City of Rochester
News Release
(Thursday, September 1, 2016) – The City of Rochester was featured today on The Atlantic’s CityLab site for the Inner Loop East Reconstruction Project in an article entitled: “Burying a 1950s planning disaster.”
“The Downtown Rochester that many of us grew up in was built for the automobile, with the anticipation that the volume of traffic would continue to grow,” Mayor Lovely A. Warren said. “But today, our residents want a city that is also walkable and bikeable – a city that is connected. The Inner Loop East project is just one step we are taking to reconnect Downtown to our neighborhoods and build a 21st Century downtown for a 21st Century population.”
CityLab is a news site that features new and innovative solutions in city planning. In his article, author Norman Garrick, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Connecticut and a fellow and former board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, discussed how urban freeways have disconnected our cities and overtaken valuable land that could instead be used for job creation.
“Realizing the devastating effect urban freeways have had on downtowns across the U.S., many cities are now contemplating some form of freeway removal. Most of these discussions haven’t gotten very far, but in Rochester, New York, officials have moved beyond the talking phase and are actually taking action,” Garrick wrote.
In her 2016 State of the City address, Mayor Warren announced that she is seeking funding to evaluate alternatives for removing the northern section of the Inner Loop, demonstrating an ongoing commitment to the city’s neighborhoods.
“If any city is going to break the stranglehold that mid-century transportation planning still has on so many American cities, it might just be Rochester,” the article continued.
Read the CityLab article here: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/09/burying-a-1950s-planning-disaster/498203/
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News Media: For more information, contact Press Officer Jessica Alaimo at 428-7135.