Guest essay by Eric Worrall
President Biden’s infrastructure plan includes $20 billion to pour landfill into major access roads to cities, to eliminate racist community divides, reduce CO2 emissions, and revitalise inner cities by ensuring people who work in cities are incentivised to live near their workplaces.
Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities?
By Nadja Popovich, Josh Williams and Denise Lu
May 27, 2021ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Built in the 1950s to speed suburban commuters to and from downtown, Rochester’s Inner Loop destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, replacing them with a broad, concrete trench that separated downtown from the rest of the city.
Now, the city is looking to repair the damage. It started by filling in a nearly-mile-long section of the sunken road, slowly stitching a neighborhood back together. Today, visitors of the Inner Loop’s eastern segment would hardly know a highway once ran beneath their feet.
As midcentury highways reach the end of their life spans, cities across the country are having to choose whether to rebuild or reconsider them. And a growing number, like Rochester, are choosing to take them down.
In order to accommodate cars and commuters, many cities “basically destroyed themselves,” said Norman Garrick, a professor at the University of Connecticut who studies how transportation projects have reshaped American cities.
“Rochester has shown what can be done in terms of reconnecting the city and restoring a sense of place,” he said. “That’s really the underlying goal of highway removal.”
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The growing movement has been energized by support from the Biden administration, which has made addressing racial justice and climate change, major themes in the debate over highway removal, central to its agenda.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/27/climate/us-cities-highway-removal.html
According to Neighbourhood Scout, Rochester has double the violent crime rate of New York as a whole, around 7.5 violent crimes per 1000 residents per annum. So if you spend 10 years in Rochester, you have around a one in ten chance of being mugged or raped.
Obviously the source of violence is the sense of distance the drug psychos feel towards cashed up workers, who selfishly roll up their windows and race home to the safety of suburbs or small towns, locked in their armoured CO2 emitting gasoline powered four wheeled bubbles, when they could spending more time in the community, helping to build a better Rochester.
Ripping up highways, bringing down barriers, so everyone can mingle together. That’s what Biden and Buttigieg appear to want. I bet their vision for a climate friendly future even includes evening singalongs in the new parks which stretch where gasoline powered automobiles once raced down highways, like a permanent carnival where children can play and adults build bonds with other members of the community, over coffee and vegan snacks.
Obviously there are a few unanswered questions, like how the coffee and muffin ingredients get delivered if delivery trucks can no longer make it through the traffic snarl. But perhaps this is what Biden means by green jobs – an amazing new opportunity for teams of climate friendly bicycle couriers, who can unload delivery trucks at the edge of cities, and deliver goods the old fashioned way along all those new bicycle tracks. Or perhaps they will revitalise inner city metros, like the old Rochester subway (see above).
Are you feeling the love yet?
Any amount of money is OK?
I say you are a cheating Democrat that believes the end justifies your means! If it smells like smoke it’s straight from the pits of Hell and I’m smelling lots of smoke!!!
The COVID lockdowns and people working from home have dramatically changed the “going to the office to work” routine. Workers and businesses have continued to find ways to stay at home and work, and even work from new homes hundreds of miles away from former offices and never step foot in it again.
So decaying Blue Democrat-run cities like Rochester can try to force White Collar office workers to come back to the city for their jobs, but all they’ll likely do is give them and their employers even more incentive to stay as far awaya as possible.
I worked at a big plant back in ’80’s. Right across the street was a bad neighborhood. Car break ins and vandalism was a major problem. Then in the ’90’s the city built a freeway between the plant and neighborhood. Solved the problem.
Hometown pork for U.S. Representative Joseph Morelle to “help” small businesses in his district by destroying access and improving the lives of demolition companies hiring the lowest paid workers in underserved communities (where, as it happens, he is seeking even more federal largesse). Sens Schumer and Gillibrand also get a virtue backhander, claiming credit for destruction of critical infrastructure in order to save the poorest parts of the city. It hardly costs Joe anything, since he also gets a backhander for signaling support for the good Senators’ even less effective government waste to pretend to combat a hypothetical crime that is most likely to occur, if ever, in those same underserved neighborhoods of Joe’s district. Joe plead down (paywalled – see campaign violations on his wikipedia page) his earliest conviction for election fraud, admitting to what he’d previously had “no knowledge” of doing, but hey, its New York.
