>>1965248In Kansas City, planners thought demolishing neighborhoods to build freeways would help traffic (turns out the opposite is true).
President Eisenhower created the interstate system with the vision that the highways would connect to ring roads around the perimeter of cities. When he found out idiots were going to run the freeways right in the middle of downtown he was dismayed.
https://seattletransitblog.com/2012/03/10/eisenhower-didnt-want-highways-through-cities/KC now has more freeways per capita than anywhere, and it's now famously a shithole.
Also KC residents joked that their city was being bombed like a European city because they were demolishing so many buildings to make freeways.
>A 1972 Star article on the completion of the last portion of the Loop refers to the infamous nickname that locals gave the construction zone along what would be the 6th Street Expressway: >For a time the area was referred to as Kansas City’s blitz. The mounds of fallen bricks and the gaping holes suggested that enemy bombers might have passed overhead the night before. 