THE DESIGN OF THE HIGHWAY 189 



the discouragement of tangent alignment and the favoring of long 

 arcs with radii in the 5,000- to 30,000-foot range in open terrain. 



I wish to stress that a variable median and independent roadways 

 do not in and of themselves produce beauty, if the alignment is dis- 

 continuous. The principles of smooth, continuous alignment are 

 by no means novel, and historically the Bureau of Public Roads and 

 some progressive States, such as the State of New York, have used 

 them for many years. The question now before us is how to encour- 

 age the other States to adopt the best standards. 



The second avenue of approach is a basic policy decision on, as 

 President Johnson put it, "increased respect for the communities 

 through which [the highways] pass." 



This means not just avoiding aesthetic and valuable urban areas 

 but also more greenery, wider buffers, more respect for street geom- 

 etry, for topography and urban views. Most important, in high 

 density residential and downtown areas the highway must be sub- 

 ordinated to the dominant pedestrian spaces. This rules out elevated 

 or at-grade facilities through these downtown areas and their parks. 

 A depressed lower Manhattan expressway or a depressed Delaware 

 expressway in Philadelphia may cost up to 50 percent more than 

 their above-grade counterparts. But cost-benefit ratio of urban 

 facilities is usually so favorable that even an increase of this magni- 

 tude will not throw it out of reason. Progressing beyond that, in 

 our thinking about the second generation of freeways, we should 

 perhaps start thinking of the removal of some existing elevated 

 structures such as the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco and 

 the West Side Highway in New York. 



Finally, the third avenue of approach has to do with design pro- 

 cedures. There are today engineering consultant firms which in- 

 clude landscape architects, architects and other visually trained 

 professionals on their team, and who have achieved a high 

 level of expertise in refined geometric design and location. These 

 teams should be allowed to specialize in the initial, visually decisive 

 stage of location and geometric layout, while the extremely time con- 

 suming, but aesthetically not too relevant phase of preparing working 

 drawings, developing drainage details and computing quantities 

 should be left to firms proficient in these supporting tasks. This is 

 similar to Minoru Yamasaki designing the World Trade Center and 

 Emery Roth & Sons doing the working drawings and is a way to 

 maximize the utilization of scarce talent. 



