New Orleans' ongoing Master Planning process may recommend decommissioning its main interstate, I-10.

This Times-Picayune article sums up some of the Master Plan's visions and goals. Here is a snippet on transportation:

Encouraging rapid-transit bus routes to eastern New Orleans, the West Bank and other underserved areas, adding hundreds of miles of bike routes and supporting efforts to replace the limited-access expressway that cuts through the heart of the city with a normal street or boulevard. Interstate 10 traffic traveling through the city would use I-610. Dixon said eliminating the expressway would provide a disincentive to living in the suburbs and emphasize that preserving the city's neighborhoods is more important than shorter commute times.

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Essentially, the entire Interstate 10 Loop would be demolished, reconnecting long cut-off neighborhoods.


Can you imagine St. Louis outlining such a goal in a Master Plan? Or even participating in a Master Plan process to begin with? Or voting to give that Master Plan the force of law (which voters did in November of 2008 in Orleans Parish)?


Interstate 55 in St. Louis could be rebuilt as an at-grade boulevard, with three driving lanes on each side, and a central median for the North-South Metro expansion. The leftover former right-of-way could be given over to Transit Oriented Development and to reconnect the portions of South St. Louis bisected by the insensitive, meandering course of I-55.


St. Louisans should start imagining more often.