The Highway Hit List

What surprises me is the vitriol with which people fight back at these efforts. I live in Oakland, and seeing people lose their minds about 980 has been quite interesting. Whenever I take 980 it is mostly empty, and removing it would make downtown and west Oakland way more accessible from either side. Should residents of Walnut Creek driving to Alameda (who from what I can tell are the only people that regularly use 980) dictate Oakland's urban future? I would say not.

I used to be all for the removal of highways, but now I worry that this trend will accentuate economic inequality and hurt poorer people who might want to move to the big wealthy cities where these highways are being removed.

50 years ago, when these roads were being built, they enabled wealthy workers to flee to the suburbs and commute into city centers for work, cutting through the poorer neighborhoods left behind.

Now the geographic patterns are reversing in some areas, and city centers are now far more vibrant (read: wealthy), while in places like Los Angeles, where I live, much of the new population growth is occurring on the periphery of the urban area, where lower income workers can afford to live while enduring long commutes into the city.

I live in an affluent neighborhood, and many of my neighbors want to make the city more walkable and "friendlier", by making roads smaller and de-emphasizing cars in favor of transit and human-scale development. In the long run, I think this is a good idea, and would dramatically improve my life in the city.

But at the same time, if policies make a city and its high quality jobs difficult to access for people who can't afford to live in the city itself, it's not necessarily a net positive, especially when the wealthiest cities are enthusiastically restricting supply.

Ultimately, I worry that we will look back at this period in urban policy as the time when city centers got far wealthier, low-income people were displaced, and the focus of wonks turned to creating cities that rich people like them would like to live in, without realizing that the same policies that makes a city enjoyable to live in also makes the engine of good jobs hard to access for people who aren't fortunate enough to already be living there.

Real solutions (in my opinion):

  * Public (city/state/etc) owned parking structures at the edges of the city.
  * Good, all weather sheltered, pedestrian access between in city parking / housing / jobs.
  * More residential development within cities, until the competition drives the rent down to the same as (or close
    to) the surrounding areas; when it increases due to network effect push again to keep it within that bound.
  * Improve building codes to keep the quality of life in the city the same as out of the city.
  * Incentivize (tax benefits for compliance, tax more for non-complianc) units having more 'family'
    sized dwellings (and those even better acoustic isolation).  Make it possible to afford and find
    a place to raise a family within the city.

I will be a little bit sad to see 280 spur go. For some parts of SF (e.g. Pac Heights) it is better to take I-280 and cut through the tenderloin (6th street exit -> harrison -> 7th street -> leavenworth -> pine) than to take the central expressway spur. When I was driving for lyft, the 280 was a fast and reliable way to return to the high-volume SoMa area for pickups during the evening rush.

Richmond VA's got one of these situations. In the 1950s I-95 was routed straight through Richmond's historic black district, Jackson Ward, destroying it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Ward

Plans to remove 280 spur in San Francisco, that's a major change.