New Orleans' Claibourne Overpass is this year's Congress for New Urbanism choice for "Freeway without a Future." Photo: CNU.org

Latest week the Congress for New Urbanism released its updated list of “Freeways Without Futures” — 12 transportation anachronisms that are increasingly likely to meet the wrecking ball.

This year’s top finisher was New Orleans’ Claiboure Overpass — a 1960s-era eyesore that replaced a thriving, tree-lined commercial street at the center of the city’s oldest, most culturally vibrant black neighborhood. The teardown for this highway has some real traction; a master plan to remove the elevated portion is expected to be endorsed by City Council shortly, according to CNU.

The Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx is runner up, the same position it held in CNU’s 2008 Freeways Without Futures list. This riverfront disaster was bestowed by the master highway builder himself, Robert Moses. Residents of the Bronx have successfully fought off two separate proposals to expand the Sheridan, which runs right along the Bronx River. A coalition of community groups and advocates called the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance has led the charge to replace the freeway with housing and parks, and a group of cities agencies are now examining teardown scenarios with the help of a federal TIGER grant.

The third-place finisher is New Haven’s Route 34 (the Oak Street Connector), which is slated for demolition. New Haven received TIGER funds to convert the road into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard and local officials are currently haggling over the design details — there’s a chance they’ll opt to replace a highway with a road that feels like a highway.

The new illustrated edition of CNU's Sustainable Street Network Principles debuted this week. Image: CNU

The goal of the Principles is to promote development patterns that add value to communities. The way to do that, said CNU President John Norquist, is to design streets to play three simultaneous roles: that of a transportation thoroughfare, a commercial marketplace, and a public space. “Typically, U.S. DOT and State DOTs tend to look at roads only in the dimension of movement, and even in that one dimension, their rural-style forms fail in the city,” Norquist says.

The principles are a plain-language counterpart to the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ “Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares,” a collaborative effort with CNU which came out in March 2010 and is written in “engineerese” according to Norquist. By contrast, “the Principles are very readable,” he said, “and can be used to encourage local public works authorities or departments of transportation to do something in cities that adds value to neighborhoods.”

Those authorities don’t always have a very good record in that department. For decades now, government transportation policy has been geared toward speeding up long trips, while ignoring issues of walkability and the corresponding value added to neighborhoods. “If one person has to cross the street to get to work, and another drives 25 miles to work in the same building, the government is obsessed with helping the guy who drives, even though the guy who walks contributes more net value [by using fewer resources, spending less time in traffic, etc.]” Norquist told Streetsblog. “If you look at the little blue book, it’s designed to challenge that idea.”

One upshot of that shortsightedness, Norquist explained, is that for too long policymakers have attempted to minimize congestion, often employing the warlike verbs “eliminate,” “destroy” or “combat” to describe their approach to doing so. “But there are worse things than congestion,” says Norquist, who has written before on the subject. “It’s sort of like cholesterol: there’s good and bad. You die without any cholesterol, and cities die if they don’t have congestion. Look at Detroit: they’ve defeated congestion, but now that’s the least of their problems. They’re missing congestion, but federal policy is to destroy it.”

The pamphlet illustrates seven principles of street network planning aimed at maximizing the value of nearby neighborhoods. Image: CNU

So, why “occupy” TRB? The need for an “occupation,” Norquist said, comes from the continued insistence on the part of transportation policymakers to blindly adhere to the “Green Book,” the roadway design manual published annually by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Congestion reduction is paramount in the Green Book, which in Norquist’s view essentially encourages state DOTs to spend their money expanding capacity on freeways.

But Norquist argues that maximizing throughput does not add any value to an urban context, and in fact drains value from the land roads run through. State DOTs should instead be encouraged to concentrate on building dense, walkable street networks.

The first step in shifting that paradigm was CNU’s collaboration with ITE, which resulted in the walkable thoroughfares guide. This “Little Blue Book” represents the next step, a plain-language explanation of a better way to design street networks, accessible enough to reach a much larger audience.

The final step will be its adoption by AASHTO, about which Norquist is cautiously optimistic. “They’ll resist for a while, but they’ll adopt it eventually,” he said.

