Tearing Down an Urban Highway Can Give Rise to a Whole New City
The highway removal and park creation were part of a series of changes that widened sidewalks at the expense of car lanes, turned a huge traffic circle into a circular green park, instituted a public bicycle system, reorganized bus lines, and improved and expanded an already excellent subway system (including retrofitting lines with glass platform screening doors and linking it to buses with a unified payment system). Soon after Congress approved the Interstate Highway Act, people began opposing the part of it that prescribed highways through cities. The always astute Lewis Mumford, author of the prophetic 1958 article “The Highway and the City”, called the inner city highways something that would create “a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of the city.”
Source: www.citylab.com