Originally posted on April 29, 2010:
Louisville is at a crossroads. The ORBP represents previous generation's inability to overcome powerful special interests. Now is the time for 8664, the right vision for future generations.
Credits: Bob Hill, Gill Holland, Paul Coomes, Earl Jones and more.
Read the Time to accelerate freeway removals? article on citiwire.net. It concludes:
"The timing, as the nation turns away from far-out sprawl and more to center cities, should be perfect -- atoning for the last generation's racially-tinged land seizure, making use of prime urban land to create livability, and opening up choice new economic development sites."
According to St. Louis Business Journal article Most Arch Design Teams: Remove I-70 Downtown, 4 out of 5 of the groups in a design competition recommend rerouting I-70 away from downtown as proposed by the City to River advocacy group. Link to Google Maps showing I-70 across St. Louis' waterfront.
While Louisville struggles to break free from an inbred political system that answers to special interests, other cities like St. Louis are moving forward with exciting plans to embrace a more livable and sustainable future.
This afternoon on NPR's Marketplace, Andrea Bernstein reported from New York City where there is growing momentum to remove an elevated portion of the FDR Drive.
You can listen to the piece by clicking here. Click Listen Now and go to 22:10. You can also view the Photo Gallery Slideshow.
The piece concluded:
"But around the country, mayors and governors are eying urban highway teardowns as the road to development, not congestion."
Except in Louisville, KY where outgoing Mayor Jerry Abramson has been aligned for decades with a special interest group to stop the East End Bridge.
Louisville needs to change. Louisvillians are ready for change. It's time!
"For more than a decade, a plan pushed by some [Louisville] residents and transportation advocates has sat on the fringes of the State Transportation Department's to-do list, in part because it would be a radical undoing: tearing down [I-64 on Louisville's riverfront]."
OK, so we made a few changes to the NYTimes article. It's just a matter of time though. We'll get there. Read the article.
The article about the "Our Cities Ourselves" exhibit in New York City begins:
"Imagine no cars -- or fewer, anyway.
In New York, a two-mile stretch of the FDR Drive parkway is torn down to open lower Manhattan for parks and plazas, and bicyclists are given their own lane on the Brooklyn Bridge.
An elevated highway in Guangzhou, China, is transformed into a pedestrian promenade and rooftops are linked by raised walkways and bikeways."
--
"A year ago nobody thought you could close Broadway," he said. "But suddenly it's closed, and everyone loves it."
Read more
The "mainstream" media is covering how the best and brightest thinkers are looking at cities in new ways to make them more human-scale and environmentally sustainable. Our latest video discusses some of these issues, but Louisville's political leadership is too entrenched with the anti East End Bridge folks to do the right thing for our future. Who are you going to vote for to lead Louisville? Are they going to do the right thing?
Thanks to WFPL's Gabe Bullard for bring the Infrastructurist post "What does "Livability" mean to the US Government?" to Louisville's blogsphere. Incredibly, US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood thinks Livability has something to do with using your feet.
Waterfront Park's "Great" Lawn (ROLLOVER PHOTO)
ORBP's plan would make I-64 50% wider than it is today - that's 75 feet wider. Also notice that the rendering doesn't include a shadow, but if constructed -- planned to be 10 feet higher than its current height -- the shadow from I-64 will cover the majority of what we now call our Great Lawn.
Slugger Field
The new Spaghetti Junction ramps will be at least 35 feet above the ground and plow right through Slugger Fields parking lot. The ORBP's current rendering of the above ramps show them avoiding the Slugger Field's parking lot, so we've requested accurate renderings.
Click the link below to see what happens to the Xtreme Park and more.
From today's USA Today article:
"The resurgence of downtowns has turned available pieces of land into hot commodities. At the same time, the drumbeat for more parks in smog-choked cities is getting louder.
"It's essentially like creating oceanfront property," says Linda Owen, president of the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation in Dallas. "It's an economic engine."
(C) Gannett Co. Inc., owner of the Courier-Journal
It is hard for some people to imagine what Louisville's waterfront will look like when aspects of 8664's vision are adopted. Originally, we hesitated to illustrate our plan, because we felt the specifics should be determined by an open community dialog whereby urban planners, park designers and transportation engineers take citizen input to create the best possible solution. That is still what needs to happen. But some people have intentionally misrepresented our plan by suggesting that the parkway would be eight or ten lanes wide or that it would create a dangerous obstacle to access Waterfront Park. Malarkey!
This project should be used as a model for how community decisions are made. It's not up to politicians or road builders, and it's not up to us. It's a collaborative process that leverages the best and brightest ideas available. To that end, we can look to other national examples of freeway removal to help us visualize what our Waterfront Parkway might look like. Portland, OR was the first national example, so let's take a look at what their parkway looks like today:
Click the link to read more.
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