In this week’s episode of “Moving Beyond the Automobile,” Streetfilms takes you on a guided tour of past, present and future highway removal projects with John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Some of the most well-known highway removals in America — like New York City’s West Side Highway and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway — have actually been unpredictable highway collapses brought on by structural deficiencies or natural disasters. It turns out there are good reasons for not rebuilding these urban highways once they become rubble: They drain the life from the neighborhoods around them, they suck wealth and value out of the city, and they don’t even move traffic that well during rush hour.

Now several cities are pursuing highway removals more intentionally, as a way to reclaim city space for housing, parks, and economic development. CNU has designated ten “Freeways Without Futures” here in North America, and in this video, you’ll hear about the benefits of tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx, the Skyway and Route 5 in Buffalo, and the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans.

Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

A template for an urban street in "Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares." Source: Claire Vlach, Bottomley Design & Planning.

One of the foundational documents in our country's history of car-centric street design is what's known as the Green Book. These engineering guidelines, which have been published in various editions by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) since the 1930s, are only "green" if you're looking at the cover.

"We should take control of our streets. If 85 percent of our motorists are driving faster than we want them to, then we need to redesign the street."

Fortunately, these engineering standards are shifting. One important step is a new report co-authored by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). "Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach" aims to define a more humane engineering language for streets. The report is intended to supplement the Green Book by laying out a set of design standards that make sense in places where people can get around by foot or on a bicycle.

Dan Burden leading a walkability workshop in Lepeer, Michigan this February. Image: Michigan Municipal League

As the founder and executive director of Walkable Communities, Inc., Burden travels the country helping people plan and develop more sustainable neighborhoods. In 2001, Time Magazine named him one of the six most influential civic leaders of tomorrow. Burden spent 16 years as bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the Florida Department of Transportation, so he was able to share with us his experience as both an advocate and an administrator.

Here's the first part of our interview:

Noah Kazis: Let's start with that new ITE and CNU report that you participated in. What's its significance?

Dan Burden: A couple of big breakthroughs occurred with that publication. One where we struggled hard, but finally broke free, is setting a target speed for roads. Before, there was always the driving speed, which had to be higher than the posted speed to provide "forgiveness" to drivers. Of course, drivers totally figured that one out, and they'd drive faster than the posted speed. In these guidelines, they're supposed to design the road for the speed that we want to elicit from the driver.

NK: Who is the target of this report? Who's going to be implementing its recommendations?

DB: Any city or county engineer -- anyone who is going to be professionally responsible for setting street standards for their own community -- will be able to find that now there's an official resource provided by the Federal Highway Administration that they can pull language from. It is truly an authoritative source. This collective body of professionals got together and agreed upon these new criteria.

NK: Is this a shift for ITE? Many of us think of transportation engineers as very conservative, very car-centric.

"The AASHTO Green Book is built for rural America and for suburban America. It was never designed for downtowns. It was never designed for the average neighborhood street."

NK: Besides bringing the posted speed and the design speed into alignment, what are the other innovations in this report?

DB: A lot of language was created to allow a more liberal interpretation of flexibility. We shouldn't force any given category of street to fall under very tight constraints. We really need permission to build narrower roads, to use less asphalt, to green up the streets, to emphasize the need for walkability and bicycling, to bring down speeds on roads.

The CNU/ITE report explains how adding bike lanes requires changing details like the turning radius of an intersection.

The report sets the platform for creating that livability. It covers the planning aspects, it gets into the broad-based principles and then it gets down to the exacting details and explains why 10-foot and 11-foot lanes are superior to wider lanes. It gives more flexibility while providing specific language that an engineer and a planner could pull for their own street standards.

NK: How do these guidelines and recommendations get turned into change on the street? Where does the federal government come in? The state and local governments?

DB: First of all, there's always been a misunderstanding about federal standards. It doesn't matter what state I go to; I can hear some folks in the state agency say, "Well we have to do this, because the federal government says that these are the standards." The federal government does not set standards. They help create publications, they provide a lot of guidance, but they truly have no desire or ability to set the standards that a local government would impose.

The key is influencing those in state government to realize that they're in charge, that whatever language they create can then be inserted in a local street system that happens to involve state funding. In some states, the total street system, from an alley to a lane to an arterial, is set by state guidelines. In Florida, we have what's called the Green Book committee; I used to sit on it for about 15 years. We came up with guidance for what every category of road would be and then whoever built the road -- certainly any private developer -- had to follow those standards if they wanted to turn the road over to the community. They gave a baseline for certain margins of safety and performance.

