>>992235Orlando, FL here.
Being Florida, it's always been a clusterfuck of bad planning and sprawl, but here are some specifics.
The biggest blunder of all? Interstate 4
Similar issue as Twin Cities, the highway was built in a transitional area between white and black neighborhoods. Today it acts as a divider between the wealthier and poorer halves of the city. Though today that poorer half (Parramore) has been seeing development over the decades such as 2 sports arenas, a theater, a stadium, a smaller soccer stadium under construction, community centers, a federal courthouse, a college and technical school, and finally the proposed building out a UCF downtown campus with a new neighborhood built on the site of the old arena to attract tech companies - Creative Village. Yet Parramore continues to remain poor.
One of the neat things about Orlando is that arguably has the country's first dedicated BRT system - the LYMMO.
Now back to the monstrosity that is Interstate 4:
Currently it is under a massive rebuilding project (I-4 Ultimate). with improvements such as interchange re-configurations and the addition of 4 toll lanes in the median.
But instead of toll lanes, we could have had high speed rail to Tampa running in the middle of I-4. Governor Rick Scott killed that though.
Now the big blunder is how FDOT wants to redesign I-4 through the downtown area. Here it is an elevated highway on embankments and columns. It will get wider and remain the same, with the embankments becoming 25ft walls and maybe less columns where it is elevated. In short, it will become even more of a barrier.
I know the water table is high and all, but with the right water pumping tech, they could have instead sunken this mile or so section of I-4, and cap it off with a park on the surface. And the cost wouldn't have been terribly more either, as they're basically tearing down the highway in stages and building new sections out of scratch.
