[supafamous]

Originally Posted by EvoFire

Does it not serve the purpose to cutting through all those lights? The elevated viaduct is effectively 4-5 blocks long if you get on from Venables/Prior street.

I can't pretend to know because I haven't looked at the studies.

It does serve that purpose, it's just WAY overbuilt for it. The viaduct was built when the plan was to run a highway up to it and with no highway it has way more capacity than it needs for that purpose so the tradeoff of taking up that land for a road versus building a park or housing (or anything else) isn't worth it anymore. Saving a couple mins on someone's commute ends up not being worth what that land could otherwise do (that's pretty prime real estate).

Wild fact: Something like a third of the land (often more) in most cities is used for roads and parking. Considering the value of land it's completely insane that we devote so much of our land to moving cars/trucks from point A to point B. This is what people mean when we say we subsidize cars.