The great city flop

[Astroman 0]

This thread is all about, from Architecture to mass transit or just about any  that realiy flop in city planning history,

 

 

 

 

1,The double decker bridge in Boston it made more problems then it solved and it was a real eye sore and it tore apart most of the water front from the down town

 

2,Los Angeles highway system give you one word bad city planning,my reason why i don't like Los Angeles highway system it took me about 90 min from marina del ray to 20 century fox studios.

[haux 6]

I'll have to go with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. What a mistake. Awesome pictures and video, though.

[spa 970]

How about Mirabel Airport in Montreal. It opened in 1975 was suppose to become Montreal's main airport replacing Dorval (now Pierre Trudeau Airport) but it was way the heck out in the boonies and wasn't linked effectively to the city so it never saw much more than occassional use. I think it was just last year that they finally ceased all passenger traffic out of it and now the place is just used for freight. Imagine. A perfectly good modern airport complete with passenger terminals and the lot and no use whatsoever. Dumb.

[pnorrell 4]

How about New Orleans' 9th Ward...

[fivedayrental 0]

The Detroit people mover, i'd like to also recommend the Monorail in the Simpsons

[organicsabre 1]

I have to chip in here one of the Uk's worst decissions was the cost saving of the M25 in the 80's when it was built.

It was designed to be a 12 lane motorway around the city of London. The cost due to having to tunnel under the thames (Dartford tunnel) and all the engineering nightmares they had, they decided to reduce this to a 6 lane motorway (3 lanes each direction).

This millenium they are spending more than

[DavidBrown 0]

Date: 2/3/2006 6:17:05 PM Author:Astroman

2,Los Angeles highway system give you one word bad city planning,my reason why i don't like Los Angeles highway system it took me about 90 min from marina del ray to 20 century fox studios.

 

Not many people may know this, but London was going to have an LA-style motorway network called the Ringways. It would have involved not one, but 4 M25's, plus a huge amount of arterial roads. More information can be found here .

[tchaos713 5]

How about any city that put a freeway right along its riverfront? I live in Louisville and I-64 spoils an otherwise beautiful view of the city from Indiana!

[spa 970]

Yep. The waterfront freeway was an all too common mistake. Toronto's Gardiner and Lakeshore Expressways come to mind. They nearly built one along the Halifax harbour in the 60s but it luckly didn't happen and instead Barrington Street's highway like area abrubtly ends at the Cogswell interchange and becomes the downtown grid. Today the area that would have been destroyed and cut off is one of the city's major tourist draws.

[mpetryni 0]

The Seattle Monorail Project. Link: http://www.elevated.org/

They came up with some financing plan that was like, three-quarters of the costs were interest on a loan spanning 75 years. Or something like that. For one line of the system.

[simzebu 20]

Date: 2/4/2006 3:36:48 PM
Author: tchaos713
How about any city that put a freeway right along its riverfront?

quote>
Albany has that too. So did Boston, before the other flop of the Big Dig.


EDIT:
on a related note, The Dunn Memorial Bridge, and the interchanges on the ends, specificaly on the Albany side.
To list the problems:
The bridge to nowhere:


there was some plan for this, but it never got finished.

the thing its self:



and the structural problem that, had it been discovered a few hours later, probably would have sent quite a few commuters plummeting to the ground a couple hundred feet below:

[espiegs 0]

as much as i loved London when I visited, it is a city you cannot navigate by car. It took me an hour to get to the M3 from Holborn. i understand that the roads were built for horses, but they have to build a highway in central london somewhere

but aside from that, a major mistake in design: Uris Hall at Cornell University was designed after the US Steel tower in Pittsburgh. Both were built of cortan steel, an alloy which turns a bluish yellow over time. However, this only happens in a city with high levels of pollution, and Ithaca, NY has close to none. this is why the building has a rusty color that can be considered ugly.

[justanothersim86 83]

Boston's John Hancock tower: had windows popping out all over the place when it was first constructed.

