Page:Interregional Highways.pdf/88

70 that use may yield the benefits not only of quick and free traffic flow, but also of eradication of a long-standing eyesore and blight upon the city’s attractiveness and health. Even at the expense of some indirection in the location of the route, it may be greatly advantageous to convert undeveloped areas to such use.

Other locations favorable for the reduction or simplification of intersections on the arterial routes may be found within or along the boundaries of parks and other large tracts of city or institutional property that interrupt the regular rectangular street plan. An examination of the city for opportunities of this sort may be rewarded by the discovery that it is possible to project reasonably direct routes from one such area to another with substantial advantage in the reduction of intersection problems.

After an interregional route has been carefully located so as to minimize the number of cross routes, a considerable number will still exist. The grade of all that cannot be avoided should then be separated.

And finally, all sections of the interregional system in cities—those serving as circumferential distributors as well as the city-penetrating routes—should be established as arterial highways of limited access. The principle of limited access is outlined in a later section of this report.

Relation to urban planning.—It should be borne in mind that the interregional routes, from the standpoint of the city, will provide only a partial facility for movement of the city’s traffic. That part whether great or small, should be determined in location and designed in character to be a consistent and useful part of the entire urban transportation plan. As previously suggested, the entire plan should be conceived in relation to a desirable pattern of future city development.

The present flow of traffic within the city is affected by the existing pattern of land use, the existing location of railroad and other transportation terminals, the existing concentrations of business, industrial, and cultural establishments, and the existing location of residential areas of various classes. It is probable that many of these existing land uses will be materially changed within the life period of any substantial new traffic facilities now provided. Such material changes must be expected even if there is no planned direction of the course they should take, and the location and character of the new routes provided should anticipate them as fully as possible.

By careful and complete functional studies of the city organism, it may be possible to devise a rational plan of future land use that will assign more or less specific areas to each of the principal classes of use—residentalresidential [sic], cultural, business, industrial, etc. Having planned such rational distributions of land use, it may be possible to obtain the public consent necessary to the establishment of legal controls, land authorities, and other devices and machinery that will assure an actual development over a period of years in conformity with the plan. In such case, the planning of city streets, the interregional routes and other express ways, and all other urban facilities would take the forms and locations necessary to serve the intended land uses, and these facilities would be provided in essential time relationship to the development of the entire plan, and in a manner to bring about its undistorted realization.