"The clear zone that's required -- how far you have to set back trees or other fixed objects from the roadways -- was determined years ago by one phone call from a committee of AASHTO to the General Motors test track."

NK: So are you arguing that states should take a step back from transportation planning and let local governments move in?

DB: Yes I am. I feel that the people who end up populating the committees that set these standards are not keeping their ears close enough to what's going on in a given neighborhood. By the time you're high enough up in the chain of your state agency, you no longer go to public meetings, you no longer read every document that comes out. So you're trying to make decisions that are good for everybody, even though you've reached a point in your career when you're no longer grassroots.

NK: What does that detachment lead to?

DB: You feel like you have a responsibility to keep raising the bar but in many cases the bars gets raised with absolutely no scientific evidence. For example, the clear zone that's required -- how far you have to set back trees or other fixed objects from the roadways -- was determined years ago by one phone call from a committee of AASHTO to the General Motors test track. So they're talking to one person at the test track -- for cars -- and the guy said 100 feet and [AASHTO] said, "No, that can't work, we can't buy 200 feet of right of way everywhere." So they negotiated and said 60 feet would eliminate a lot of the crashes. That's how they determined it. If you went back and studied how a particular measure came to be, it's, "OK, if I agree with you it should be 15 feet rather than five, then will you agree with me on my point about this topic?"

The CNU/ITE report is context-specific: What's next to the street should influence the design of the street itself.

NK: In terms of the internal politics of state departments of transportation, is there some sort of bias in how the roads are designed?

DB: Historically the AASHTO Green Book, which is still what most people will quote and many state design guidelines are built around, is built for rural America and for suburban America. It was never designed for downtowns. It was never designed for the average neighborhood street. It was designed for this new America we were building, where we wanted to keep the greatest flow of vehicle movement. So we come up with things like turning radii on the corner of an intersection, driveway flows, everything based on a suburban and a rural application.

NK: Do you think that momentum toward livable streets -- among both engineers and the state departments of transportation -- is going to continue?

DB: I know it's going to continue. For example, take complete streets. Every state that adopts a complete street philosophy now comes together to try to figure out, well, What does this really mean? So it builds on itself. I was in Columbus, Ohio, where the state has adopted a complete streets package and now everybody is quickly trying to figure out, Do we always have bike lanes or do always have this or that? So, yes, I think that, along with Secretary LaHood's recent comment that pedestrians and bicycles will have equal considerations in designing and building and funding our streets, that this is shaking up the industry.

Obviously we're crafting new buzzwords and we've got more enlightened secretaries of transportation, but we're also going to realize we cannot continue to build roads that are not sustainable. They create more drainage impacts, more heat gain, more use of oil for asphalt or processing concrete. These resources are going to put us in a non-compete situation with the rest of the world where we're just trying to keep our system working. In many cities now the individual is spending 20 percent, even 25 percent, on their transportation out of their take-home pay. That's not sustainable at a personal level.

As Aaron and Sarah have noted, the Congress for the New Urbanism is in the midst of its annual meeting in Denver. This spiffy short is the winner of this year's CNU 17 video contest. Created by independents John Paget of Paget Films and Drew Ward and Chris Elisara of First+Main Media, "Built to Last," in the words of the filmmakers, "explores the connection between New Urbanism and environmental issues."

Enjoy. And if you're really feelin' it, follow @naparstek and the #cnu17 feed on Twitter for to-the-minute insights from CNU speakers over the weekend.

You can follow me @naparstek. 

And you can follow other conference attendees at #cnu17.

Brady Street, which boasts some of the best street life in Milwaukee, has flourished thanks in part to the defeat of a nearby freeway spur and the redevelopment that followed. Photo: Steve Filmanowicz.

In the second part of our interview (read the first part here), Norquist discusses these victories and setbacks, and how federal policy can help cities and towns do the right thing.

Ben Fried: Expanding the transit system in Milwaukee has been a very long, protracted process. You wanted to build light rail. What sort of resistance did you meet from other public officials?

Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland -- the regional planning commissions they have really aren’t looking out for city interests, they're looking out for the exurban interests.