London ON's Horton Road: A sunken avenue that cuts off the area southwest of downtown from downtown itself.

 

 

[irishgrapes 1]

Milwakee's Marquett Intrechange or the spaghetti bowl as many people call it. When it was completed it was already about 10 years behind it's time and now we're spending millions to expand it. Not only that, but it cut right through the old italian nieghborhood in Milwaukee, diplaceing many of its residents and destroying serval old churches including the italian communities oldest, our lady of Pompeii.



From the Historic Third Ward association Then in the 1960s, highway construction displaced the close-knit Italian Third Ward community. Milwaukee's first architectural landmark was named in 1967, the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii Catholic Church. Later that same year, the church was demolished, also for freeway construction.

This is the only picture I could find of it Online:

[EnigmaticUK 1]

Coventry ringroad and the majority of the construction inside it.

[system439 0]

The biggest flop is I-495 in New Jersey and New York. The interstate starts in New Jersey, goes through the Lincoln Tunnel into New York city, then just ends. It ends and has exits to city streets. Then one must take city streets across the entire island of Manhattan to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. I-495 starts again at this tunnel and runs the entire length of Long Island.



Originally planned to span the entire island, costs and local opposition (most expensive real estate in the USA) have kept this from becoming a reality...as a result this causes 24 million cars a year to sit in midtown traffic trying to cross the island to get from one part of 495 to the other...what a dumb idea.

Read more about this at http://www.nycroads.com

[irishgrapes 1]

Better that than to have torn a gapeing hole through lower midtown.

Highways are like vampires, they such the life out of cities, speeding through at 70 mph they destroy our sence of place.

[Micah 16]

Houston- the built a monorail in the middle of a road and they promised us that it would provide thousands of new jobs because of a huge growth along the rail-line.... well, that never happened, and now traffic suffers because there is a big rail-line in the middle of the road.

[tizzy123 0]

In terms of being absolutely detrimental to a city's future growth, the gentlemens agreement that no building in Philadelphia be built higher than the statue of William Penn on city hall led to a steady decline in the rate of growth of the city. Once the largest city and port in the U.S. Philly was on course to be much larger than it currently is. It wasn't until 1987 (I think) that an office tower taller than city hall was built.

On the other hand, it made the city much more aesthetically appealing. So, it's a toss-up...growth or beauty. If you stress growth this was definitely a flop--beauty, this was definitely a great idea.

As an aside, there are still no buildings taller than William Penn to the east (towards the Delaware), leaving him a clear view of his original area of settlement.

[storms991 0]

dang, irishgrapes, they should just get a roundabout

[Ratieya455 1]

This one is of a much smaller scale, but a small town in Minnesota near where I live recently built a new library. Their old one was probably built around 1975 and is located at a nice little park in town, and they were simply running out of space. They built a new, much larger library about a mile outside of town near a mini-urban sprawl area. It's nice to have the space, but they days of walking to the library are over. There is no walking or biking trail of any kind leading to it, and if you were to walk along that highway you'd probably get picked up by the police and put into a mental ward. If you are going to drive outside of town to go the the library, you might as well keep driving for 11 miles to a much larger library. Just bad planning, in my opinion.

[Gman55 0]

The long-running Seattle monorail bit :/ And the city (and state) might make a flop out of the efforts to rebuilt the Viaduct that runs along the waterfront.

[moganite 4]

in Sydney the cross city tunnel first it was funded by a state government/private consortium partnership then the gov couldn't keep it under buget the goverment couldn't negotiate a contract the traffic was rerouted so that you had to use it if the traffic didn't make the quota the goverment had to compensate the consortium the toll was set too high $3.50 aus each way when it opened it had half the cars they wanted then it dropped to a quater of that toll free period was introduced only half the expexted viechles used it afterwards the traffic fell by 60 percent or so in the week tolls were reintoduced now they can't/won't cut the toll to a more reasonable level and the gov won't buy it outright either. we are stuck with a white elephant noone uses they expected 120 thousand cars to use it each day during the toll free period i never got above 40 thousand now cariies 20 thousand at most a day and dropping this would have to be a flop if there ever was one possibly rivaling GWBushes idiocy in new orleans.

