Remove Detroit's Freeways?

[Detroitnerd]

OK, you asked for it... you are bat-shit crazy!

Haha. Well, um, thanks, I guess.

Let me ask this question... north of I-94, what is the major cross-town roadway for getting from the east to the west side? Let's see McNichols [[6 Mile) is closed, so that would leave 7 Mile Rd. [[and Davison to a lesser extent)!!

Well, Mack/MLK is south of I-94, but it's a solid crosstown thoroughfare without the annoying one-way orientations. I guess Davison, to my mind, is still the quickest way to drive from one side of town to the other. And why is McNichols closed?

I-94 does a great job of fixing the problem that the east/west sides of Detroit are poorly connected with cross town roadways. South of I-94 you have the Warren/Forest maze to get you across town, and below that you have to go to downtown to find cross town roads.

It's true, Detroit never had a good system of crosstown thoroughfares [[probably something we inherited from the ribbon-shaped private claims and the odd alignment of the 10,000-acre tract smack in the middle.

But consider that for a long time we DID have a good system of crosstown streetcars. We gave them up and pushed for high-speed roads instead. And that's when we did some sensible things [[bulldozing Myrtle through to Woodward, for instance) and a lot of questionable things [[routing I-75 on Vernor Highway).

So I-94 does a great job of funneling all the cross town traffic that has nowhere else to go [[without the need for a map) between 7 Mile to the north and Warren/Forest to the south.

It is a handy route for people who don't want to consult a map, but when you consider that it handles through traffic, switching traffic, short-trip traffic ... well, that's a lot of jobs to give one road. [[And that's not to mention the thousands of demolitions that went into building it.) Ideally, we should put some other transportation option in place to pick up the slack and promote density -- if we build dense enough, maybe we won't need to take all those crosstown trips.