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‘Tame’ wide British roads and replace them with boulevards of homes, says thinktank
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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I don't think the idea is to build houses on the wide roads, the idea is to build them beside the wide roads but remove space for private cars and instead repurpose that space for pedestrians and cyclists (in other words, have wide pavements ideally tree lined but instead of 4 wide lanes of cars maybe 2 narrow lanes with most of the space turned over as a public space for people).
@mackwinston @snacks perhaps one motor lane in the centre, with occasional unloading spaces.
i hope so. Theres a brilliant video by B1M about Rochester in the US where they removed a 6 lane highway ringroad with this idea in mind and it looks amazing https://www.theb1m.com/video/america-interstate-highway-system-teardowns
I like your idea, but that's not what the article says
Only housing is mentioned.
"A boulevard is a type of broad avenue planted with rows of trees. " - Wikipedia
No, not just housing is mentioned but a boulevard and you cannot overlook that very important word and say the article only mentions "housing" because that is a seriously bad take on this article. By definition a boulevard is wide. It wouldn't be a boulevard if they made the road narrow by building houses on the road rather than by the side of the road, so while the article doesn't explicitly say it, by calling it "boulevards of new housing" implies that the thoroughfare does indeed remain wide, and becomes tree lined rather than car-lined.
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a boulevard as:
"A wide road in a city, usually with trees on each side or along the centre"
(And not only is a "boulevard" mentioned in the article, the article also includes a picture of what a part of Rochdale would look like. The housing is on the side of the road, and some of the car lanes have been converted to pedestrian/cycling space, and trees are added).