[fitchy 3]

Kansas City Missouri is currently improving its most heavily traveled interchange. Two interstates and one state highway (which is essentially an interstate also) converge at the Grandview triangle. (there will be a name change upon construction completion). Currently 250k vehicles per day, and const. to accomidate 400k per day. Triangle Construction by the Numbers . 540 acres . 660,000 square yards of new concrete pavement - Most of it is 14" thick on an 18" rock base . 70 lane miles of new pavement . 135,000 tons of asphalt . 22 new bridges (1,016,000 sf of bridge deck = 23.3 acres) . 293 new bridge columns . 28 existing bridges are being removed (360,000 sf of existing bridge deck) . 99,000 square feet of concrete sound walls are being constructed . 248,000 square feet of MSE retaining walls are being constructed . 1,900,000 cubic yards of soil excavation . 700,000 cubic yards of rock excavation . 2,300,000 cubic yards of embankment http://www.kctriangle.org/1h_design.htm

[hamsterTK 93]

The old Holiday Inn in Downtown Houston, Texas

It was built in the late 70's, went out of business in the mid 80's,became a maharishi heaven on earth place for a while, then has been empty for over a decade. The downtown hotel market isnt very good, in fact dt houston has many abandoned modern hotels.

Piccy's:

it may be renovated, but who knows:

[harshmanc 0]

Originally posted by: spa Yep. The waterfront freeway was an all too common mistake. quote>

Cleveland has a dual problem on it's lakefront, the "shoreway" freeway, and a series of train tracks that sever what lakefront attractions there are from downtown. They have plans to turn it into a boulevard though in the future.

[Saint Andrew 6]

Originally posted by: spa

How about Mirabel Airport in Montreal. It opened in 1975 was suppose to become Montreal's main airport replacing Dorval (now Pierre Trudeau Airport) but it was way the heck out in the boonies and wasn't linked effectively to the city so it never saw much more than occassional use. I think it was just last year that they finally ceased all passenger traffic out of it and now the place is just used for freight. Imagine. A perfectly good modern airport complete with passenger terminals and the lot and no use whatsoever. Dumb.quote>

Yep. As a Montrealer, I agree. In fact, Mirabel was built to acomodate 120 million passengers a year. That's almost twice as Atlanta-Hartsfield, the worlds busiest. Now Dorval (Trudeau) handles all commercial flights and receives a mere 10 million passengers per year. Mirabel was also the largest airport in the world in terms od land area when it was completed (larger than all 5 NY boroughs together). What a waste.

Montreal does have its share of flops. Another is the 76 Summer Games when the Olympic Stadium was completed after the games were done, and we just finished paying for the stadium (took 30 years).

Still on the sports scene, the Expos were a flop. Having to play home games in Puerto Rico because attendance was better there. And of course the 2005 FINA World Championships, which were given to Mtl, then taken away because of the lack of funsing, then reawarded to the city and ended not being that bad.


And finally most recently the problems with extending the Montreal Metro into Laval (major suburb located north of the island) which cost over the double of its initial planned cost, all that work for only 3 additional stations. The line is still not completed.

[spa 970]

Originally posted by: Saint Andrew

Originally posted by: spa How about Mirabel Airport in Montreal. It opened in 1975 was suppose to become Montreal's main airport replacing Dorval (now Pierre Trudeau Airport) but it was way the heck out in the boonies and wasn't linked effectively to the city so it never saw much more than occassional use. I think it was just last year that they finally ceased all passenger traffic out of it and now the place is just used for freight. Imagine. A perfectly good modern airport complete with passenger terminals and the lot and no use whatsoever. Dumb.quote>

