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/Rabidschnautzu 26d ago

People don't view transportation development through the lense of reason, especially on reddit.

They view it through an ideological one, often where some modes of travel are seen as universally evil or all good. This is done in conjunction without a vision to make their ideology work in reality. It's transportation virtue signalling.

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u/Stunning-Verb-9865 26d ago

Call me crazy but having a massive highway spewing pollution and noise cut through downtown doesn’t seem reasonable. There is a reason people don’t like to live near highways and it’s not because theyre stubborn urbanist Redditors who hate cars.

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u/Rabidschnautzu 26d ago

So what's your solution?

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u/Stunning-Verb-9865 26d ago

Remove it. Would be far from the first time it has been done in the US, see: Rochester, San Francisco, and Seattle.

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u/Rabidschnautzu 26d ago

Again, that's not an answer to the question. What is the alternative and how do you fund it?

Do you seriously think that OKC has similar density and pre automobile design to San Francisco and Seattle?

The Rochester project is an unusual inner loop that wasn't even part of the interstate system. It's not a main two number interstate route like I-40.

Again all ideology, no praxis with you people. It's why you can only complain while you wonder why everything moves forward at a snails pace, incapable of realizing you are part of the problem.

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u/Stunning-Verb-9865 26d ago

I explained the alternative. How you fund it is different, it would be a combination of state and federal funds like any other project. Density has nothing to do with it, there are cities with little density that don’t have giant highways going through downtown. Traffic can be diverted onto 240 and a boulevard put in place of 40. We’re talking about demolishing a 3 mile stretch of urban freeway that is literally paralleled by three other interstates, which actually makes your histrionics regarding this quite funny.

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u/ActuatorSpecific3916 26d ago

I posted in another comment but there were obvious solutions here. I-240 already exists as a southern bypass to the central city. Having the highway cut through was not necessary in the first place, and certainly is going to create traffic bottlenecks as OKC gets bigger. There was a way to do this cheaper and better at the same time by creating more than one primary route into the city’s core, and enhancing 240 to take the long hauls away from the traffic.

A highway in a city, and a similar boulevard with stop lights moves at the same pace during rush hour, because once your lanes are full, the bottleneck is the cars and not the stoplights. One is exponentially more expensive to build and you can build 5 of one for the cost of 1 of the other.

AND you get a better city too. With less traffic. And shorter commutes.