The "what to do with I-81?" discussion will be heating up soon, as the state DOT attempts to make a decision by 2017-ish on the fate of the elevated highway through Downtown Syracuse. Between now and then there will be a ton of public debate about what the best option will be for not only Downtown, but for Central New York in general.
Personally, I find the whole thing to be a no-brainer: tear it down, utilize I-481 as a bypass and rename it, and replace I-81 with a ground-level parkway or boulevard; something that helps to connect The Hill with lower Downtown.
If you generally agree with that sentiment, then I've gone ahead and done some of the dirty work for you. Please feel free to use any or all of these passive-aggressive, bullet points and/or questions when someone actually tries to defend rebuilding I-81 through Downtown Syracuse.
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Separating the city's two major money generators, Syracuse University and the medical centers, from the city's epicenter and most desirable neighborhood, Downtown, with a giant concrete highway seems like a gross misallocation of resources.
I fail to see how demolishing more infrastructure for the sake of a bigger highway system will help the city grow.
How will an elevated highway beautify both Downtown and its walking experience and can you provide some examples of when this has worked in other cities? (The answer is usually "no").
According to Google Maps, a trip from Nedrow to Cicero via I-81 takes 22 minutes. The trip around Downtown via I-481 to I-81 takes 26 minutes. Unless my math is incorrect, that's only a difference of 4 minutes.
Building a huge, concrete highway directly through the region's urban center seems very 1954-ish to me.
I wonder if there's any correlation between the construction of I-81 and the city's population plummeting during the middle-half of the 20th century?
Did you know that Downtown Syracuse has no true park for its 2,500 residents and its 30,000 workers? I thought that was a funny little bit of info.
Since its lifespan is nearing an end and the highway is coming down anyway, how does rebuilding it every 50 years make good financial sense?
Syracuse is a small city and rebuilding a highway through its center contains its size and dampens potential growth of Downtown and University Hill, its two fastest growing neigborhoods.
Ambulances and emergency vehicles should be fine. More people will not die because there is no elevated highway. Emergency vehicles nowadays have these fancy things called sirens and lights. Furthermore, an emergency vehicle can get trapped on a highway just as easily, if not more easily, than it could on the streets (here's a good example of it actually happening).
If not having an elevated highway helps to attract new businesses and people to Downtown, is it so much to ask for people to sacrifice their already low commuting times?
Gas is wasted and the environment is polluted the second the ignition is turned on in a car. Please don't use the "we'll be wasting more gas" as a legitimate argument or try to make me feel guilty about the environment any more than I already do. People will be using more gas for the very reason that they chose to have a car and live far away from the city's center in the first place.
Riddle me this: do we want a better place to live or do we want to drive faster?
I don't understand this statement, " something that helps to connect The Hill with lower Downtown." as I have never found i-81 to be an impediment to travelling from downtown to SU. The connection you speak of would run perpendicular to the raised section of I-81, and, in fact, already exists. Harrison, Adams, Genesse, Fayette, Erie - they all pass under the highway without much difficulty. I have never understood this argument that the road over head impedes travel.
ReplyDeleteI-81 doesn't impede much travel by car. The east-west streets (like you said) all generally work. Though, on occasion, an awkward, one-directional bottleneck can happen, typically after Dome events, where ALL traffic is heading in the same direction and trying to get onto the same on-ramp. It's tricky at that spot (I think it might be Adams and Almond?) and it does create traffic issues at times. (For a weird example, if "traffic" were a huge sink filled with water and you have 8 sinkholes, water kind of makes up its mind on where to go, whereas if you have just 1 sinkhole, it takes longer because it's all trying to go in one direction). But, the problem doesn't happen too often, just typically with Dome events.
DeleteWhat I mean by connecting the two neighborhoods is improving the pedestrian experience and quality of life. None of that really exists right now. The highways inhibit it. They can still be walked under - even safely, but there's just something very un-humanistic about it doing it - this even applies to an area like the Creekwalk - something that's intended to be geared towards the pedestrian. It's very hard not to get a feeling of intimidation and isolation when you walk underneath them. And at night those effects are only amplified (they're noisy, they're dirty, they block the light and sky, etc...). I've never had any issues with safety personally, but the overpasses are one of the major areas around Downtown where I never feel safe walking.
The other thing that's going to help (once I-81 is taken down) is filling in the space with infrastructure like mixed-use buildings and maybe a park (in a similar style to what Boston did with the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway).
Right now, the main focus of the entire area between Adams Street and Pearl Street is cars. And after that, the next two focuses are steel and concrete. There's just nothing rewarding or redeeming about having to walk around the highways and it isn't a problem that can be solved with fresh paint or new sidewalks. It creates an actual psychological wall for pedestrians.