Those wacky planners are always coming up with crazy ideas. Recently, a planner over at Planetizen proposed that cities should remove urban freeways.
His reasoning was simple. Freeways are ugly. Cars are evil. Freeways induce more driving. So if we get rid of the freeways, people will drive less and everyone will be happier.
![](http://ti.org/DetroitFreeway.jpg)
Beauty vs. mobility?
Flickr photo by gsgeorge
I can’t argue with the notion that some freeways are ugly, but so are a lot of things and beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. Everything else about this argument is simply wrong.