It’s frustrating, because Milwaukee was always ranked by the Federal Transit Administration as one of the best places to put in a light rail, because it was built around the street car system. There was over 350 miles of street car in Milwaukee at the end of the war, 200 miles of inner urban. We had a really, really good transit system and by 1958 it was all gone. But the land use patterns were all built around street car lines. Now I think my successor, Tom Barrett, has got himself some clout with this. They put an earmark in the budget bill that just passed that gave him control of a nice big chunk of money, so he might be able to get that street car going.

BF: So the dispute between you and the county executives, is that emblematic, would you say, of the basic problem with MPOs?

JN: It depends on who runs the MPO. New York and Chicago have their MPOs under control. We have enough clout in Chicago that the local regional planning commission -- CMAP -- they're not going to turn around and screw Chicago. Chicago has a lot of representation on CMAP’s board. In New York, basically New York runs its own regional system -- sometimes the metro system has too much interference from the state, but basically New York City can call its own shot when it comes to planning. And that’s not true in a lot of cities. Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, the regional planning commissions they have really aren’t looking out for city interests, they're looking out for the exurban interests.

BF: We’ve got a potential freeway teardown project here in New York, the Sheridan Expressway, it was number two on CNU’s list of the top teardown candidates. Could you walk us through what you had to go through with your freeway teardown in Milwaukee -- who did you have to win over to achieve that?

JN: The Sheridan is ready to go. It has a nice low traffic count, so it’s hard to argue that it’s really necessary. But what did I go through? Well, the first thing was, it’s so counterintuitive to do these things that the first reaction was from very reasonable people -- ordinary citizens, the traffic engineers, neighborhood people, even very progressive people -- “You want to do what? You want to tear that -- what?” You know, it doesn’t compute, it sounds like a wacky thing to do. You have to have patience and spend a lot of time in meetings letting people beat the living hell out of you. And then you get to a certain point where people say, “Hey, wait, I think I understand what you mean. You’re saying the freeway’s a blighting influence.” And you just go through all the arguments against it, but the biggest argument for it is it just makes the place function a lot better and add more value and be a place where people actually want to be.

In the mid and late 70s a whole bunch of legislators were elected who were against freeways, people who organized and went door to door. If we hadn’t won those battles Milwaukee would have been devastated.

So you go through all these value calculation fights, and then finally you need to play your political cards. In Milwaukee the anti-freeway movement began in early 70s, and in the mid and late 70s a whole bunch of legislators were elected who were against freeways, people who organized and went door to door, they won the battles. If we hadn’t won those battles Milwaukee would have been devastated, but we’ve killed about half the freeways they had planned on building. And that saved the city really from being in a very similar situation to what Detroit is in right now.

BF: Are some of the freeway projects the Wisconsin DOT is planning now, are those in metro Milwaukee?

JN: We have several on there, they're all unnecessary, they're all dead weight loss. It’s really disgusting and it shows you how hard it is to get them to look at it in a different way. The I-94 widening -- it’s already six lanes, they want to make it eight lanes from Milwaukee down to the Illinois border. And they want to do a new interchange, called the “Zoo Interchange,” which will cost close to $1 billion. A lot of these stimulus projects are completely unnecessary and they don’t make sense. To route your grade-separated traffic through the most expensive real estate in the state of Wisconsin? It’s insane. They don't do it in Europe. They have freeways, but they're between cities, not in cities. They go around the outer edge with belt lines, but they don’t jam up through the most built-up places, because it just concentrates traffic and creates more congestion at the nodes.

A lot of these stimulus projects are completely unnecessary and they don’t make sense. To route your grade-separated traffic through the most expensive real estate in the state of Wisconsin? It’s insane.

Look at it not just from a big city standpoint, look at it from a medium- or small-sized city standpoint. Let’s say you were in New York wine country and you come to Ithaca. In the old days, instead of a bypass they’d have a truck route around the outer edge of the street grid. You might go a little bit faster, 35 miles an hour instead of 25, but it’s a little longer distance, so it’s pretty much an equal choice whether you drive through the middle of town or you go on the outer edge. And if you're driving a truck and you're going on through-traffic you take the truck route.

