Burying a 1950s Planning Disaster
In the 1950s, the construction of freeways through city centers created damage that we are still trying to undo. Jane Jacobs, respected by neighborhood preservationists and urbanists alike, most notable battle was to keep a freeway from destroying her neighborhood. Rochester, New York, is working to remove its 1950s freeway; City Lab has more. How do Eugene's streets need to change to make a more functioning downtown and close-in area?
“Many places grappling with the damage caused by urban freeways remain stuck in a 1950s planning paradigm, a period where planners and engineers misunderstood the relationship between the form of a city and its traffic. They thought they had to reconstruct the city to accommodate an anticipated flood of traffic in the future. What they didn’t understand was that it was the very change that they advocated that would create the vehicular traffic their models predicted.”