Unbuilt Urban Projects That You Wish Had Been Built

[kernals12]

History is littered with ideas from architects and planners to remake our cities that never made it off the drawing board for a variety of reasons. What are the ones you wish had been built?

Mine is Marincello, a planned development at the Marin Headlands. It would've provided beautiful views of the bay and easy access to San Francisco. It was cancelled in 1970 due to opposition from residents. And given the Bay Area's dire housing shortage, it should've been built.

 

[TheMann]

Oooooo....You just landed one of my favorite topics....

My favorite of my hometown of Toronto is easily Harbor City:

Turn a small, underused airport and roughly 500 acres of filled-in land (with much of the fill coming from the massive development going on in Toronto at the time) into a community of sixty thousand people in one of the largest mixed-use neighborhoods in the Western world, where every single residential unit has water frontage, light rail trains take most of the residents from their homes to the trains and mixed-use developments give a greater sense of people living right near everything they need without the need for massive skyscrapers.

Had it been built in the 1970s, it would probably have changed virtually everything about Toronto's cityscape, as it would have proven the worth of such ideas decade before OTL, and probably resulted in the re-development of a lot of the city that is happening now much sooner.

 

[kernals12]

Oooooo....You just landed one of my favorite topics....

My favorite of my hometown of Toronto is easily Harbor City:

Turn a small, underused airport and roughly 500 acres of filled-in land (with much of the fill coming from the massive development going on in Toronto at the time) into a community of sixty thousand people in one of the largest mixed-use neighborhoods in the Western world, where every single residential unit has water frontage, light rail trains take most of the residents from their homes to the trains and mixed-use developments give a greater sense of people living right near everything they need without the need for massive skyscrapers.

Had it been built in the 1970s, it would probably have changed virtually everything about Toronto's cityscape, as it would have proven the worth of such ideas decade before OTL, and probably resulted in the re-development of a lot of the city that is happening now much sooner.

Looks like Expo 67 on steroids.

 

[Dorknought]

The dead straight express lane from my house to my work.

 

[TheMann]

Looks like Expo 67 on steroids.

To an extent, it was. Harbour City and Metro Centre, the two monster re-development projects Toronto considered in the late 1960s, were complete opposites of each other in many ways, with the latter being designed around massive towers and explicit separation of transportation, commercial, residential and institutional areas and purposes, while Harbour City was the complete opposite, designed and developed as a dense low-rise neighborhood with the intent of creating a walkable neighborhood where everything was in close reach, and the water frontage was meant to allow residents to all have boats and access to the Toronto Islands for recreational purposes. Both ultimately fizzled (though Metro Centre's landmark feature, a telecommunications tower, was ultimately built as the CN Tower, completed in 1976), but Metro Centre really never had a chance of working for a variety of reasons, while Harbour City was a genuinely good idea that ultimately succumbed to NIMBY issues.

 

[TheMann]

History is littered with ideas from architects and planners to remake our cities that never made it off the drawing board for a variety of reasons. What are the ones you wish had been built?

Mine is Marincello, a planned development at the Marin Headlands. It would've provided beautiful views of the bay and easy access to San Francisco. It was cancelled in 1970 due to opposition from residents. And given the Bay Area's dire housing shortage, it should've been built.

Looking at where it was planned to be built, there was absolutely no way it wasn't going to run into NIMBY hell, but I agree with you on the condition that transportation problems could be settled. The Golden Gate Bridge is already congested a lot of the time, and the 30,000+ residents of Marincello would make that immeasurably worse. Figuring out the traffic congestion issue would be absolutely essential for Marincello to ever have a chance of success, either by developing the economy on the Marin County side or figuring out how to make the Golden Gate Bridge be able to handle the extra traffic load.

 

[kernals12]

Looking at where it was planned to be built, there was absolutely no way it wasn't going to run into NIMBY hell, but I agree with you on the condition that transportation problems could be settled. The Golden Gate Bridge is already congested a lot of the time, and the 30,000+ residents of Marincello would make that immeasurably worse.

One Golden Gate Bridge not enough?

Then build another one!

