Right-Sizing Roadways in Urban Locations is a Financial Necessity

Like an old person with a big yard, we own more than we can maintain. And once we let the weeds in, it's twice the work to remove them. And the longer we wait, the bigger the problem gets - weeds, then bushes, then small trees then big trees for a yard. 

Fifty years ago, when we designed most of our roads, asphalt cost a nickel and it was cheaper to pave space than to landscape it. That's no longer the case. Worse yet, patching potholes is a mugs game - they are forming faster than we can afford to patch them. And that is because we've deferred maintenance on roads, so what would have been a pothole fix has caused other problems. A car-suitable roadway is a complex structure of compacted soil, 'roadbase' (rocks, gravel, sand) all topped with as asphalt 'roof' that keeps the water off. When we let that roof fail water gets into the roadbase, freezes, and wedges it apart, causing larger cracks at the asphalt surface, letting more water in, until the soil underneath washes away and you get sinkholes that undermine the road. Lacking the money to fix everything, our best strategy is to limit what we fix.

And that means removing pavement. Leaving something unpaved seems reasonable, but that just opens the door to accusations of poor maintenance. Making the problem worse is past fecklessness - we've slopped asphalt on things that look like city streets but aren't. And no one likes to learn that the 'street' behind their house is actually an alley, and the city isn't ever going to repave it. 

The nightmare of reducing paving is that a roadway is a system--the asphalt hat carries water to the curb, which channels it to the gutter, which runs to the stormwater sewer, which is a huge network of pipes most people barely know exists. So reducing pavement by moving a curb is a non-starter. So either  reduce the paved area by converting the edge of the road into non-car uses (bi-directional cycle lane with a floating curb) or  take it from the center and add a median - either a bio-swale to contain water, or an elevated island with trees.