Quote:
Milwaukee gained almost 30 acres of prime downtown real estate after it demolished the Park East Freeway in 2002 and 2003. Since then, the area has seen about $1 billion in private investment, the city estimates. “We’ve showed that when you take the highway out of the city it gets better. It’s that simple,” said Peter Park, who served as Milwaukee’s planning director at the time. ---
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in milwaukee's case, the park east freeway was simply an expressway spur, not a through route, so getting rid of it and replacing it with a more traditional boulevard style street was 8 billion times easier than removing a full-blown through-route expressway that carries tens or hundreds of thousands of cars per day.
lots of cities have these over-engineered expressway spurs into their downtowns that were born out of the fever dreams of post-war traffic engineers, and i can totally see more of those types of expressway infrastructure disappearing.
as i mentioned earlier in the thread, chicago has one of these expressway spurs, the ohio street feeder ramp, that i could see going away at some point in the near-term future.