An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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COMING DOWN
John Norquist (CEO of CNU) explains, from an economic conservative’s point of view, why urban freeways are coming down:
NAC: What about funding? Your tenure as mayor has been described as fiscally conservative, which makes you something of an anomaly among urbanism fans and advocates. What do you think is the best way to fund large-scale projects like urban highway removal?
JN: Well, they’re smaller-scale than rebuilding the highway. Particularly if it’s an elevated freeway, it’s going to cost a lot of money to rebuild. A lot of freeways are headed beyond their design life, so they have to be rebuilt. You can’t just resurface them again. It’s cheaper to just tear it down and replace it with a surface street, so you win the cost argument by comparing it with rebuilding the freeway. …
There are a whole bunch of projects pending where there’s some real good opportunity to have more success in tearing down freeways. Basically, freeways don’t belong in densely populated cities. They create more problems than they solve. They’re very expensive, so almost nobody’s building new ones. That tells you that they’re sort of doomed: When you’re not doing new ones, you’re going to eventually have to remove the old ones.
More here in Next American City.
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COMING DOWN AND GOING UP
Be still my heart – a whole issue of Seattle Magazine devoted to transportation. Something to enjoy over your coffee.
A comprehensive guide to what’s really slowing the Seattle commute. Plus, encouraging updates on the transportation transformation already underway around Puget Sound.
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THE COST OF BAD GRAMMAR
The Priceonomics price guide shared data with The Atlantic on the best markets for expensive, cheap, big, small and foreign cars – here – and included this rather fascinating note:
… using incorrect grammar appears to have an economic cost (in the resale market):
