A lot of people have nostalgic longings for the return of a ground-level N. Claiborne Avenue but I wonder if all of the nostalgic longers understand that the city they're creating will never be the city that the previous generation destroyed.
No one is proposing that we connect Eastern New Orleans to the city center via cheap, accessible, and efficient public transit. All they're proposing is that we cut off the, admittedly imperfect, highway access that currently exists. Despite what the self-congratulatory literature pumped out by yuppie professional planners would have you believe, the future of the American city will not be a golden age of compact, "walkable" development. Instead it will be something much more like the model in evidence in the third world where the elite live in compact fairly well served (through privatized and quasi-privatized agencies) neighborhoods and the rest live in isolated shanty towns on the outskirts. Cutting off Eastern New Orleans by chopping down the Claiborne expressway is a small part of that process. I'll maybe feel differently about it the day somebody shows me the monorail that will replace it.
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