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name-isnt-important t1_iqwvn86 wrote

Don’t live there but I suspect it’s about both. The charm of the area are the homes and most would rather have a nice house with friendly neighbors than a strip mall. It’s just a shame that our major roads have become pseudo highways because of poor urban planning.

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dtjayhawk t1_iqxs82d wrote

Replace “poor” with “non existent”, otherwise you are 100% correct

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Jimithyashford t1_iqz5ccs wrote

I mean you’re right that there wasn’t really “urban planning” regarding the home layout and street placement of national or sunshine.

But like…..man of those homes and all of those roads were laid out in like, ya know, 1890-1920 in that part of town.

So yeah, you are correct it wasn’t exactly urban planned for the needs of a modern city. But how could it have been?

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name-isnt-important t1_ir0m72g wrote

My understanding was the edge of town was sunshine and battlefield was farm land. Traffic should shift to Battlefield and not have gone through a developed residential area.

Edit: still can.

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Jimithyashford t1_ir0o0jw wrote

It was, in like 1860. At one point Phelps grove park was considered inconveniently far out of town.

But the residential sprawl crept slowly outward over the years. It didn’t happen all at once. That area was “fully developed” as in most of the houses and lots were in place and built on as we see and know them today by about 1930.

However at that time battlefield was still the boonies and way out of town and basically farm land.

Most cities in the world aren’t centrally planned, they grow organically over time. Roads that originally catered to like a thousand people mostly on foot and in horse carriages were not laid out with hundreds of thousands of cars in mind, or with the intention of being major corridors between sections of regional hub city.

That’s all true, terrible city planning. But like…..duh. Of course it is. Who in like 1840 when national and sunshine were first laid out could possible have planned for the reality of 2022?

But of course road ways can be torn up and redone, homes can be placed under imminent Domain and demolished to re-do the transportation grid. That’s an option. But what are you proposing? If I gave you the city planner pen and guaranteed approval for whatever you propose, what are you proposing?

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name-isnt-important t1_ir10wgb wrote

At this point an easy solution would be for the city to buy the home and either turn it into a low density office or tear it down and build a pocket park as a buffer to the neighborhood. It could be a nice looking corner.

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Jimithyashford t1_ir225r7 wrote

.....I thought you were complaining about national being a "pseudo highway" due to poor urban planning, and fixing that is what we were speculating about.

How would putting a park on that corner help with that at all. In fact if that park were popular and drew addition traffic to that area it would make the problem worse.

And if you put a park in the footprint of that property, that wouldn't "buffer the neighborhood" it would buffer, let's see, taking a look at the assessor map, exactly zero additional houses. The house immediately to the north and the house immediately to the west would still be road front, and their back yards intersect behind that corner house, and there are no other adjacent properties.

So it would provide absolutely no additional buffering.

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So I'm not sure what you are getting at.

And I'm not trying to be difficult, I just, I hear people make these complaints all the time, and to actually fix what they want fixed the city would have to imminent domain literally hundreds of houses across the city and substantially redo the traffic system in town. Which yeah, if the city gets big enough someday we'd likely have to do that, but I don't think it's there yet, and for every 1 person mad about the roads, you'd have 1000 people made about the aggressive property snatching and expense and several years of construction needed to make it happen.

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Wolverkeen t1_iqz09w4 wrote

Yeah, I have always assumed that any "planning" here involved absolutely zero assumptions that it would grow any bigger than it was at that moment.

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sullivan80 t1_ir17wab wrote

> It’s just a shame that our major roads have become pseudo highways because of poor urban planning.

That was my biggest complaint when I lived in Springfield was how much of a nightmare it was to get around town due to lack of any "real" highway other than around the periphery.

I lived in the Phelps Grove area and there was nowhere I could get quickly without fighting traffic except downtown.

Chestnut Expressway is not an expressway. Not sure who came up with the idea of naming those roads choked with traffic lights expressways.

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