I’m convinced we live in a simulation and drunken, high ‘teenage’ aliens are running it.
Ahhhhhh………Koom by yar !!!!!!
Three bridges that desperately need replacing or to be supplemented with another bridge like they did for I-65 at Louisville. And another that should have been built already but isn’t. These are critical infrastructure projects that should have already been addressed but the people controlling the sock puppet in the Oval Office want to spend infrastructure money on the BS mentioned above.
One might suggest building tall walls about the Democrat run hell-holes.
Then fill them with water.
Was just about to mention the Rochester Subway; that highway was build in the subway bed. That subway was in the old Erie Canal route through Rochester abandoned ca.1913 replaced with the Barge Canal route south of the city. The Subway, which also served as a belt railway freight route around pat of Rochester might have worked better if it had been done earlier but pat of its downfall was it could only go where the canal did. Last run June 30, 1956–next to the last car line in NY state!
Oh, in 1911 the city had hired a consultant to recommend what to do with the soon-to-be-abandoned canal. He recommended building an arterial highway for motor vehicles in the canal bed–his idea was dismissed as a crackpot scheme!
Nate,
Thanks so much for reminding me, I’d forgotten that about Rochester. Should have known that the NYT had gotten it wrong by at least a century and a half.
Clearly the coffee and muffin ingredients can be smuggled in by pushers who always figure out how to get it done. I imagine Slo Jo & Ho see that as stimulating the economy.
Got to give the Thin (on brains) Man credit for following the demands of Agenda 21, which is to eventually destroy all high ways and isolate cities to only trains. Then the Wildlands Project moves in and isolates communities, forcing people to the cities. This is not enticing people to live in the city, it is to force them to move to the city.
100% this
I see evidence of Agenda 21/Wildlands Project in my area too. The amount of forest access roads, trails, and campgrounds that are being closed to human activity and left to overgrow in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains is scary. The process has greatly accelerated in the past few years. Far too much emphasis on preservation, rather than conservation. They will probably close so many roads and lands that everyone will be forced to move into the city center, not able to leave, travel, have privacy, or be self-sufficient.
Although this of course does not fit with the purpose of this site I cannot let this Memorial Day go by without comment. I will let President Reagan say it because he said it about as well as it could be said. Remember what those who kneel during the National Anthem are saying and contrast it to what those that have died in the service of our country said and how they said it!
https://youtu.be/QRJkj0YfakE
There is a reason why some universities demand its professors spend time
in the working world outside of academia and that is to improve their
ability and to keep them in touch with reality.
Roads, one of the prime developments allowing mankind to advance.
Easy peasy, just backhoe a trench across roadways every couple of blocks. Easily achievable fossil fuel consumption reduction…DC should set the first example….
Unintended consequences? Maybe they don’t announce them as goals, but when they are so easily foreseeable,how is it possible to say the Unintended Consequences weren’t Actually the goal?
At some point, stupidity Stops being cover for sabotage.
Snake Plissken is familiar with the concept of insuring that people live close to where they work.
It’s just one more of the items on The Great Reset agenda, beginning: no travel (save the planet – from what exactly and for whom is never spelled out); we ‘all’ live in cities (except the billionaires on their islands) and have everything delivered to us by drone, and we’ll be happy.
In other words, force people to live where the government wants them to, not where they want to.
I don’t buy the claim that roads destroyed cities. It was the welfare state that replaced fathers with welfare checks.
effing liars…
If the people of Rochester want it, they can pay for it. (And if any federal money paid to have the freeway widened last year in Henderson, everyone else has a right to be upset.)