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August 4, 2007
"The Last Three Miles" and the Atlantic Yards experiment
Atlantic Yards Report
There are some indirect lessons for Atlantic Yards watchers, I think, in New Jersey journalist Steven Hart's recent book about the construction of the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey.The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway, covers the story behind the 1932 opening of the final link that would connect New York City and the Holland Tunnel (1927) with the mainland highway system, thus diverting traffic that had clogged local roads and Jersey City streets for five years.
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Failures in designBut for those of us in Brooklyn, it's useful to consider Hart's suggestion that this project be included in courses concerning failures in design.
Hart writes:
The Pulaski Skyway should also be a part of those classes, if only as an example of a quieter kind of failure--a failure rooted not in recklessness, but lack of background knowledge. The designers of Route 25 and the Skyway that is its most visible section were visionaries doing something that hadn't been done before. They weren't the only ones thinking in terms of superhighways--the first German autobahn was completed the same year the Skyway opened--but they were under the gun, and they had little experience in the field of traffic engineering to draw upon. The result was one of the most visually spectacular and functionally impaired mistakes ever made.
(Emphasis added)
Posted by amy at August 4, 2007 8:27 AM