While Vancouver gets into conniptions over a kilometre or so of roadway and a bikepath through a park, this is how a city of about the same size does it in Germany.
The German city of Hamburg, the 2011 European Green Capital, has announced an ambitious plan to create and link an amazing 27 square miles of new and existing green space all over the city.
.
Including this:
A head start on the linked network may be provided by a plan to cap a two-mile stretch of a major freeway with woods, parks, trails, and garden plots for city residents. The green cap, which will also reconnect neighborhoods split by the freeway, will be over 100 feet wide and as much as ten feet thick in places.
I have recommended the same thing for 1st Avenue and the creation of a Venables greenway, but would note that Vancouver residents were wise to stop the creation of a freeway years ago that would have divided the city. Apparently Hamburg didn’t have such an activist citizenry.
Are you under the illusion that the overburdened surface streets of East 1st and 12th don’t divide the city just as effectively as an elevated freeway?
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what’s under the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, but my answer is “no” – surface streets that are part of the regular street grid, no matter how busy, just don’t impose that same kind of barrier. Especially 1st (west of Nanaimo) and 12th, which are only four lanes wide altogether. Yes, there’s a lot of traffic, but the city is contiguous across those streets and isn’t blighted by a dingy, oppressive concrete roof.
Also, judging from the illustration the freeway being “capped”in Hamburg isn’t elevated, it’s in a trench, which creates a much more impermeable barrier in a city.
What he’s talking about is the proposed 1970s freeway in trench in the Grandview Cut.
See drawings here:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost.php?p=4518723&postcount=128
There would have been some elevated sections through the Granview industrial area, but through the neighbourhoods, it would have been in a trench along the Grandview Cut with railroad below then followed the Malkin allignment to the viaducts (i.e. avoiding the current use of Prior St)