Talking Headways Podcast: The Freeway That Never Was
This week we’re talking with Brendan Wittstruck about St. Louis's never built freeway, I-755, which he recently wrote about at Streetsblog member NextSTL.
By
Jeff Wood
2:26 PM EDT on July 23, 2015
This week we’re talking with Brendan Wittstruck about St. Louis’s never built freeway, I-755, which he recently wrote about at Streetsblog member NextSTL.
Brendan discusses the history of the project and how drawing lines on maps can be seductive to planners, who always have to be careful about trying to “fix” cities. He also talks about the racial politics of freeway construction in St. Louis, and how that legacy still shapes the city today. Finally, we chat about what the I-755 story means for freeway teardown movements today in terms of data collection and why this freeway never saw the light of day.
Join us and hear about the teardown that never had to happen, and the freeway that was never built.
Jeff Wood is the creator of the Talking Headways podcast and editor of the newsletter The Overhead Wire.
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