Sat
May 17 2008
08:03 am
KnoxBlvd Idea (everyone gets it but Knoxville)
By: Bill Pittman

Tearing down a downtown interstate and replacing it with a boulevard and an elongated park...now that's just crazy.

(link...)

Topics:
rikki's picture

Replace with a park or

Submitted by rikki on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 12:49pm.

Replace with a park or rebuild with pork, that is the question. You could look at this as a test of which states have the strongest or weakest road-builders lobby.

michael kaplan's picture

Tearing down a downtown

Submitted by michael kaplan on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 12:54pm.

Tearing down a downtown interstate and replacing it with ..

several of us stood up and suggested this at the public meeting organized by bill lyons, held in the first months of the haslam administration.

and i wrote on this subject over a year ago in the knoxville voice, in an article titled "Fourth and Nowhere."

scottfrith's picture

Why not get rid of Neyland

Submitted by scottfrith on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 3:19pm.

Why not get rid of Neyland Drive?

calloway's picture

damn fine question

Submitted by calloway on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 3:23pm.

Didn't Crandall Arambula suggest something along that lines .. or at least covering it up ? It's about as useless as JWP.

bizgrrl's picture

Just wait and see what UT

Submitted by bizgrrl on Sun, 2008/05/18 - 6:08am.

Just wait and see what UT does to the farm across the river. Won't that be a great use for prime property? Too bad there wasn't some sort of property use requirement for that land, or was there? If you look at just about anything UT has done in the last 20 years or so, you don't see much in the way of planning or beauty.

calloway's picture

frequently what you hear from naysayers

Submitted by calloway on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 3:27pm.

Is the expense, usually followed in coversation by how great and cost-effective it would be to level, blast, sod, rape, and pillage 'dat 'dere hillside and throw a road through the middle of it. See Powell for examples.

calloway's picture

Believe me, I am confused as to why

Submitted by calloway on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 9:14pm.

so many conservatives seem to think throwing barrels of money at asphalt peddlers is A-OK, and once someone mutters 'In-fer-strukture' heads nod and you have officially lost the argument with them.

Frustrating.

scottfrith's picture

Not sure who thought up

Submitted by scottfrith on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 6:53pm.

Not sure who thought up Neyland Drive, but it was a terrible idea. Take 2.75 miles of the city's most valuable land and bury it under a four-lane highway.

A redevelopment plan creatively incorporating public use, and returning parcels to the tax rolls, would make sense and could pay for itself. The South Knox Redevelopment plan could be a model. Integrating it with UT would obviously be important.

Oh and James White Parkway, and the newly-built Smartfix 1-40, could handle the football and Boomsday traffic.

Joe Hultquist's picture

There are examples in other cities

Submitted by Joe Hultquist on Sun, 2008/05/18 - 12:35am.

Portland and San Francisco come to mind as two good ones. In Portland, there was a riverfront freeway that separated downtown from the Willamette River. It was removed in the 1970s and replaced with a riverfront park. That city has done just fine without that freeway, thank you (though there is still a riverfront interstate highway on the east side of the river). San Francisco got rid of the Embarcadero Freeway, I'm told, replacing it with a surface street that includes streetcars. I've only seen the "after", so I don't have any personal experience with what was there before.

Closer to home, Chattanooga reclaimed Riverfront Parkway from TDOT and made it a more benign Riverside Drive. It's still a major street, but it's now a bit more people-friendly and connects to the downtown street grid.

The answer for Neyland Drive is probably to put it on a "street diet", reducing the number of lanes and making it a more pedestrian friendly street with a wide sidewalk/riverwalk between the traffic lanes and the river. Crandall Arambula's idea of covering the part of it next to downtown is worth taking a close look at at some point. It also might be a good idea to look into the potential for moving some or all of the sweage treatment plant, even though it may prove to be too costly. Riverfront land is extrememly valuable, and will only be more so in the future.

scottfrith's picture

How would an idea like this

Submitted by scottfrith on Sun, 2008/05/18 - 5:17pm.

How would an idea like this move forward?

bizgrrl's picture

The South Knox Redevelopment

Submitted by bizgrrl on Sun, 2008/05/18 - 6:05am.

The South Knox Redevelopment plan could be a model.

I think I'd have to take that plan many steps further before I would use it as a model.

Up Goose Creek's picture

Neyland

Submitted by Up Goose Creek on Sat, 2008/05/17 - 11:19pm.

The idea I've heard is reducing Neyland to 2 lanes. That would handle the traffic just fine 300+ days out of the year.

____________________________________
Less is the new More - Karrie Jacobs

Tennessee Jed's picture

Ironic that we are building

Submitted by Tennessee Jed on Sun, 2008/05/18 - 10:22am.

Ironic that we are building wider/bigger/faster highways while fuel and vehicles are inflating way beyond common reach. We could have saved millions of dollars if gas had went up to $4.00 a gallon years ago. No cars in every garage and bone soup in every pot.

_______________________________________
Trying to not make matters worse.

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