cities have [freeway access to the city core]! Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Edmonton, Mississauga, Calgary, and Brampton. And of the smaller ones that still justify being called cities, many also have it. As someone who lives in Calgary, I can tell you for certain that we do not have such a thing. Not even close. So I'm curious as to where you got that information.
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Mar 22, 2014 05:50
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Toronto wants to tear down the Gardiner. Either that, or it will fall down due to lack of repairs and City Hall inaction on a replacement plan. If the Gardiner dies, there will be no freeway running directly into Downtown Toronto. DVP is close, but not quite. Spadina Expressway was never built to the south of Eglinton and likely never will. Brampton and Mississauga are glorified Toronto exurbs, also terrible. Neither have what most would call a proper downtown for their size - they have city centers that are basically a small cluster of municipal buildings and that's it. Both are working toward building proper downtowns so that Toronto doesn't continually steal the spotlight (same with the other GTA exurbs like Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Markham, etc.). Also, Brampton City Center is over 30 blocks from the nearest 400-series highway. Varance fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 05:52
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PittTheElder posted:As someone who lives in Calgary, I can tell you for certain that we do not have such a thing. Not even close. So I'm curious as to where you got that information. The map of Calgary.
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Mar 22, 2014 06:36
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I don't know what road you're looking at. The only thing even approaching a freeway inside the city is Deerfoot Trail (Highway 2), but it doesn't go into the core. The Trans-Canada (Highway 1) is not even remotely a freeway, and also doesn't go to the core. Then I guess there's Stoney Trail, which is an actual freeway, but it's literally a ring road.
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Mar 22, 2014 06:54
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Crowchild Trail and Glenmore Trail look solidly like freeways and Crowchild trail in particular gets very close to downtown, at least as close as freeways tend to do in most American cities.
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Mar 22, 2014 07:01
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Glenmore sort of is (free of lights, but 80km/h, terrible flow, nothing like a US interstate), but is at least 50 blocks from downtown. Crowchild is not a freeway at all. It's got a 60km/h speed limit at its closest approach to downtown, and it's covered in lights and at grade intersections.
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Mar 22, 2014 07:04
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The fact that they are referring to freeways/highways as "trails" seems almost blasphemous.
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Mar 22, 2014 07:10
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I kind of like it. The roads are all named after locally important things, and Deerfoot Trail sounds better than Deerfoot Route or Highway or what have you. The best one is Edmonton trail; despite running northwards in the general direction of Edmonton, it does not in fact go there, it just sort of dead ends. The joke practically writes itself!
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Mar 22, 2014 07:22
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The UK does have some motorways that go very close to the city centre/downtown areas, most notably Glasgow (M8) Newcastle upon Tyne (A167(M)) and Leeds (I forget the numbers). These were built during the 60s when motorway building was all the rage and, especially in the case of Glasgow, they took inspiration from American urban freeways. However only Glasgow (and Birmingham to an extent) actually connected their urban motorway(s) to the wider network. The other cities, including London, tried to but either finances or political will stopped it so now in most cases you get a fancy yet visually disruptive freeway style road (in the case of Newcastle even double decker) which obruptly ends and dumps everything onto surface streets making it pointless in a way. Even London flirted with the idea of having a network of urban motorways but had to stop part of the way through the first phase of the innermost section as people noticed it would actually go through some very well to do areas (it would've plowed through Chelsea & Kensington, for example) so that made it a huge political disaster. The interesting thing is though that the UK probably latched on to the car just as much as America did, with even the government focusing more of its resources to road infrastructure by sacrificing many many rail lines (BEECHING  ), but once many of the urban motorway schemes fell through they didn't really offer many alternatives after that. The only exceptions I can think of at the moment is Newcastle who invested in a metro system by converting old commuter lines and Manchester who have invested heavily in LRT since the 90s.
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Mar 22, 2014 08:16
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Even in cities where the motorway does not run right into the core it can be easier, more convenient and indeed common to use the ring road to travel within the city. Much faster to drive 2km to a on ramp do 10km on the motorway and another 2km to my destination than 10km of stop and go urban fabric to navigate through.
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Mar 22, 2014 10:23
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Where is this it looks lovely
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Mar 22, 2014 13:22
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thehustler posted:Where is this it looks lovely That's apparently Mattawa, Ontario on the main stem of the Trans-Canada through Ontario. MyFaceBeHi posted:The UK does have some motorways that go very close to the city centre/downtown areas, most notably Glasgow (M8) Newcastle upon Tyne (A167(M)) and Leeds (I forget the numbers). These were built during the 60s when motorway building was all the rage and, especially in the case of Glasgow, they took inspiration from American urban freeways. However only Glasgow (and Birmingham to an extent) actually connected their urban motorway(s) to the wider network. The other cities, including London, tried to but either finances or political will stopped it so now in most cases you get a fancy yet visually disruptive freeway style road (in the case of Newcastle even double decker) which obruptly ends and dumps everything onto surface streets making it pointless in a way. Yes, the UK essentially has all the downsides you can get out of urban freeway and even freeway construction in general, tethered with building them to be practically useless as a whole. And then once they halted building projects, they used the fact they had already spent so much money on the roads as an excuse to not do any alternative stuff. NihilismNow posted:Even in cities where the motorway does not run right into the core it can be easier, more convenient and indeed common to use the ring road to travel within the city. Much faster to drive 2km to a on ramp do 10km on the motorway and another 2km to my destination than 10km of stop and go urban fabric to navigate through. This is totally true.
