Vancouver wasn’t the only city fighting off freeways in the late 1960s. The Map Scroll reviews “failed efforts to destroy urban America” – like these ones in San Francisco:
“In the face of public pressure, which began as early as 1955, more than 80% of these roads never got built …”
There’s also an update that links to the story of all the proposed freeways (conceived by New York’s Robert Moses) for Portland:
The red ones got built; the green ones were thwarted.
Better yet, check out this 12-minute video on “The Defeat of the Mt. Hood Freeway” by Streetfilms:
Even Calgary had a massive downtown freeway plan that never saw the light of day. The ‘Downtown Penetrator’ as it was called:
http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=77ab7b3a-2819-443d-abb3-db9dba5b9bad&p=1
I honestly just can’t understand why anyone would want to build that many freeways. It gets to the point where it’s crushed and destroyed so many homes, so who’s going to drive on them? There’s so little space between them that it’s absurd even from a freeway lovers point of view.
Still, I think the Downtown Penetrator is an apt name for a freeway.
There’s another great map of San Francisco’s once and future freeways at http://sfcityscape.com/maps/freeway_revolt.html which is also a great source of all manner of information on things urban, transport, and San Francisco.
And there are a bunch of never-built freeways that would have crosscut Manhattan. One of them, the Lower Manhattan Expressway would have gone over Canal street. I can’t imagine what China town would have been like had this actually been built.
Great pics here:
http://www.oldnyc.com/lomex/contents/lomex.html
There was another one planned between the Lincoln tunnel and the 59 St Bridge. Also, another for the Mid-town tunnel and somewhere on the westside.
Not sure why it was never built, but I don’t think it was specifically because of opposition to the roads.