Yep. As a Montrealer, I agree. In fact, Mirabel was built to acomodate 120 million passengers a year. That's almost twice as Atlanta-Hartsfield, the worlds busiest. Now Dorval (Trudeau) handles all commercial flights and receives a mere 10 million passengers per year. Mirabel was also the largest airport in the world in terms od land area when it was completed (larger than all 5 NY boroughs together). What a waste. Montreal does have its share of flops. Another is the 76 Summer Games when the Olympic Stadium was completed after the games were done, and we just finished paying for the stadium (took 30 years). Still on the sports scene, the Expos were a flop. Having to play home games in Puerto Rico because attendance was better there. And of course the 2005 FINA World Championships, which were given to Mtl, then taken away because of the lack of funsing, then reawarded to the city and ended not being that bad. And finally most recently the problems with extending the Montreal Metro into Laval (major suburb located north of the island) which cost over the double of its initial planned cost, all that work for only 3 additional stations. The line is still not completed.quote>

Yeah Montreal has had its share. The Olympics and Mirabel have to be the two biggest and the funny thing is they're actually nationally recognized. Other cities have their screw ups but Montreal went for gusto.

It struck me that we're so far talking about big projects. Well I'll give one from small town Nova Scotia that I saw in the paper. Port Hawkesbury is building a new sewage treatment plant. They selected a site bordered by a cemetary, a railway and highway and the ocean. There isn't much room. They were advised to move because there wouldn't be any room to accomodate future expansion that would be required if the town continues to grow (Port Hawkesbury, unlike much of rural Canada, is actually growing). They wouldn't. They then discovered that they needed to buy this tiny piece of worthless land that a former town councilor owned. Well the former town council took the town to the cleaners over that little useless tiny patch of land. His land was utterly worthless except the town needed it. So costs are up and the site isn't perfect but things are now a go right? Wrong. Next the Historical Society got involved because of the nearby cemetary. They did some hunting through records and got an archealogist to assess the land and low and behold it turns out that there are several unmarked graves right where the plant is suppose to go. Well that did. The site had to be changed and a new site was found across the road. All of this could have been avoided had things been done in a more logical order. Total wasted funds for the town of only 10,000 $500,000 Canadian. Dumb.

[Aleutiandude12 0]

Seattle's elevated highway along the bay its hard to get on and its noisy at Pikes Market

[OnitzukaScorpion 0]

Well, I lived for a while in Brussels and still study there and you can call the whole city a big flop. There are several mistakes made by the city council. I wil post two of them. 1) The European Quarter is the centre of all european activity in Brussels and knowing that Brussels is the capital of Europe it's pretty large (in a Belgian way). The only problem is, is that the city council, blinded by the money from the european institutions, gave "carte blanche" to the institutions. And we all know that that's the worst thing you could decide! During construction of the European Parliament and other EU-institutions, whole (historical) neighbourhoods were demolished THe European Quarter is now a conclave, a "closed" neigbourhood for EU-councils and buraucrats hiding themselfs from the outside world. There are shops and a postoffice, but only for the fue lucky ones. THis is the main building, where you can find shops, bars and other services, but only for the fue lucky ones. 2) The second mistake is the fact that the city council is thirsty for money, any kind of money. As you may know, Brussels is known for his art-nouveau houses. Instead of keeping the historical buildings and restaure them, the council decides that the one who buys it, can do with it whaterver he wants. Ofcourse this leads to a mass demolition of art-nouveau houses who are replaced by those hidious things. That's how it was before. 3) And finally I 'll tell you something about "De Grote Markt / La Grande Place" a marketplace listed in the heritage-list of UNESCO. The council just decided, again for the money, that one of the buildings behind the marketplace is beeing restaured. But, by doing this, they will add af few more storeys, knowing that this will affect the vieuw of the marketplace and that this could lead to a removal of the UNESCO-list. Well these are just a few ot the mistakes they made. But it's not allways like that, the council also made some good decisions, but that's for another time. Maybe good to know is that I have a love-hate relationship with Brussels like all inhabitants of Brussels.