“What do you mean, why’s it got to be built?” he said. “It’s a bypass. You’ve got to build bypasses.” Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast.
You can take this picture in just about any city in the US too. NYT did a pretty good piece about it, gifted so y’all can read it: Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities? www.nytimes.com/…/us-cities-highway-removal.html?…
I’m not American so I might not fully understand the repercussions of this. (houses being demolished and stuff)
But I honestly prefer the current version. It seems to have more green spaces. The highways could be shit, but if it meant better public transportation them I’m all for it (buses for instance). Maybe kill a few lanes and get a train going there or something…
I don’t know, the old layout seems very claustrophobic to me. The newer one seems to have more potential.
Edit: Upon reviewing the picture again, I think the previous version had a lot of parks that seemed “claustrophobic” but it’s just because it’s a B&W picture… So maybe I’d change my mind and go with the older one.
I haven’t checked the video yet (but I 100% will) but that’s absolutely how I feel too. I’m from Europe and the big cities are usually easily navigated without a car. Smaller cities maybe not so much BUT, you can still kindof easily walk to ride a bike somewhere.
I’m always surprised when watching American movies that there’s not sidewalk if you leave the city centers. That’s is absolutely incomprehensible to me lol I can walk from my city to the next 3 or 4 neighboring cities all by walking and using the sidewalk.
The scale is the issue. You won’t find many places in Europe where the next town over is over 100 miles (200 km) away. Get even 150 miles from the coasts in the US and you can easily find places where that is the case.
I don’t think that’s the case. My country is also big, cities are apart by hundreds of km. But our cities still are dense, there are (almost) no suburbs, and roads are not giants. In my city (2nd largest in the country) the largest roads have 6 lanes. There is only 1 street with 8 lanes. A lot of important busy streets have 4 lanes. Most streets have only 2 lanes.
There are still sidewalks (many streets even have more sidewalk than road), there aren’t huge parking lots everywhere, public transportation is everywhere.
Back when they built highways, they used them to segregate neighborhoods. Also, the US has dog shit public transit. Buses are terrible and trains are barely existent. The entire country is built around automobiles.
The notion that the US was built around automobiles is a goddamn scurrilous lie. It was built for walking and transit just like everywhere else, and then it was demolished for automobiles!
But I honestly prefer the current version. It seems to have more green spaces.
Those “green spaces” are worthless freeway medians that do nothing but attract homeless camps. Here’s a street view of some of it – complete with panhandlers and tents in the background – so you can see what I’m talking about.
Edit: LOL, nothing like downvoting a local for telling you the truth.
…comes across as disgusted, as if we can’t have the homeless out here visible. I’m all for helping them and have volunteered and donated accordingly, though I could do more.
A green, shaded spot to camp is a lot better than many homeless have it I’m afraid. Better than a freeway underpass if I had to choose personally.
Of course I don’t want to see homeless people there, because I don’t want there to be homeless people there. And you shouldn’t either! WTF is wrong with you, that you want people to be homeless?!
You’re the one advocating for them to be relegated to fucking freeway medians, not me!
I wanted the city to not close the Peachtree & Pine homeless shelter so that we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place!
You should be fucking ashamed of yourself for dishonestly trying to shoot the messenger for the grievous sin of merely pointing out the goddamn problem!
Nothing I said suggests they should be relegated there. I do not believe they should be driven out when they have no place else to go. Too many places want to break up their camps without giving them any alternatives… making them miserable so they’ll go elsewhere. I’m all for providing shelters and raising taxes to do it. As I said, I’ve volunteered working with the homeless many times when I used to work in and live near a downtown area. I hope to do more in the future though at the moment live a long ways away from an urban area to do so.
Nothing I said suggests they should be relegated there.
Bullshit. When I implied that it was bad for them to be there (an idea that’s nothing more than common fucking sense), you attacked me for it. You have been uncivil and accusatory to me from the very beginning. Again, WTF is your problem?
I don’t mind your guy’s opinion at all, that was what I wanted to know when I left a comment. I even started by saying that I’m not even a local precisely because I wanted the locals opinions.
You all went out of your way to downvote me though, I’m not even quite sure why.
Apologies; my edit was directed at someone else, then.
Still, I think your comment earned its downvotes because suggesting the vast wasteland of parking lots and freeway medians has “potential” while calling the walkable, human-scale devlopment it replaced “claustrophobic” is… frankly, just objectively incorrect. I’m not sure you realize just how zoomed-out the view is, but for the record, those two prominent horizontal parallel roads (Memorial Dr and Fulton St) are about 1/4 mile (0.4km) apart. That means if you’re trying to, say, walk from your house at the southeast corner of the image to the State Capitol just off the top of it, the majority of your journey is along a 5-lane stroad overpass above a busy freeway. It’s among the least-pleasant pedestrian experiences one could imagine, short of not having a sidewalk at all.
Yeah I see what you mean. I had to go on street view to get it. I hadn’t even realised that it was an overpass lol. Thought it was just a road but even so, it would be a boring walk.
With the old layout you’d have a more pleasant one through the neighbourhood and such.
