In real-estate terms, that is.
Steve Mouzon picks up Charles Marohn’s theme: Auto-oriented design produces a lousy return on investment. It’s wasteful – and we can’t afford it.
Only he has a few other cities for illustration, namely Florence, left, and Atlanta, right:
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The need for speed devours huge chunks of American cities and leaves the edges of the expressways worthless. Busy streets, for almost all of human history, created the greatest real estate value because they delivered customers and clients to the businesses operating there.
He first analyses why expressways need so much room (eg, faster roads need wider lanes; an 8 foot lane can handle 20 mile per hour traffic, but at highway speeds, you need 12 foot lanes.) And then nicely illustrates how valuable acreage and frontages are extinguished of value, using as illustrations Seaside, FL, where all frontages have value:
And, by comparison, Miami:
Conclusion:
How can we afford to pay so much and get so little? Cities really do need to rethink their infrastructure priorities. We are beyond the point where we can spend enormous sums of money with little or no return. Municipalities, from cities to towns, villages, and hamlets, all need to take a careful look in the mirror each time they want to spend money and ask themselves: “What is the return on this investment?”
I like these comparisons, similar to the great ones Alan Jacobs did in Great Streets (Venice-Irvine CA was particularly notable), but they do compare apples with oranges to some extent. No doubt the freeway interchange example from Atlanta slices through the centre of the city or close by, but European freeways are almost as wasteful of space. If you go to google maps/earth and scan south from central Florence a few kilometers you come to the route of the Autostrada del Sole (A1). This divided toll highway is situated out in the country and largely bypasses the built up area, but note the fairly extensive cloverleafs and ancilliary auto oriented development at the interchanges. Kind of like Vancouver, another city ostensibly without freeways.
The diffenence between most European cities…and to a certain extent Canadian cities versus most American cities is the freeways do not go into the city proper. Although freeways are cleary bad for ‘cities’ they are needed between cities for inter regional mobility.
And with the construction of the freeways came destruction of neighborhoods, In Atlanta’s case it cut through the vibrant black community where Martin Luther King grew up and lived to his death. The freeway construction was mentioned a few times describing the history of that community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Auburn
Sweet Auburn was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.[2][10] However, like so many other inner-city neighborhoods, Sweet Auburn fell victim to lack of investment, heavy, widespread crime, homelessness, and abandonment, compounded by construction of the Downtown Connector freeway that split it in two. In 1992 the National Trust for Historic Preservation recognized that it was one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places and, in 2005, the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation included the area in its 2006 list of Places in Peril. The Historic District Development Corporation (HDDC) was formed to turn the trend around, starting with houses surrounding the birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and working outward.
The other piece missing from the equation is walkability. Atlanta has great green spaces that require a car to access. Downtown businesses have fled to the suburbs. Lucky on my last visit three months ago there was a Science Fiction Conference in town, and the downtown streets were populated with ….aliens walking on the sidewalks.
By applying the walkability parameter you promote sustainability, sociability, and directly address obesity. We need to think about walkable places to go and through, with lots of visual interest at a walking pace.