Kaid Benfield, of the National Resources Defense Council, makes an interesting point about cities with freeways cutting through their centers versus those without: they're more romantic.
Yes, Paris has its Peripherique, Rome its Circonvallazione Orientale, but those freeway-style highways run around the center, not through it. The center is more likely to have boulevards and streets instead of freeways.
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The relative presence of romance is tied, naturally, to the relative presence of people:
Now, I'm not one to say that the Interstate Highway System in the U.S. was a mistake. Far from it, the system of highways we now take for granted made intercity travel much more convenient for many more people. When I-40 was built from Asheville to Hickory when I was a kid, it meant we could visit my grandmother after my parents got off work and come back on the same night.
But, within cities, they did a lot of damage, building the transportation equivalent of the Berlin Wall through neighborhoods and parks, frequently displacing the poor from their homes while doing so.
A Brown University economist, Nathaniel Baum-Snow, boils this down: each new federally-funded highway added to a central city has the cumulative effect of reducing said city's population by approximately 18 percent.
More. Also. (And a tip of the hat to the Soul Survivors)
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