Also about my initial comment, even though the parks looked claustrophobic to me, I said it was likely the black and white colors messing it up for me, and yeah we’re zoomed out a lot. Also, parks are almost never claustrophobic anyways, I just meant how it looked from above I guess.
they demolished a medium density neighborhood for highways so suburbs can commute in and out of inner city. when you destroy neighborhoods and create “green space”, people don’t just stop existing. they either get pushed to the suburbs if they can afford it, or (most likely) the ghettos.
and how does highway create public transit?
highway is a mechanism to separate the undesired that cannot afford cars. kill a few lanes and build trains would mean “those people” can reach “our neighborhoods”.
Those are the state government offices next to the Capitol building. It’s not actually a swastika, but if it can be mistaken for one it’s not a great look. 😬
Still, do you see how many trees there are? That place must’ve still looked nice and was certainly transformable into a really nice place without unreasonable effort.
Nah not really, such low population density requires cars to be used. If you think tearing that down would be simple, then yes. But I think that even in Atlanta that would be difficult. The reason why those highways are there is that more people wanted to live in that kind of neighborhood.
such low population density requires cars to be used
As someone living in a much less dense area, I wholeheartedly disagree. Even just a single tram stop with >=bi-hourly frequency near the center could make that entire area car-free if the people weren’t car-brained. That area looks like it’d be bikable in <10min side-to-side, so most people could probably even walk to such a tram stop.
(That tram would actually need to go somewhere but that’s part of a larger system’s problem, not of this hypothetical neighbourhood.)
First of all, I am sure that is part of something much larger and it is a real neighborhood, not something hypothetical.
Second, I don’t see people giving up their car brains just because you put a tram. I myself would still be using a car if it wasn’t made completely superfluous and fatiguing where I live and work.
I am sure that is part of something much larger and it is a real neighborhood, not something hypothetical.
I’d agree but I don’t see how that makes a difference. My point was that the visible part could be served by even just one tram station. If there are more such parts, you’d obviously need tram stops for those aswell. (More tram stops would realistically be necessary anyways.)
I don’t see people giving up their car brains just because you put a tram.
Me neither. Point was that it’d be possible for those people to reasonably get where they need to go without any cars involved with as little infrastructure as a single tram stop.
The reason why those highways are there is that more people wanted to live in that kind of neighborhood.
No, those highways are there because white men got together and intentionally chose to put the highway there with complete disregard (or quite possibly, with malice) for the people who lived there.
That’s what I was thinking. Neither solve the problem. The 1950s one just resulted in bigger traffic jams. What solves the problem is robust public transportation.
No, the 1950s version (actually more like 1900s; those houses were already decades old at the time they were photographed) was good. It was a traditional street grid with small blocks, and there were streetcars going all over the place. Sure it was mostly single-family (probably with more than a few duplexes sprinkled in), but it had great bones for densifying later when demand justified it.
I live only a few miles from the area pictured, in a neighborhood with the same development pattern. Even though it’s been damaged by the removal of the old streetcars and having zoning superimposed upon it after the fact (which causes problems by mandating things like too-large setbacks and minimum parking requirements, as well as outlawing corner stores within residential areas), it’s still mostly fine.
How do roads even end up like this? The cloverleaf is as extreme as I’m willing to drive through. If anything like this came up in Google maps for my drive I would just nope on home.
Yeah they only seem complicated from the air, on the ground you just read the signs and it’s always clear, or if you’re using your phone - just go in the lane it tells you
Engineer answer: being a stack interchange, it’s actually easier to navigate than a cloverleaf because there’s only one exit in each direction instead of separate “A” and “B” exits with an entrance ramp and weaving in between. The complexity in this case simply comes from the fact that it’s superimposed on top of what used to be a street grid, so they added a bunch of exits to local streets.
Big-picture answer: the desire to put freeways there in the first place is the product of mental illness.
People from Atlanta really love to gatekeep the city, though. You live ITP? You live in Atlanta. OTP? You live in some redneck shithole whose name isn’t worth remembering.
It’s a distinction that matters. The fact that the City of Atlanta only makes up 1/10 of Metro Atlanta (by population) and that the rest of the metro is Balkanized into dozens of different jurisdictions is a substantial cause of a lot of the fragmented city planning and other related problems we have around here.
As another said, that’s not spaghetti junction (Tom Moreland interchange), but frankly people get pretty fast and loose with how much of the surrounding area they’ll call ‘Atlanta’ anyway. The actual city of Atlanta proper is much smaller than most people would think by just looking at a satellite photo, and the distinction between the many cities usually doesn’t matter much unless you live there.
There are still some chucklefucks who want to build I-485 (tunneling under the rich white neighborhoods north of I-20 and bulldozing straight through the poorer and blacker ones south of it, of course).
And Cities Skylines massively fudges things by treating cars Jetsons-style (take up negligible space when sims get to their destination). If the game accurately modeled parking, it would be way worse (and no longer fun to play, which is why the developers didn’t do it).
Cities Skylines 2 fixes this a little, there’re actual parking lots built into businesses and extra parking lots you can build. The scale is still a little funky, but it’s more in line with the general scale of the game now.
And in Cities Skyline you can just pause time, delete and fix a bunch of shit, and continue. Instant and nobody complains that you just bulldozed their house.
I think highways would look nicer if real city planners had the ability to redesign everything vs add on pieces over time.
When you bulldoze houses in skylines and unpause you’ll notice your population goes down. Because they were inside the houses. That you bulldozed. Have a good day!
Nope, they’re temporarily not counted as residents because they’re enjoying an all expenses stay in the swankiest spot in town as they await their new construction!
Add comment