Why might that be?

Re: conjestion relief, I suppose you are unfamilar with NY’s Westchester County’s I-87. Works quite well, and way better than LI’s I-495.

Re: space for storing parking garages, I suppose that you never heard of parking garages?

You did not answer my point about swaping a commuter railroad to the existing I-40 corridor. As for the north Miami suburbs, e.g. Hollywood (I should have specified this), check out Google maps- it’s a great resource.

I don’t understand the point of keeping development in a city if its just going to follow suburban development patterns.

If you want to serve a city, transit (particularly rail but also bus) provides for transportation at a human scale. It also eliminates the need for most parking in the city center.

You are conflating things here. Highways are just another form of road right of way as are streets. As it is, there is plenty of right of way available to automobile use in Oklahoma City as well as pretty much every other city in the world. There is nothing stopping you right now from driving into pretty much any American city. Rail lines are another type of ROW. The difference in NYC was that steam trains could not go south of 42nd street. Period. This may or may not have been a bad thing as the pollution that they produced was quite bad at that point in time. They were allowed south of 42nd street, of course, with the El’s and then, when they really behaved (i.e. were electrified) were allowed to go underground.

I don’t know anything about the development history of Miami so I can’t comment.

To go around the city entirely would have more of a centrifical force with encouraging development away from the city.

Chris- were you one of those people in a past life who stopped the trains in Manhattan from goin south of 42nd Street?

If a transit line is lacking, placing it directly though the center core on the existing I-40 alignment would make a lot of sense.

Can either of you tell me why, as an example, that the passenger rail line northwards of Miami is way inland along the I-95 corridor, rather then closer into town along the Dixie Highway corridor?

That’s an infinitely more logical solution then Norquist’s doctrine of all highway traffic around a city and/or upon the surface streets.

BTW- European city’s often DO have the highways within, but not directly through the central medieval core, where the demolition detriments would outweigh the slight traffic benefits opposed to a highway a few blocks away.