Well, now they don’t even have that option anymore, all they have is a Mercedes-Benz test track, a highly-banked, grade-separated freeway that routes all the traffic around the city and then you get the inevitable death of any retail in the middle. You end up with antique shops and empty buildings. And then you get the big boxes out on the beltway.

These small towns, they don’t need beltways. Give them another option and they might choose it. If they still want to build a beltway and they want to help pay for it, fine, but the feds should give them the kind of options that allow urban real estate development, job development, walkability, connectivity, all these things. Higher economic performance, higher environmental performance. Those are all possible when you create a wide variety of choices, instead of just going right to grade separation. That’s basically saying, "We only fund through-traffic -- if you want to go a long distance, we’re into funding it."

The feds don’t look at it in terms of the economics. Traditionally, there’s three purposes for a road: movement, economic and social interaction. Those are the three things that traditionally a thoroughfare in an urban area did for thousands of years. That’s what it was. And then in the last 60 years it’s all dumbed down to just one thing -- vehicle movement -- and the other stuff doesn’t matter. Well that’s really stupid. The federal government collects a lot of taxes from hardworking people in the United States, and they shouldn’t just think that the only purpose of investment in transportation is through-traffic.

How can federal policy encourage walkable street networks instead of highways and sprawl? Image: CNU

At the moment, however, the scene on the ground shows how far we have to go before the reality catches up to the rhetoric: State DOTs flush with federal stimulus cash are plowing ahead with wasteful, sprawl-inducing highway projects. Ultimately, you can't end car dependence or create livable places without enlisting the very people building those roads -- the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), state DOTs, and other entities that shape local policy. How can the feds affect their decisions?

The Congress for the New Urbanism has some intriguing answers. During the stimulus debate, CNU proposed a new type of federal road funding that would help to build connected grids -- the kind of streets that livable communities are made of. The proposal didn't make it into the stimulus package before the bill got rushed out the door, but the upcoming federal transportation bill will provide another chance. CNU President John Norquist -- a four-term mayor of Milwaukee who first got into politics as an anti-freeway advocate -- was down in DC last Thursday to share his ideas with Congress. Streetsblog spoke to him afterward about what's broken with national transportation policy and how to fix it. Here's the first part of our interview.

Ben Fried: During the stimulus debate you sent a letter to James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and among other things you said that discussion of national transportation policy often presents a "false dichotomy" between transit funding and road funding. What did you mean?

They are taking this stimulus money and using it for roads that people really don’t even want.

Freeways don’t work in rush hour; they're slower. Like in Washington, DC, Connecticut Avenue is faster at rush hour than the Potomac Freeway. The Potomac Freeway goes down to about two to six miles an hour during the peak hour, whereas Connecticut Avenue goes down to about eight to thirteen miles an hour. So you're really talking about the federal government investing billions and billions of dollars in stuff that reduces the value of the economy. How bad is that?

BF: So say they do implement some good metrics that get at street network connectivity…

JN: What would that be? Let me tell you. Right now the metrics are minimums -- you need at least 12 feet for a highway lane, whereas in Vancouver no lane can be bigger than three meters, which comes out to nine feet ten inches I think. Their biggest lane can be nine feet ten inches…

BF: These are federal requirements?

JN: No, but they all feed into the same system. The feds don’t even do the requirements directly -- in the federal highway program they reference the AASHTO Green Book. These are rules, they're just not stated as rules… On the interstate system you can’t have a lane that’s less than 12 feet wide, so that actually is a rule there. You have all these metrics that make everything bigger -- turning radii and ramps, the length of ramps -- all these things designed to have the vehicles move faster without having to slow down when they get off the freeway, that sort of thing.

Right now the system is biased towards trying to make everything like Brasília, where all the arterial street intersections are grade-separated. It’s the most lifeless city in the world.

Look at the Embarcadero Freeway. When it was torn down, the trips actually got faster, because people were able to enter the street grid of northeastern San Francisco without having to overshoot the mark or undershoot where they want to go and then go in a direction they don't want to go. So by removing the freeway and re-enriching the street network, it actually made traffic distribute better. Then it was a better setting, obviously, for real estate and job development, because the views of the bay were restored and streets are better.

So what are the metrics? The metrics would be intersection density, block size -- you would reward intersection density. And the feds can do that, they can say that states could draw federal money and add to the density of a street network, creating more mobility that way.

