People make cities an interesting place to be. It’s the people that produce culture and economic prosperity, yet many cities have highways going right through them. These highways make the city worse in every regard. Now, cities in America will be getting funding to repair the cities from the damage
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Things Are Good: Removing Highways Improves Cities
Urban highways occupy a lot of space that can otherwise be used for parks, housing, offices, or anything else that produces economic benefits. The post war highway building boom in North America destroyed communities (in the USA highways were built to purposefully isolate black communities), fuelled car-dependent suburban developments, and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Highways Make Traffic Worse, Transit Improves Traffic
Regular readers of this site already know that highways are amongst the worst ways to move people effectively and also a way to ensure urban development is built to cater to cars instead of human beings. Yet, in Ontario the government wants to build a $6 billion highway to promote
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kansas is Growing Roadside Grass
Highways are loved in America due to their ability to allow single occupant vehicles to move uninterrupted, thus they crisscross the entirety of the United States. This makes for a lot of land covered by asphalt, cars spattering litter, brake dust, exhaust onto the roadside, and large swaths of manicured
Continue readingThings Are Good: 6 Cities Where Highway Removal Made the City Better
Car culture has ruined cities with never ending traffic problems and made the streetscape untenable for modern living. Smog from cars kills too many people every year. Yet, we still see places looking backward and ensuring that this regressive car-focussed planning continues. Toronto is one such place with it’s obsession on keeping a decaying highway […]
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Continue readingThings Are Good: Reducing Highway Size Doesn’t Negatively Impact Congestion
Nobody likes being stuck in traffic and in the recent past the solution was to build more roads (or add more lanes). Ironically this makes traffic worse as an increase in traffic capacity means more people will drive places. These narrow-minded solutions are still applied in some places like Toronto
Continue readingThings Are Good: Urban Highways Should Be Torn Down; Replaced By Useful Space
Car-dominated infrastructure is clearly bad for local communities, transit, the environment (local and global), and the economy. So why do so many places refuse to tear down crumbling urban highways? The addiction to the car is a powerful one in many parts of the world and we need to curb
Continue readingLeft Over: You Had Me (Choking) at Affordable…
This morning, I had to control my urge to laugh while reading: Affordable Housing Canada: Housing Boom, Government Cutbacks Create ‘Rent Squeeze’ by Rachel Mendleson in HuffPost Oct 4, 2012 I knew, the minute I read the headline, that the author probably lived in Ontario, or, at least, definitely not
Continue readingThings Are Good: Copenhagen Gets Bike Superhighway
Copenhagen is known as the most bicycle friendly city on the planet and they keep getting better. Recently, the capital of Denmark has created a bicycle superhighway that is separated from car-dominated roads. The network of highways is designed to get people in the suburbs to get out of their
Continue readingWorld Headlines Review: Afghanistan: War, Power and Illusion
Canadian LAVs, Afghanistan, by isafmedia This week, Project Censored has released its annual list of top 25 censored news stories in a volume entitled Censored 2011: The Top Censored Stories of 2009-2010. An astounding article published by The Nation on November 11, 2009; How the US funds the Taliban, resurfaces
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