Highway to Hell

Charles Rosenblum lays out everything that's wrong with the Mon-Fayette Expressway here. In particular, he discusses what it will do to Braddock:

Mon-Fayette advocates insist that the new traffic will benefit Braddock by encouraging development. That reasoning is simply false: Look at struggling East Ohio Street on the North Side near the Parkway North. It’s also creepy. Do they really have to destroy Braddock to save it? A few tens of millions of dollars to save historic Braddock was derided as an unrealistic pipedream. But now that it’s too late, a few billion to flatten what’s left for a highway -- there’s a great idea. ...

In an era of smart growth, sustainable development and a movement of people back to the cities, the idea of a new superhighway is more out-of-date than any under-maintained Victorian building ever was. It’s positively antediluvian.

Full disclosure: Rosenblum teaches at Carnegie Mellon. For more thoughts on the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and the Mon-Fayette Expressway, go here and here.