$ 20 billion to tear up highways, scale back local weather change and the divide brought on by street visitors – what is the level?
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
President Biden’s infrastructure plan calls for $ 20 billion to fill landfills in key access roads to cities, eradicate racial divisions in the community, reduce carbon emissions and revitalize inner cities by ensuring that people who work in cities, be incentivized to live close to their workplaces.
Can Removing Highways Repair America’s Cities?
By Nadja Popovich, Josh Williams and Denise Lu
May 27, 2021
ROCHESTER, NY – 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 wide concrete moat that separated downtown from the rest of the city.
Now the city is trying to repair the damage. It started with filling in nearly a mile of the sunken street and slowly sewing a neighborhood back together. Today, visitors to the eastern section of the inner loop would hardly know that a motorway once passed under their feet.
When mid-century highways reach the end of their lifespan, cities across the country will have to decide whether to rebuild or rethink them. And a growing number, like Rochester, are choosing to tear them down.
To accommodate cars and commuters, “many cities basically self-destructed,” 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 to reconnect the city and restore the sense of place,” he said. “That is really the underlying goal of freeway removal.”
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The growing movement was stimulated by the support of the Biden government, which has made the fight against racial justice and climate change major issues in the highways removal debate.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/27/climate/us-cities-highway-removal.html
According to Neighborhood Scout, Rochester has twice the violent crime rate of New York City as a whole, about 7.5 violent crimes per 1,000 people per year. So if you spend 10 years in Rochester, you have roughly one in ten chances of being mugged or raped.
Obviously, the source of the violence is the sense of distance the drug psychos feel from cashed workers who selfishly pop their windows and run home to the safety of suburbs or small towns trapped in their armored carbon-emitting, gasoline-powered four-wheeled bubbles could spend more time in the community helping build a better Rochester.
Tear open highways, break down barriers so that everyone can mingle with one another. Biden and Buttigieg seem to want that. I bet their vision for a climate-friendly future even includes evening singalongs in the new parks where gasoline-powered cars once raced along highways, like a permanent carnival where kids play and adults connect with other members of the community over coffee and coffee can vegan snacks.
Obviously, there are a few unanswered questions, such as how the coffee and muffin ingredients will be delivered when vans can’t make it through the growling of traffic. But maybe that’s what Biden means by green jobs – an amazing new opportunity for teams of climate-friendly bike couriers who can unload vans on the outskirts of cities and deliver goods the old-fashioned way on all these new bike lanes. Or they will revive the downtown subways like the old Rochester subway (see above).
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