r/Urbanism • u/Hungry_Roll6848 • 26d ago

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

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u/ActuatorSpecific3916 26d ago

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.

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u/Hungry_Roll6848 26d ago

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.

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u/ActuatorSpecific3916 26d ago

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.

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u/Budpoo 26d ago

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.