Imagine if half the country's infrastructure was built in a 30 year span and there was no plans to replace the aging infrastructure that is rapid approaching the end of its lifespan, wouldn't that be crazy
Anyways, most urban freeways were built between 1950 and 1980 and are going to be in need of either replacement or demolition within the next 10 to 20 years so civic advocates and urban planners should start preparing plans for what to do with them once they need replacement
For example, the downtown portion of I-64 in Louisville was built in 1976 along the ohio riverfront and could be easily removed when the date comes and replaced with a boulevard OR if we let KYTC, it could be rebuilt as a larger structure with more lanes, it will be our job as citizens to demand that positive change is made to our cities when the infrastructure reaches its expiration date
There's a lot about the practical/financial side of roads and cost and land use that most North Americans don't realize. We assume our way of building cities is the only possible way, and don't realize just how expensive it is compared to ... pretty much any other way of building cities. Here are some of the important parts:
How often you have to re-do a road depends mostly on the number of cars (and the weight of those cars) that drive on it. We talk about the freeze-thaw cycle being bad for roads, and it is, but the number one factor is how much car-and-truck traffic it gets.
Fixing/repaving an old road that has deteriorated because it has been used is just as expensive as building a new road from scratch. Sure, a lot of the work has already been done for you, but you have to tear up the old road surface, which takes a lot of time and labor and equipment. So when you put in that major freeway that costs an arm and a leg and people say "yeah, it's expensive, but then it's done and we'll have this great freeway!" they are not taking into account that you don't just have to pay that massive bill once, you're going to have to pay that massive bill again in 20-30 years.
If your city design is based on "everybody drives everywhere" then you are going to need places for those people to park. And that costs money. And you can't tax that land at the same rate as you can tax everything else. So if you compare two city blocks in the same city, and one block has a single large business (all shiny and new) with a large parking lot, and the other block has a row of 80-year-old buildings filled with small local shops, the brand-new commercial building with parking is going to bring in about 80% of the taxes that you get from the older style block of businesses without parking, but the services for the block cost the same to maintain. (Roads, water pipes, sewer pipes, power lines, etc.)
Car dependent suburbs lose money for the city once they're more than 20 years old. When they're first constructed, the city doesn't lay out a dime for the infrastructure, and the houses are shiny and new and fetch a high price (and thus have a high tax rate). 20 years later, those houses are no longer shiny and new so they're not generating as much in taxes, and also all that infrastructure now has to be maintained on the city's dime. And unlike a medium-density suburb (like the old-style streetcar suburb), there aren't that many houses per block. And nobody walks anywhere because there's nowhere to walk to, so every single thing you do outside of your house requires a car. So the roads need a lot of maintenance. Low density plus high maintenance costs means that any car-dependent suburb older than 20 years old costs the city more in services than it gives in taxes.
You put this all together, and it's a major contributing factor to why US and Canadian cities are so often teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Not only is building everything around cars really bad for our social health and bad for the environment, it is literally the most expensive way anybody has ever designed cities. It's incredibly wasteful.
And right now is the perfect time to change that. Right now is when so many mid-century infrastructure projects are crumbling and need rebuilding. It's the perfect time to say "hey, wait a minute, how about we change our model so that cars are not the only viable method of transit."
I'm not saying take away cars! Lots of people need cars, and will always need cars, for a variety of reasons.
But if you have other viable methods of getting around so that people have choices, and you transition suburbia to medium-density instead of low-density and allow people to open shops and businesses there so you can go to a store close to you instead of driving for miles to get to a big box store, that will save so much money on road construction and maintenance that you can then spend on things like social services and libraries and schools and hospitals and museums instead of asphalt.
A lot of people don't know what medium density suburbs look like. They can look like a lot of things, but one of the things they can look like is this:
Note that they still have lawns and space for a garden, they just don't have a whole private park per person. Everything is on a human scale. You may look at this and go "how could we convert our existing suburbs to this without razing everything and starting over?" and the answer is, if you allow more flexibility in land-use laws and zoning codes, people will do things themselves. Sometimes they'll build another house in the backyard, or an apartment over the garage. Sometimes they'll add a second story and make it into a mother-in-law flat. Sometimes they'll take an old house, knock it down, and put a duplex or a triple-decker or something else on it. People will do things that match their needs, and a lot of times that will mean more housing per acre.
The other thing is making sure that as many neighborhoods as possible have a main street or high street with shops and offices (and often apartments over those shops for more housing.) And making sure that it is pleasant and easy and safe to walk there so people will choose to do it at least some of the time. The more people who walk a couple blocks to the corner store instead of driving ten miles to the big box store, the better it is for everyone: fewer emissions, less congestion on the roads, less money spent on road maintenance.
Then you increase the the public transit options available, and that also means fewer cars on the road, which means less congestion and less money spent on asphalt.
