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On March 31st, President Biden unveiled his $2 trillion economic plan to "reimagine and rebuild a new economy." The American Jobs Plan aims to "invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race." During Wednesday's speech... View full entry
The aftermath of George Floyd’s death while in police custody has created a moment for radical truth-telling. So here’s some ugly truth about the city of Los Angeles: Our freeway system is one of the most noxious monuments to racism and segregation in the country. — The Los Angeles Times
Mattew Fleischer, Senior Digital Editor of The Los Angeles Times pens an editorial for the newspaper highlighting the indefensible, racist legacy of highway construction in American cities. Citing historical research regarding the ways in which highway construction and urban renewal... View full entry
“The bottom line is this: The way people get around, the way people live is going to change,” [Texas Governor Greg] Abbott said, according to the Rivard Report. “As a result, this generation of roads that [Texas Transportation Commission Chairman] Bruce Bugg is in charge of building is probably the last major buildout of roads we’ll have in the state of Texas, even considering the fact that Texas is the fastest-growing state in America.” — D Magazine
Might Texas finally end its long-running love affair with highway infrastructure? According to the state's Governor, Greg Abbot, it's a possibility. In a recent speech, Abbot, who is a Republican, expressed doubt that the state's current transportation regime can last much longer as the... View full entry
Fifty years ago this summer, word reached New Orleans that John Volpe, secretary of the Department of Transportation under President Richard Nixon, had canceled the Riverfront Expressway—the high-speed, elevated interstate highway slated for the edge of the French Quarter. — Nola.com
Tulane University urban geographer Richard Campanella pens a lengthy remembrance for the failed Riverfront Expressway, a Robert Moses-designed highway that would have cut New Orleans off from its historic waterfront and the Mississippi River. The epic struggle to turn back the highway was... View full entry
Since January 2000, more Americans have died in car crashes than did in both World Wars, and the overwhelming majority of the wrecks were caused by speeding, drunk or distracted drivers, according to government data. — The Washington Post
As the rise of deaths and injuries from automobile crashes continues unabated, the public's fascination and obsession with driving cannot be swayed. The Washington Post highlights data that points to a major cause for nearly all crashes: human error. "In automotive circles, it's... View full entry
Imposing tighter limits on leadfoots is a key part of the Vision Zero campaign for reducing traffic deaths and injuries, because of the dramatic safety benefits associated with reducing vehicle velocity. Does this add up to evidence that fast-paced Americans are ready to embrace the virtues of city life in the slow lane? — CItyLab
How fast is too fast? Cities like New York, Portland, Boston, and Washington, D.C. are initiating ways to regulate traffic speeds and install better signage to aid in pedestrian and bicycle safety. With the high number of reported traffic-related deaths and injuries only rising, cities are... View full entry
The United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has unveiled its annual list of "highway boondoggles," a list of "budget-eating highway projects" that will "harm communities and the environment, while likely failing to achieve meaningful transportation goals." The proposed North Houston... View full entry
The opening of I-95 in Philadelphia 40 years ago cut the city’s waterfront neighborhoods off from their source. For more than a decade, the city has been planning a fix: a new park at Penn’s Landing that would cap a stretch of the highway and again connect Old City with the Delaware River. — inquirer.com
A recent report from The Philadelphia Inquirer recaps the city's long-running effort to build a pedestrian plaza over Interstate-95 linking downtown Philadelphia with an existing waterfront park at Penn's Landing and the Delaware River. Designed by Hargreaves Associates, the proposed 4-acre park... View full entry
As part of a recently-opened exhibition envisioning the future of Paris's urban highway system, a team led by Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a dramatic, two-pronged vision for what the city's Boulevard Périphérique might look like in 2050. Ratti, working with research... View full entry
A proposed bridge over the 101 would allow mountain lions and other wildlife to cross safely over the freeway and improve their access to food and mates. — kcrw.com
Caltrans authorities working in Los Angeles County are pushing toward creating a $60 million wildlife crossing that will allow urban animals to roam throughout the region's mountainous geographies. The 165-foot by 200-foot crossing would span over US Highway-101 and Liberty Canyon in the city of... View full entry
Rodeo Road will be renamed after President Barack Obama, city leaders decided this week. But it’s not the first roadway in LA that lawmakers agreed to name after the 44th president.
In 2017, the state legislature approved a resolution to designate the stretch of the 134 freeway that runs between Pasadena and Eagle Rock as the President Barack H. Obama Highway.
A year later, however, there’s little evidence of that decision.
— la.curbed.com
A 3.7 mile stretch of road in Los Angeles, now called Rodeo Road, will be renamed Obama Boulevard honoring the country’s first African American president. Located in the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw neighborhood, the road was chosen for its significance in the black community and its relation to a... View full entry
If no one in 2018 would argue, as a young writer named David Brodsly did in 1981, that the "L.A. freeway is the cathedral of its time and place," or that it's the spot where Angelenos "spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives," as British architectural historian Reyner Banham put it with almost laughable enthusiasm a decade earlier, there's no doubt that both the practical and metaphorical meanings of the freeway continue to preoccupy Southern Californians. — Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne reflects on Southern California's ongoing love-hate relationship with its freeways. View full entry
The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been — The Guardian
Block a highway, and you upend the economic life of a city, as well as the spatial logic that has long allowed people to pass through them without encountering their poverty or problems. Block a highway, and you command a lot more attention than would a rally outside a church or city hall — from traffic helicopters, immobile commuters, alarmed officials. — the Washington Post
The article notes that, historically, highway construction decimated black communities, such as in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Oakland, and many other cities. In New York, Robert Moses explicitly used highways to clear "slums," in the process devastating parts of the Bronx and other black... View full entry
It would be helpful if there were another word for “infrastructure”: it’s such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not) and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers of information, in particular broadband...
The word “crisis” is also overused, applied to the unimportant as well as the crucial.
But this country has an infrastructure crisis.
— the New York Review of Books
Elizabeth Drew considers several recent books on American infrastructure, with an eye to both the material reality and the political system producing it. She concludes that fixing our infrastructural systems "may require even more widespread paralyzed traffic, the collapse of numerous bridges, and... View full entry