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Mar 22, 2014 16:30
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thehustler posted:Where is this it looks lovely It's also super common. The Trans-Can, and other Canadian highways in general do that all over the place. It's a very different philosophy than the interstates.
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Mar 22, 2014 18:37
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Right, the Trans-Canada Highway is literally just the Canuck version of the US Route system.
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Mar 22, 2014 18:54
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Baronjutter posted:What percent of driving is ever even done at those speeds? Aren't most trips well under those speeds since they're in a city? Unless you're going on a trip to another city by car or live way out in the burbs when do you even get a chance to drive on a road that fast? Over the last couple of decades, more than half of kms driven on Dutch roads were by freeway. And in 2010-12, out of the ~185b kilometers traveled each year countrywide, >130b were by car, either as a driver or passenger. Baronjutter posted:I honestly didn't notice any in my travels in europe. Both Prague and Berlin have pretty extensive freeway(-like) roads going right through highly urbanised areas. Hell, the A100 through Berlin is the busiest freeway in Germany. Then there's the Boulevard Peripherique in Paris, the Ronda Litoral along Barcelona's coast, and stuff like this:  Antwerp is the fourth most congested urban area in NA/Europe.
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Mar 24, 2014 11:30
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Prague has a gently caress-off crazy amount of highway tunnels. I think they hold some tunnel record. I think they have some sort of "Speed" situation but with a TBM and just have to keep it going at all times.
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Mar 24, 2014 14:54
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Munich is planning to move one of its concentric ring roads entirely underground - they already did a large portion a decade or so back. I don't know if you'd count it as a US-style freeway, but it has entry/exit ramps and few if any signals, at least on the underground portions. There's some stuff about it on German Wikipedia here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesstra%C3%9Fe_2_R You can see all the Autobahnen terminate at the ring road, with smaller roads going into the centre.
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Mar 24, 2014 15:40
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Wolfsbane posted:Munich is planning to move one of its concentric ring roads entirely underground - they already did a large portion a decade or so back. I don't know if you'd count it as a US-style freeway, but it has entry/exit ramps and few if any signals, at least on the underground portions. There's some stuff about it on German Wikipedia here: I wish Americans had the skill to properly bore tunnels. There are so many in Europe, but they're so rare and fraught with difficulties here. So, here's a special treat that I think not even Kurumi has seen (and if you're reading this, it has the route and label for the CT 83 freeway): the I-84 Environmental and Joint Use Study from 1970. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByQzqtNM0WuFMWJvMDh0SmNOUUk/edit?usp=sharing (PDF, 29MB) In 1970, I-84 had recently been finished, and Hartford experienced a resultant building boom and a huge reduction in congestion. However, I-291 and I-484 hadn't been completed, and volumes going through downtown were already at 95% of capacity. The report notes that some stretches of the road were already at LOS D (oh no!). In anticipation of the city's continued growth, a consultant drew up plans for the corridor's development. It's very optimistic, to say the least. High points: - Back then, about half of the traffic on I-84 was expected to go to the CBD. These days, it's more like 5%. Clearly, they expected through traffic to use 291. - Only 2% of traffic on I-84 would've used the I-91 interchange. More like 30-40% now, since 484 was never built. - The report notes that I-84 isn't what divides the city in two - there was a deep divide long beforehand due to the river, railroad, and industrial zones. As an aside, the Busway has done more to divide the city than I-84 ever did, by severing Flower Street. - There's tons of brutalist architecture, including a monolithic monorail station built atop Union Station. - The assumption was that the city would continue to develop, whereas it ended up shriveling due to urban decay and congestion. And one more interesting note: if you ever read Robert Moses' report on I-84, he recommended building it on a northerly trajectory, explicitly to clear out the slums. This would've kept through traffic out of the city, too, and added a new river crossing, as well as provided room for a full 84-91 interchange, something we still lack. Funny how things turn out, isn't it? Edit: I guess this is pretty pro-freeway? The report talks about the aesthetic downsides, too - a lot of that architecture is meant to blend the concrete and steel roadway with the city surrounding it. Honestly, if that stuff ever got built, we'd probably need to double I-84's width - that's the real irony of the situation. Cichlidae fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Mar 24, 2014 |
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Mar 24, 2014 22:57
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Baronjutter posted:Prague has a gently caress-off crazy amount of highway tunnels. I think they hold some tunnel record. I think they have some sort of "Speed" situation but with a TBM and just have to keep it going at all times. Is it cheaper to build tunnels there than it is to build tunnels in the US or something?
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Mar 25, 2014 01:21
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The guy who wrote a book on Houston's freeways wrote a much less thorough but full of pictures
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Mar 25, 2014 03:41
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Cichlidae posted:High points: Do you know if the same assumption was made in Waterbury? Having only two lanes is a horrible bottleneck but it occurred to me that maybe everyone was supposed to get off at the local exits.
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Mar 25, 2014 04:00
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This probably belongs here: http://www.theonion.com/articles/city-planner-gets-halfway-through-designing-city-b,35611/ quote:City Planner Gets Halfway Through Designing City Before Realizing He’s Just Doing Philadelphia Again
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Mar 25, 2014 08:39
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