If you can get natural light in people could live under the mound. Then you can have a city that looks like a park! People could quickly walk or cycle to where they need to go. Cars stay in tunnels.
There are around a dozen streets downtown that are multilevel, Wacker Dr. being the most famous thanks to The Dark Knight. They’re not tunnels so much as raised floors. The buildings around them are similarly laid out so that the pedestrian levels are actually dozens of feet above the ground with service entrances beneath.
You might also might be interested to know that Millennium Park is actually a massive rooftop garden covering a train station and parking garage which connects to a lot of these streets.
I’d also add that street level was raised off of the ground in the 1850’s, but that was just to help with drainage afaik.
I’m in Shanghai right now and you can see the “geological strata” of economic development here really well. Stuff built 20-30 years ago can be pretty shoddy, but the closer you get to the present the better things look to the point where the most recent stuff is very impressive, and absolutely massive in scale. Much of the center of the city around the People’s Square is “old”, and boarded up, probably for demolition. Construction does not stop on weekends it seems. I look forward to visiting again in a few years, the place will likely be unrecognizable. I also wish they redid the Oriental Pearl tower. It is iconic and huge, of course, but having been built in 1995 it’s also (imo, ymmv) ugly AF, especially up close. The Chinese can do so much better now.
Maybe that's a sign that we have more cars than we can handle.
I wanted to see what it looked like walking around and found a pretty good video:
https://youtu.be/2vK4PiE4SMk
Seems like any other big city park, but perhaps with stricter rules on where you can walk
What’s interesting is that in California for that much money you could only build perhaps a 1/10 of that project. A basic highway overpass costs $40m.
Pretty ingenious way to hide a 1500 spot carpark underneath.
Toronto is thinking of doing something similar, except to hide the downtown rail lines instead.
If you can get natural light in people could live under the mound. Then you can have a city that looks like a park! People could quickly walk or cycle to where they need to go. Cars stay in tunnels.
Doesn’t Chicago keep a lot of cars in tunnels already, by using a separate system of underground roads and highways for commercial traffic?
There are around a dozen streets downtown that are multilevel, Wacker Dr. being the most famous thanks to The Dark Knight. They’re not tunnels so much as raised floors. The buildings around them are similarly laid out so that the pedestrian levels are actually dozens of feet above the ground with service entrances beneath.
You might also might be interested to know that Millennium Park is actually a massive rooftop garden covering a train station and parking garage which connects to a lot of these streets.
I’d also add that street level was raised off of the ground in the 1850’s, but that was just to help with drainage afaik.
Sshhhh, you'll out the inner earth people.
I’m in Shanghai right now and you can see the “geological strata” of economic development here really well. Stuff built 20-30 years ago can be pretty shoddy, but the closer you get to the present the better things look to the point where the most recent stuff is very impressive, and absolutely massive in scale. Much of the center of the city around the People’s Square is “old”, and boarded up, probably for demolition. Construction does not stop on weekends it seems. I look forward to visiting again in a few years, the place will likely be unrecognizable. I also wish they redid the Oriental Pearl tower. It is iconic and huge, of course, but having been built in 1995 it’s also (imo, ymmv) ugly AF, especially up close. The Chinese can do so much better now.
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