Highway Caps Increase Networking Opportunities
Recently, highway caps have become popular where there are highways running through cities. These highways were originally put on to make the highway networks better, but there is evidence that these “improvements” did not actually help decrease the highway traffic. One such city is Philadelphia, where I-95 runs through it along the Delaware River. As in other cities, the addition of I-95 through the city served to force many people out of their homes and tear apart neighborhoods. As a native Philadelphia resident, I can attest to the fact that there is, especially during rush hour, a very high volume of traffic that uses I-95, as well as other highways that go through the city. As taught in class, even if one thinks that the network is being improved, all of the outcomes must be analyzed in order to ensure that the improvement is successful.
In Philadelphia, I-95 creates an obstacle for people to get to the waterfront. To remedy this, it has been proposed that the city could create highway caps above the highway overpass. These highway caps in other cities typically take the form of filling in the space above the highway in between overpasses, and then creating a park or other type of development above the highway. In the case of Philadelphia, these caps would serve to create easier connections between the waterfront and the rest of the city. These connections would facilitate business growth in the waterfront because there would be more pedestrian traffic. This will create a network in which the nodes consist of a business, the people that visit the business, and friends of those people. As pedestrian traffic increases, more edges will be created between a business and different people that visit it. By word of mouth, friends of these customers will also visit the business.
As viewed by its success in other cities, such as Boston and Dallas, creating highway caps in Philadelphia would improve the networks of the city as a whole. It makes no change to the highways themselves, but creates a vast potential for increasing business opportunities.
Sources:
Philadelphia Considering a Cap for Waterfront Highway https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/philly-to-take-first-look-at-capping-waterfront-highway
Five Cities Turning Ugly Overpasses Into Vibrant Parks http://gizmodo.com/five-cities-turning-ugly-overpasses-into-vibrant-parks-1259568561