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Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

The problem of getting from one side of town to the other very quickly, without clogging up the "walkable neighborhoods" in the middle, with their narrow streets and wide sidewalks. The people going through get on the highway, out of the way of the people actually living in the town.

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In the UK we have built bypasses for most towns and most of the traffic goes around them instead of through.

In Brazil, every city bypass we build becomes the new city center in about a decade. The city just moves there.

That's generally true with Glasgow being a notable counter example - fortunately the equivalent designs for Edinburgh were never implemented:

http://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?tag=edinburgh-motorways

And we all saw how well that worked out for Arthur Dent!

I'm a fan of ring roads, Rochester for instance had a small inner loop and a much wider outer loop of freeways (with freeway segments and decent arterials connecting the inner to the outer, it looked kind of like a wagon wheel) that meant you could get almost anywhere pretty quickly.

Rochester has an extremely sad downtown area, because it’s tightly encircled by highways killing any connection to the surrounding areas, and it was turned into an office park filled with parking lots. Only a few blocks (where there are students) have any kind of vibrancy. For anyone who doesn’t have a car, it’s the perfect dystopian nightmare. A great illustration of what the article under discussion in this thread was talking about.

It was much more of a real city up through about 1950. This comparison shot is striking: http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/

At least they’re trying now though, http://www.cityofrochester.gov/InnerLoopEast/

Doesn't the UK have zoning laws that prevent the city from gravitating towards the bypass?

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