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Showing posts from October, 2010

We destroy to build... even today

5 Terrible U.S. Road and Highway Designs: Lessons Learned Lesson No. 1 ||| Don't Bulldoze Houses for Roads (L-R) The Cross-Bronx Expressway, New York City; The Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattle The Offenders: The Cross-Bronx Expressway, New York City; The Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattle To the 21st-century American, the idea of razing homes to make room for more roads may seem inconceivable, or at least dated. Our metropolises might be strangled with congestion, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a traffic engineer or highway designer who thinks more urban expressways are the solution. That wasn't always the case. In the immediate post-war years, massive highway projects reshaped vast sections of the urban landscape. In New York, whole neighborhoods disappeared, and more than 5000 families were forced to move when master builder Robert Moses ran the 8.3-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway, a vital link in his vision for a massive network of urban expressways, ...