> Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use

Neither of these are necessarily true. Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.

Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people. That encouragement doesn't guarantee high density will happen, builders preferences and peoples budgets will still dictate cheap single family houses most of the time regardless. But that's not something the freeway itself influences. (In the same way that a train station encourages high density, but many are still in suburban areas anyway).

The only real drawback is price. Ugly, space-wasting rural freeways at ground level are much cheaper. But they are worse for drivers and pedestrians, every bit as bad as what we see here for everyone.

> Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.

The air pollution and noise is mostly unchanged (same exact cars making the same trips). And Electric Cars already fully solved both of these problems anyway, it's just a matter of time as gasoline vehicles get phased out.

It looks like their current solution to the crosswalk is to add a stoplight to it. Which ironically will actually increase air pollution, as previously-traveling cars will now often sit idling, right next to two schools...

Wide roads do cut neighborhoods in half and make them so much less walkable. We don't need freeways everywhere. While I like driving fast, there are other concerns than speed and even safety. I recommend strongtowns.org's article on "stroads": https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/3/4/the-stroad.html

I have a similar straight road with a school near my house. To make matters worse it's a main artery to the freeway. However, the city solved this much better. As suggested in the article the road is fairly narrow and there are physical separators in the middle of the road in the area where the school is. You can still easily go the speed limit, yet from my anecdotal experience of driving the road at least twice a day I'm pretty much the only person going slightly over the speed limit. I would argue that the road very much works as intended to transport cars efficiently and children safely.

> Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.

Can you show an example? 280 in San Francisco comes to mind. The division is the underpass or the overpass, and the frontage roads required to support it. Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use. It's not limited to freeways, either -- you can achieve a similar effect with grade-separated railways.

Here's an simple / cheap example from my small hometown - https://goo.gl/maps/e6N42cBBH582 (Google Street View is out of date, there are mid-rises on both sides of the freeway now).

It's green, it's safe, it's pedestrian / bike friendly and they are always at grade, so it's accessible. Cars only go 10mph (the distance is so short, they couldn't go much faster anyway). The freeway takes up almost no land -- it's just a single 1 minute walk to either side. Plant bollards at both ends to block the cars, and it's now 100% safety for everyone at all times.

Here's a really creative example from Seattle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_Park

> Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use

I don't think that's inherently true, it's just the cheap way to do it. Freeways can be high density and pedestrian friendly too. They just usually aren't, for the same reasons buildings aren't -- it costs money.

Additionally, there doesn't need to be any distance between buildings to have a freeway. See Cobo Center in Detroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-10_(Michigan_highway) or Washington State Convention Center in Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Convention_Ce...

Your hometown and its metro area are almost entirely car dominated. >80% of workers commute to work alone in cars, >10% carpool to work, most of those with 2 people per car. About 4% work from home, 2% walk, <1% take a bus, and 0.3% ride a bike. (Data from the Census Bureau.)

I can’t easily figure out what proportion of other trips happen by bike/walking, what proportion of students walk/bike to school, etc., but I would be surprised if they match cities like NYC or Boston or most parts of Europe.

I don’t know what your neighborhood is like in person: how well trafficked is that underpass by pedestrians and cyclists in practice? Having some freeway underpasses near low-traffic streets be “pedestrian and bike friendly” doesn’t really help anyone if nobody walks or bikes anyway because there is nothing nearby to walk to because nearby places are extremely spread out and largely designed with the expectation that people will visit them by car, e.g surrounded by giant parking lots, with inconvenient road plans, etc.

The Southern CA town I grew up was similar low-density suburban with freeways passing through, and there were various ostensibly pedestrian-friendly freeway crossings here and there, but in practice few people ever walked anywhere except in the small downtown area or maybe exercising their dogs or going to one or another park (a decent number of kids <16 rode bikes around though). One of the nicest low-density suburban places I know of, but life for kids without cars was necessarily highly structured and relatively isolating.

You picked a spot right near the downtown between a low-density residential neighborhood and a commercial area, but looking at a satellite view and map search most of the residential areas in the city and surrounds seem to be relatively far from shops, restaurants, grocery stores, schools, ..., (at least compared to denser cities) so in practice many trips probably require a car. I’ve never been there so I can’t tell you what it’s like in practice.

But anyway, with that said, as low-density suburban development goes, Grand Rapids looks pretty nice, just judging from satellite view. Not my personal cup of tea, but definitely better than lots of places in the US.

I was definitely not a fan of Grand Rapids for the 2 weeks I spent there. Walking around the block (despite there being decent sidewalks) was basically unheard of, and crossing the street was akin to running across a freeway.

The worst part though was getting off work late and tring to go for a nice walk, only to find the sidewalks and half the street flooded from the heavy irrigation! I get that rain storms there flood things, but this was a consistent "lets flood a lane on either side of the street watering our lawn".

I5 through downtown Seattle is absolutely a division between downtown and Capitol Hill, and it's a 10 minute walk from the convention center exit to the next pedestrian building entry. That's a terrible example for your point.

You seem to define 'pedestrian friendly' as 'not totally impassible by pedestrians'. A dark, unlit cave that requires a pedestrian to potentially walk several blocks out of their way (e.g. from a house on North Avenue to the McDonalds) is not 'pedestrian friendly' in my book.

And this is the best-case scenario, where the highway is relatively permeable because it's next to downtown.

The Columbus freeway cap is a far better example of integrating a freeway into a neighborhood: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/.a/6a00d834518cc969e... https://www.google.com/maps/place/Columbus,+OH/@39.9740161,-... But it's an expensive enough project that it can't be possibly be duplicated on every street crossing, and the freeway infrastructure surrounding it still profoundly separates downtown from its neighborhoods.

What Strong Towns is about is prioritizing cheap, maintainable infrastructure that supports walking and biking— and freeways are not remotely cheap, especially when designed to be anything but an awful experience for those not in a car.

Thanks for posting the examples. The one from your hometown still looks like it cuts the neighbourhood apart, though. (But it probably counts as a good solution by American standards.)

Electric cars don’t solve the noise problem. A substantial proportion of car noise at highway speeds comes from the tires. They improve it quite a bit but it’s far from fully solved.

> Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people.

High speed transportation of people is the exact opposite of what encourages high density land use. If you can live 30 miles from work, and get to work in 30 minutes by freeway-driving, that's acceptable. If that same trip would take two hours, perhaps you'd consider living closer to work.