A decade ago a group of Akron officials visited Milwaukee to find out how that city revitalized itself. Today (Thursday) the former Mayor of Milwaukee came to Akron with some suggestions. Ideastream’s Mark Urycki has details:
John Norquist helped develop Milwaukee’s Riverfront Park and its lakefron drive. He was fighting expressways decades ago arguing that they destroy good pedestrian areas. He compares American cities intersected by expressways to European cities with walkable streets and says it looks like World War II was fought in our cities.
“It really is sad commentary. And one of the reasons for that is that people didn’t think about adding value in building infrastructure. All that mattered was moving cars fast.”
Norquist is the author of “The Wealth of Cities.” He supports plans announced last year by then-Mayor Don Plusquellic to demolish Akron’s Rt. 59 innerbelt freeway and replace it with a boulevard – as he did in Milwaukee. Plusquellic has since resigned and a new mayor will be elected in November.
Norquist told the sold-out Roundtable luncheon that Akron would also do well to build passenger rail service to Cleveland.
“The fact that until about the mid 50’S Akron had good passenger train service to Cleveland and you don’t have that now. But I’ll just tell you that in Milwaukee we have 8 trains a day roundtrip between downtown Milwaukee and downtown Chicago. And we have people, quite a few people, that live in downtown Milwaukee because they commute.”
Passenger trains require public subsidies but, Norquist argues, so do roads. He points out that conservative Switzerland is crisscrossed with trains. And even Utah built train service – between Provo and Ogden.
“28 roundtrips a day, 28 roundtrips. Because the Mormons decided the beautiful Jordan Valley – so they decided they didn’t want it to be covered in junk-space sprawl.”
John Norquist says a good sign for cities is that Millennials are less interested in automobiles than their parents. Also, big box retailers are beginning to move back in to downtowns and are doing so without government subsidies.