As for the notion that expanding the interstate tangle and adding the sister bridge next to the Kennedy might bring more people and jobs into the city, I can only say that 40 years after the interstates supposedly started pumping life into Louisville’s downtown, the streets here looked pretty empty, especially at night. — NYT
Michael Kimmelman criticizes plans to add to Louisville's "Spaghetti Junction" by increasing the capacity of downtown highways and building a second bridge next to the Kennedy Interchange. He considers it especially foolhardy, in light of recent efforts in cities across the globe, to repair the damages done to their urban fabric, by postwar highways.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kennedy_Interchange_Photo_Diagram.JPG
If you want to bring more people into the city then perhaps there are other venues that could achieve that. First, if there are jobs, people will come. Lets simplify this. If you have a restaurant with shitty food, do you:
A. make a wider road to it in hopes of more customers or:
B. Look at the restaurant to see that there might be something wrong it? Maybe the chef is spitting in the food, or ingredients are bad, or....
I'd assumed Louisville was still making football bats. Or has that been sent to China too?
Yo!
They are baseball bats, and yes they still make them. The only reason the idea of putting the bridge to funnel downtown (along with three other bridges that already do this) is even an option is because all the rich people on the eastern sides of jeffersonville/louisville didn't want a bridge going too close to their mansions, thats also why indiana taxpayers will be paying for a billion dollar tunnel to go under a 'historic forest' a forest that was only granted historic status because wealthy people on the indiana side knew it would prevent a bridge, or at least hinder building a bridge there.... adding a bridge into downtown louisville should in no way be an option, there are already too many bridges going directly into downtown... and if they want more life in downtown lousiville... stop demolishing everything and putting up parking lots, those parking lots are worthless if tehres nowhere to go....
this is difficult.
i'm completely against the downtown bridge, the rebuild of what we affectionately call 'spaghetti junction', the tolls that will accompany these projects, and the negative impact all of it will have on our downtown. i thought this effort - http://8664.org/ - was brilliant, and i wish it had gotten some traction.
i'd also be all for a more useful public transit system. our city's configuration makes a clear transit network difficult, but a project proposed in the early 00's had promise before it got canned.
the problem is that investment in public transit will take monies from investment in highways and, to too many community leaders here, that diversion of funding is unconscionable. see, UPS and its whole host of warehousing, logistics, and distribution dependents that make up a big part of our local economy can't use public transit...
it's difficult to make this a design issue, because - from a conventional urban design standpoint, kimmelman is certainly right. but what urban design best practices would dictate and even what the citizenry would prefer is trumped by what the local economy requires to continue to grow. until we have something that could feasibly replace the huge impact UPS has on our economy, i don't see how highways and distribution infrastructure will cease to be our major public investment.
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