City Comforts, the blog. Digital Urban. Neighbourhoods. Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb. Avert your eyes: The obscenity that is Franklin's 31st Street. At rush hour. We often hear city officials proclaim their view of the "natural" progression of a road as needing to be BIGGER and WIDER as the years go on. A few years back, aldermen in my city lobbied hard for an obscenely wide road to be built behind the Northwestern Mutual Life headquarters. After all, went the argument, it'll need to get that big eventually.... This viewpoint is deeply flawed, to say the least, and it's costing our cities an enormous amount of money. We now pay to plow, salt, patch and otherwise and maintain a wide, four-lane road that was laid in front of long-standing houses --- this is where a residential STREET should be --- that gets very, very little traffic per day.
People who travel down 31st Street for the first time (most Franklin residents are unaware that it exists) are utterly shocked at its immensity. No - the smart money is on REDUCING the width of roads and streets. Squattercity. Subtopia. TRANSIT-CITY / URBAN & MOBILE THINK TANK. Tropolism. UNHOUSED. Urban Planning Blog - Thoughts on Design, Architecture & Urbansc. Where.