And the metric we use is 150 intersections per square mile, which wouldn’t just be like Manhattan or Philadelphia. In Wausau, Wisconsin, which is the home of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Dave Obey, we counted 158 intersections per square mile. That’s counting alleys. You look at all these places that have high intersection density and they're very likely to be valuable settings for jobs and real estate, and they're also very good for distributing local traffic.

Freeways don’t work in rush hour; they're slower. Like in Washington DC, Connecticut Avenue is faster at rush hour than the Potomac Freeway.

BF: It seems like there also has to be some sort of system of incentives in place, because there’s so many MPOs that are just going to be stuck in their old habits…

JN: Are you talking about MPOs or DOTs?

BF: Let’s say both.

JN: I would argue in the majority of cases the MPOs just function as an arm of the DOT. There’s this myth that some of the regional planning commissions are out there trying to do what's right. And that’s true in some cases, but in the vast majority it’s just this same mind frame that they have at the DOTs. Some DOTs are more progressive than others. My current favorite is New Jersey where they're really exploring these ideas of funding more urban streets, like replacing the freeway in front of Trenton, along the river, and putting in a boulevard instead.

BF: So how do you get the state DOTs to embrace this?

JN: Right now they're encouraged not to even think about doing this stuff. 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. Or expanding existing roads like I-94 between Milwaukee and the Illinois line, a total waste of money. They’re saying it’s $250 million to widen it, it’s probably three or four times that. Here they are, taking this stimulus money and using it all for roads that are really the kinds of things that were considered good back in the 1960s and 70s, but now are pretty much discredited. A lot of these road projects are controversial -- local groups that aren’t connected to government contracts are resisting them -- and all of a sudden the feds come along and fund roads that people really don’t even want. It’s pretty bad. In southeastern Wisconsin the MPO is the biggest supporter of building all these giant roads. Sometimes the smart growth movement says, "Well, we should give the MPOs more say." I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

If you need to have a stick, you have to know what you're going to hit, or if you have a carrot, you have to know what you want to fund, that’s why you get right back to metrics. The first step is to allow federal funds to be used to bring street networks up to a standard of 150 intersections per square mile. So if you have a suburban sprawl kind of situation where the intersection density is like at 40 per square mile, if you have a project that’s going to bring that intersection density up to 150, then the state would be eligible for getting federal funding to go in and do that.

You need to have standards that engineers can respect and if you have standards that they respect, they’ll do wonderful stuff.

If the feds say, "That’s okay, that’s good, that’s just as good as the other method," that would be a big step forward. I don't know that we can get it to say, “You must do this the more urban way.” I think that would be a little bit harder to do and I don’t even know that it’s necessary. Especially young traffic engineers that are just coming in to the field, I think they’re kind of eager to look at some different models. And if you look at ITE now, which is a very traditional group, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, they're really getting more and more excited about the idea of networks.

Even the ones that aren’t on the program yet, they're still interested and they kind of want to know what everything is about. So that’s where the metrics come in, then they respect it. Look at the 1920s, if you were a civil engineer and you're going to Purdue, you’re going to learn the two rod street -- two rods from the center lane to the building line, 50 feet of pavement with eight foot sidewalks. Add it up, it’s two rods in each direction, four rods altogether. That’s what you find all over America and particularly in the midwest. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Mattoon, Illinois. Frankfort, Kentucky. You're going to find these exact same streets. And it’s a great street for retail, for a downtown main street. It is Main Street -- and the engineers did that, they were trained to do it, they obeyed orders and they did it. If they go to traffic engineering school now they're going to learn minimum 72-foot arterials, three moving lanes in each direction with a turn lane, and then they blow out the sides with 100-foot setbacks -- you can widen the street later, you know -- and big parking lots.

That’s what they’re taught, that’s all they're taught. They're not taught the other model, because the regulations don’t even mention the other model for the most part. You need to have standards that engineers can respect and if you have standards that they respect, they’ll do wonderful stuff. They’ll create Market Street in San Francisco – new! -- if they had a standard that said it was okay to do that.

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Stay tuned for the second part of our interview with John Norquist, in which we discuss the problem with "shovel-ready" projects, what it takes to win a freeway teardown fight, and how to build your way out of congestion.