south central Milwaukee County now lacks a high speed freeway … Milwaukee has two sections of the Park Freeway (East and West) which remain vacant

I’d rather have someone who fails to build highways than someone who succeeds.

These are all facts, not politics. The fact is, Milwaukee has a dysfunctional transportation system and Norquist is largely to blame for that. Do we really want him to have a national voice?

I have a website about freeway removals at http://www.preservenet.com/freeways (with an introduction by John Norquist). I hadn’t heard about this one, and I want to add it if I can get more information.

Glad they decided to reverse the process so Greenville could take a nice step toward living up to its name.

One thing we can all work toward with our local governments is cut-through paths at the heads of cul de sacs that already exist.

I doubt homeowners clamor for cul de sacs as much as builders claim. What else do you think they’re going to say? Keep in mind that with each cul de sac, a builder can fit a couple more houses on the same land. With attached housing it’s even more. Each connection to an existing road can cost money too, from traffic studies to extra asphalt. So builders tend to avoid these connections entirely. Roads are expensive! In a way it’s all about the asphalt to house ratio.

Finally, one of the greatest renewal-by-road-removal stories is Greenville, SC, where a major highway through town was removed to expose a waterfall, which then became the centerpiece of a new riverfront district. It’s hard to believe that anyone would build a highway over that waterfall to begin with!

Metric-wise, another way to go about things would be to offer “points” to mixed-use areas. Part of the issue is that even with new connections, the store is 2.8 miles away instead of 4.2. This would definitely be true in some of the truly sprawling burbs built in the last 25 years. Encouraging cities to allow smaller and more eclectic retail and commercial spots in what are now exclusively residential areas would go along way toward making that grid useful, while simultaneously freeing up that parking lot at walmart for shorter-term redevelopment.

Even though Milwaukee and many other cities are built out, there are many examples of places where the freeway has come in and replaced the grid with grad separated interchanges where the grid used to be. Even if there is strong interest in changing these intersections back to a grid structure, there is no funding to pay for it.

At least in the Twin Cities, the grid structure is owned by the city, with the major roads (former streetcar corridors) owned by the county. The city doesn’t receive significant funding for new roads as local roads everywhere are typically developer provided, and the county generally builds suburban arterials, either new or former two-lane rural roads. To provide a funding source for a street grid, either repairing older urban fabric or for the redevelopment of suburban commercial areas would provide a strong incentive for building a grid. Design follows funding.

This might also help reduce the TOD barriers by lessoning the need for the developer to bear most or all of the cost of creating walkable streets. Mike, I agree on the land use and density part as well, although fixing road funding and design standards is a bigger nut to crack than fixing a city’s zoning code.

You don’t need to knock down houses. There are plenty of underutilized areas in the suburbs — like thousands of abandoned malls and commercial sites. The strategy is to create urban centers and neighborhoods that begin to make the suburbs walkable. Arterial roads can be transformed into boulevards for mixed-use development. There’s an awful lot we could do without beginning to worry about knocking down houses. This project will take decades. After that — who knows? — it may make economic sense to knock down some houses. Residents of a housing development in Virginia were in the process of selling their properties to build a high-density transit-oriented development not too long ago. (I think that was put on hold with the economic crash.)

“Like in Wisconsin, there’s really no projects in Milwaukee, because Milwaukee is built out with streets and so forth, so all the money goes to brand new roads.”

As a cyclist, I would simply favor making sure that every arterial street is complemented by at least one low-speed 25 mph route that runs roughly parallel to it. Then build some speed humps to passively enforce the limit. This might require that the city purchase and demolish a small number of houses, but nothing like what would be required if you were to completely restore the grid.

People who live on cul-de-sacs like them, and any attempt to completely abolish them will be met with furious protest. It isn’t a practical solution. As much as I personally prefer the grid, I suggest a middle ground that would both improve connectivity for cyclists and pedestrians while allowing suburbanites to keep their cul-de-sacs.

Provided there is a bypass further out, that’s a great opportunity for real grade-separated BRT. One could create the equivalent of the Bogata system on the cheap by using existing roads.

But how about ten-foot “roads” between the houses for bicycles and pedestrians only? That’s how you can retrofit the suburbs. The heavy traffic would still be on the outside, which people like. But it would be possible to walk or bike from the house to the school or market more directly.

And, of course, such “pass throughs” would be relatively cheap, as I described here:

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/the_bicycle_low_public_capital_cost_no_public_operating_cost.html