How exactly does the city and federal Government square this with their plan to build a huge (unwanted) freeway through the city and bulldoze multiple clubs and music venues?
Considering the US chose an interstate highway system in large part due to Eisenhower's exposure to the Autobahn during WWII, there's sort of a karmic quality to this.
The controlled-access highway system is a fantastic innovation for our automobile-based transportation system in America. It dramatically increases safety, fuel-efficiency, and throughput.
This issue is that the controlled-access highways should have never been placed inside cities, but that precludes the automobile becoming the de facto mode of transportation.
It's important to remember that many of Robert Moses's city-splitting projects were started before WWII. I suspect that some of the worst aspects of what resulted from his legacy were based on vain attempt to use suburbia as defense mechanism to better survive a nuclear exchange.
The irony is that the existing controlled access highways could be fairly easily repurposed to rail if we wanted to, it's just that the automobile addicts that we are would collectively lose our mind if we actually converted some of redundant urban highways into railways.
atlanta is trying to fix this by building a park over the interstate in the city center. Only tangentially related but it blows me away how ambitious the project is. The stated goal is for reconnecting communities on either side
It's a much-needed change, the side of Philly's Chinatown to the north of the freeway is clearly suffering compared to the south side. It's such a stark difference.
In Berlin there's a park, Westpark am Gleisdreieck, that occupies an old rail yard and covers up a rail tunnel underneath. I can testify although it still feels like the park is a dividing line between separate communities on each side, it's nowhere as divisive as an actual railway that you couldn't just walk over.
It's a widely recognized problem in the US - they built the highways through the politically marginalized communities. The Biden administration has a program to repair some of that, and I wonder if that's where Atlanta is getting funding.
I mean they have to figure that out now. IIRC, having the UNESCO status as concrete evidence to point to in the future to prevent situations like this, where the club scene has to make was one of the main reasons the Berlin has advocated for that status.
