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Archive for December 24th, 2010

Ramps to Nowhere

Flickr/Jason McHuff

My latest Slate column looks at a number of urban highway projects that were once planned but never built (or were built and then torn down). Here’s the gist:

A new exhibit at New York’s Cooper Union, Paul Rudolph: The Lower Manhattan Expressway—complete with an exhaustively recreated large-scale model of the proposed road—provides an opportunity to consider the invisible (and sometimes visible) presence of this and other phantom highways in the world’s cities. Existing merely as segments of many-tentacled schemes on faded planner’s maps, they are more than historical oddities or visions of an alternate future. They’re part of an ongoing dialogue about the meaning and possibilities of mobility in the world’s cities: Would their host cities be better off if these highways been built? How should we balance the desire for mobility with the desire to create livable, meaningful urban spaces? Is there any room for the megaprojects of Rudolph in a city that now favors pocket parks and restriped bike lanes?

There were plenty of examples I had to leave on the cutting-room floor, everything from Portland’s Mt. Hood freeway (the stub is pictured above) to the wider network proposed by Pompidou in Paris to Milwaukee’s Park East Spur, and if anyone has any images, recollections, would be curious to hear.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some Yule matters to attend to…

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Posted on Friday, December 24th, 2010 at 5:10 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
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On Queueing

(HT: Transportationist)

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Posted on Friday, December 24th, 2010 at 4:45 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

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Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

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