Or build another road deck on the existing bridge

 

[kernals12]

I touched on a lot of these projects in a series of threads
New York Thinks Big
The Bay Area Thinks Big
London Thinks Big

New York especially has left a lot on the table over the years.
There were plans to extend Manhattan south by 10 square miles and fill in the East River.
Jamaica Bay was to be turned into a Sea Port, but then Robert Moses decided he wanted to turn it into a Wildlife Sanctuary
There were also plans to fill in the Jersey Meadows, which by the mid 20th century were just a giant garbage dump

And that's not even touching on all the subway lines that should've been built, such as the 2nd Avenue and Utica Avenue lines.

 

[TheMann]

Assuming the bridge has the strength to handle the extra structural weight, the second deck on the Golden Gate would probably fix the problem, but you'd have to plan that for when Monticello is complete. If possible, I'd also try to have transit of some sort added to the bridge to reduce the problems with all of the cars. Perhaps the center two lanes of a double-deck Golden Gate Bridge are dedicated for a rail line? If you go that route, you could easily use linear-induction electric motors (which would have been maturing as Monticello was being built) as propulsion, making there be lots of room in the middle of the bridge for trains.

 

[kernals12]

Assuming the bridge has the strength to handle the extra structural weight, the second deck on the Golden Gate would probably fix the problem, but you'd have to plan that for when Monticello is complete. If possible, I'd also try to have transit of some sort added to the bridge to reduce the problems with all of the cars. Perhaps the center two lanes of a double-deck Golden Gate Bridge are dedicated for a rail line? If you go that route, you could easily use linear-induction electric motors (which would have been maturing as Monticello was being built) as propulsion, making there be lots of room in the middle of the bridge for trains.

You mean like BART? As @CalBear can explain, BART cannot be relied upon. And, as you can see from the illustrations, there are bus lanes, so it does accommodate transit.

 

[TheMann]

You mean like BART? As @CalBear can explain, BART cannot be relied upon. And, as you can see from the illustrations, there are bus lanes, so it does accommodate transit.

Bus Lanes would be alright at first, but if Monticello's construction results in more people in Marin County, dedicated bus lanes will rapidly become inadequate, and I generally (from the perspective of a transportation-specialist civil engineer, so perhaps I am a touch biased) don't think dedicated bus lanes are a good idea - if you anticipate greater transit ridership in the area you'd be better to go with light rail at a minimum, if you don't why do you take away lanes of road for buses specifically? More to the point, on a congested roadway like the Golden Gate Bridge (and a tolled one, which makes this problem worse) short of physical separation for the lanes, traffic laws keeping cars out of bus lanes is effectively unenforceable.

As far as BART goes, a BART line for a community the size of Monticello is gross overkill, and you'd need to put it through San Francisco. What I'd do in that scenario is recommend something like the Intermediate Capacity Transit System (developed with pride in Ontario, Canada, in the early 1970s ) using the linear induction motor setup, and do the double-deck bridge modification. Northbound traffic takes the upper deck, southbound the lower, and the ICTS system goes where the middle lanes were in the upper deck. ICTS cars are nearly two feet narrower than BART rolling stock, a big advantage in this case, and you would find this line cheaper to build than a BART line through San Francisco.

 

[kernals12]

This was "Houston Center", proposed in the 1970s by the Texas Eastern Transmission Company. It would've doubled the size of Houston's CBD and provided space for 10,000 residents in a mix of mid and high rise buildings

There would be monorails and airport style people movers for getting around and 40,000 parking spaces. Plus pedestrians would be elevated 50 feet above street level with no interference between them and the traffic.

Unfortunately, the economy turned sour in the late 70s and the project was cancelled.

 

[TheMann]

Monorails, inside glass tubes in Texas....*shivers* The architecture is interesting, but there is a reason why Monorails don't see wide transit usage, and glass tubes in a waterfront city with average daily highs above 85 F for five months out of the year is a really, really bad idea unless you got hella powerful air conditioning to deal with the heat and humidity.

 

[kernals12]

Bus Lanes would be alright at first, but if Monticello's construction results in more people in Marin County, dedicated bus lanes will rapidly become inadequate, and I generally (from the perspective of a transportation-specialist civil engineer, so perhaps I am a touch biased) don't think dedicated bus lanes are a good idea - if you anticipate greater transit ridership in the area you'd be better to go with light rail at a minimum, if you don't why do you take away lanes of road for buses specifically? More to the point, on a congested roadway like the Golden Gate Bridge (and a tolled one, which makes this problem worse) short of physical separation for the lanes, traffic laws keeping cars out of bus lanes is effectively unenforceable.

