[soleri]

The solution to a transportation mess like Tucson's will, ultimately, be holistic. If you do decide to take the freeway route, it's important to note that you won't stop at one. Phoenix didn't, and the 20 year sales tax increase metamorphosed into another 20 year tax extension. Freeways beget sprawl which begets more freeways, ad nauseum. Probably what the cheap growth advocates are hoping is that the frustration with traffic congestion will eventually override all other concerns. A tipping point arrives and people finally acquiesce to the logic of the horizontal growth: cars, freeways, far-flung subdivisions - the whole catastrophe.

Portland's freeways were all in place BEFORE the landmark 1970 growth boundaries legislation. In fact, the freeway fronting the Willamette River was removed and today there's a park in its place. Portland has EVERYTHING you'd want in a city: density, high rises, mass transit, and a real downtown core. They decided to emphasize quality of life over quantity of consumption. This being America, the heresy of such a choice is regularly attacked by the right wing, particularly in places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

The solution is holistic because you can't simply decide not to build freeways without also proscribing development on the far fringes, or funding adequate mass transit. Portland got the answer right with a key insight about how cities work. Each piece dovetails with another, like a functioning ecosystem. Portland is the anti-Phoenix, a place so celebrated that it's the only medium-sized city in America which attracts tourists for its downtown alone.

If your love of cities is for high rises alone, you should still prefer Portland to Phoenix as a civic model. The logic of sprawl ultimately means FEWER skyscrapers in the core. In the Cities section of this site, Phoenix (the 6th largest city in the country) has only 51 high rises, fewer than Syracuse, Omaha, Oklahoma City, and Winston-Salem. Nationally, we rank #47 in this category (Portland is #25, despite being about 1/3 as large). High rises are POINTLESS in car cities. There's really no need for them. Cheapness of this sort tends to magnetize more cheapness, as Phoenix and Tucson have discovered.

In conclusion, freeways and cars are the antithesis of genuine urbanism, and mean more right wingers, more anti-creative class types, and more anti-tax kooks. Tucson is approaching the moment of truth. Don't blink. Don't assume Phoenix is better. It's not.