I grew up by Syracuse.
Yes, the raised I-81 section is seriously ugly.
BUT...that’s how you get to places in Syracuse.
Eliminate it, and all that traffic has to exit on the perimeter and drive much longer/slower to get anywhere. That will destroy already suffering downtown activity. Further development will be far more induced to build outside the city.
Go underground, and costs incurred will devastate city finances - for a city already suffering long-term decline.
Just removing the viaduct will be horribly expensive.
Knowing how the city works, they’ll talk about it forever, cheaply patch the bridgework as long as they can, a section will collapse, removal will commence, the 481 bypass will be renamed New I-81, and downtown will degrade as all that traffic finds better places to go outside the city.
For context: a couple years ago a building partially collapsed onto I-81 within the city, shutting the freeway down for MONTHS. Seriously, they didn’t have the money/resources/motivation to just clean the bricks off the road and demolish the remaining near-collapse building. Removing the viaduct completely would take years.
privatize - then see how many actually would pay for the highway.
“The people of Syracuse are pretty clear (about) what they want. We want that viaduct down,” Hawkins said, yelling into a microphone. “
B.S.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just like the I-84 viaduct in Hartford.
I don’t know much about Syracuse but everyone single person I knew in California who was old enough to remember the Embarcadaro (sp?) viaduct didn’t miss it when it was removed.
I’ve seen it in movies like one of the Dirty Harry movies and it was godawful ugly.
In Sacramento they ran Interstate Five through Old Sacramento and the whole point was to try to destroy their riverfront area using the highway as a weapon. Now a lot of people regret that I-5 was diverted from its original route and then gerrymandered to pass through Sacramento and Stockton. It was originally supposed to go from Oregon to Vacaville (the original I-5 is now I-505) and then across to Rio Vista before crossing a river to Antioch.
They had crazy ideas in the 1950’s and now some of those ideas are due to be replaced and since the original structures have to be replaced anyway why not do it with something that makes a city more attractive instead of uglier?
San Francisco did it.