As far as BART goes, a BART line for a community the size of Monticello is gross overkill, and you'd need to put it through San Francisco. What I'd do in that scenario is recommend something like the Intermediate Capacity Transit System (developed with pride in Ontario, Canada, in the early 1970s ) using the linear induction motor setup, and do the double-deck bridge modification. Northbound traffic takes the upper deck, southbound the lower, and the ICTS system goes where the middle lanes were in the upper deck. ICTS cars are nearly two feet narrower than BART rolling stock, a big advantage in this case, and you would find this line cheaper to build than a BART line through San Francisco.

It's Marincello, not Monticello.

And Marincello was not the only cancelled development in Marin County. There were plans to build a freeway to Point Reyes through Bolinas Bay with development following along. All told, it would've added about 150,000 people. And there were also a lot of cancelled developments on the East Side of Marin County. The Army Corps of Engineers predicted in 1959 that Marin would hit 790,000 residents by 2020, against the 250,000 that was the reality. They were operating off optimistic national population forecasts that assumed the baby boom would go on forever, with America having 420 million people by now, but clearly they thought Marin could fit that many people in a pinch.

In which case, Marin probably would've needed 2 BART lines, one going east up to Novato and the other to Point Reyes.

 

[kernals12]

Monorails, inside glass tubes in Texas....*shivers* The architecture is interesting, but there is a reason why Monorails don't see wide transit usage, and glass tubes in a waterfront city with average daily highs above 85 F for five months out of the year is a really, really bad idea unless you got hella powerful air conditioning to deal with the heat and humidity.

You wouldn't be shivering, you'd be sweating through your underpants.

 

[kernals12]

The City of London wanted an extensive network of elevated pedestrian walkways, or pedways. It would've been 30 miles long, blowing Minneapolis' skyway system out of the water (only 9 miles).

 

[kernals12]

There was also this idea to raise the sidewalks of Downtown Los Angeles.

I happen to be very partial to pedestrian grade separation. It makes walking much safer and easier.

 

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

Monorails, inside glass tubes in Texas....*shivers* The architecture is interesting, but there is a reason why Monorails don't see wide transit usage, and glass tubes in a waterfront city with average daily highs above 85 F for five months out of the year is a really, really bad idea unless you got hella powerful air conditioning to deal with the heat and humidity.

This was the 1970s, Astroworld had hella powerful outdoor air-conditioning vents for the people waiting in line

 

[Workable Goblin]

Monorails, inside glass tubes in Texas....*shivers* The architecture is interesting, but there is a reason why Monorails don't see wide transit usage, and glass tubes in a waterfront city with average daily highs above 85 F for five months out of the year is a really, really bad idea unless you got hella powerful air conditioning to deal with the heat and humidity.

This is Houston. Of course there's going to be hella powerful air conditioning!

You mean like BART? As @CalBear can explain, BART cannot be relied upon. And, as you can see from the illustrations, there are bus lanes, so it does accommodate transit.

And yet I've had zero problems with BART whenever I've been in the Bay Area (including some fairly prolonged stays, so it's not just a "one and done" deal). I don't trust CalBear's opinion on this, because he seems to be living in a different universe than I do.

As for me, I would say the '70s-era proposals to build rail transit in Honolulu, which ended up being sunk by Reagan greatly reducing federal support for such projects after taking office. Given the environment and density of Honolulu, rail makes a great deal of sense here, and if it had been built in the 1970s or 1980s it probably would have been fairly economical compared to the current project. Unfortunately, it's hard to find details about it beyond "well, it existed" and "Frank Fasi favored it," which isn't much to go on. The route would have been different than the current project, but not that different, since the general "terrain" it would have had to navigate would have been basically the same.

 

[Gukpard]

Brasília was to be another city called "Vera Cruz" that should have been made on a very traditionalist architecture, the plan was eventually scrapped and built on a modernist base. I would go for Vera Cruz.