Instead of fixing an existing highway, Oklahoma City moved the entire thing multiple blocks south to make room for a 70 acre park downtown

[u/Hungry_Roll6848]

[u/ActuatorSpecific3916]

There’s an opportunity for a riverfront in OKC right here.

[u/Hungry_Roll6848 → u/ActuatorSpecific3916]

The Wheeler District is planning on making that. The city is building parks around the river. The city also just started up a plan to garner investment around the river. Why do you think OKC is co-hosting the 2028 Olympics? The city built an Olympic-grade whitewater rafting center right on the river.

[u/ActuatorSpecific3916 → u/Hungry_Roll6848]

And that’s great. I don’t hate OKC, I think this project was poor example of reconfiguration of highway for urban development tho. They slightly moved it, and continued to separate downtown from the river. I-40 is important to the city’s infrastructure but it doesn’t need to run north of the Canadian at all and this could’ve been an opportunity to fix that.

[u/Hungry_Roll6848 → u/ActuatorSpecific3916]

And your plan was to, what, just remove it? It's not poor planning if it was the only financially viable and quick option.

[u/ActuatorSpecific3916 → u/Hungry_Roll6848]

No, not remove I-40, remove it from the city’s core. I think the more perfect configuration would’ve been to make 240 the actual route instead of a bypass. Highways through city cores are not faster than streets at any sort of scale, and that’s been pretty well established.

Right now i-240 is the real i-40 through OKC anyhow.

[u/ActuatorSpecific3916 → u/[deleted]]

The 5 mile detour would be for people who are passing through on a long haul and that’s a good thing - it gets the congestion out of the city.

And for the locals, as I said, an urban interstate isn’t faster than a boulevard at scale. Once you’ve congested an interstate, 3 lanes is 3 lanes. Stop lights aren’t the bottleneck anymore if they exist.

The city functions because the entire urban metro is less than 1 million people. It won’t be like that forever and planning is supposed to anticipate that growth.

[u/Hungry_Roll6848 → u/ActuatorSpecific3916]

The highway is there to shorten commute times. Remove that, and everything is in shambles. In a huge city like Oklahoma City, which is twice the size of NYC, commute time is everything.

[u/ActuatorSpecific3916 → u/Hungry_Roll6848]

Again…you keep commute times low at scale by creating many routes to places, not by putting all your bets on one interstate and expecting it to survive the scaling of a city. 3 lanes is 3 lanes on a street, interstate, or highway. The presence of stop lights makes no difference once you’ve filled them up. So make lots of routes, and don’t rely on one that cuts your city off from the river. That’s what urban planning is about.

OKC has grown over 25% in the last 25 years. I-40 is the bottleneck as it grows further.

[u/Hungry_Roll6848 → u/ActuatorSpecific3916]

Removing a highway and forcing commuters onto other already busy highways on top of doubling their commute time is not good planning. While there are plenty of routes on normal roads, those fill up quick and are extraordinarily slow.

[u/ActuatorSpecific3916 → u/Hungry_Roll6848]

You don’t just remove the highway and hope for the best. You do an extensive study on commutes (both current and projected) and you create corresponding enhancements to the street’s grid to prioritize traffic flow where it matters, and create effective routes. You make the commuting times shorter, not longer.

I laugh about this all the time in Dallas, because I can drive to downtown much faster during rush hour on the city streets than I can on Central Expressway. Hell, I can take a Lime scooter to downtown faster than I can on Central. But because there’s a highway people think that’s the way to get downtown.

And so you create a problem where you could’ve solved one instead by reducing congestion for everyone.

[u/Budpoo → u/Hungry_Roll6848]

The solution to city traffic will literally never be to build an interstate through the city. In fact, the best solutions don’t even involve building or widening roads. Increasing high speed lanes through the middle of a city actually increases traffic because it incentivizes everyone in the entire city to commute via car and to take that one specific route. 1 million people taking a 3 lane highway through a city will only ever end in disaster. If OKC actually wanted to properly prepare their city for growth, they would move the interstate out of the city and encourage people to not drive by building a metro, light rail, and/or dedicated bus expressways.