Usually, a highway is a mono-functional road, designed to carry cars from one place to another at a maximum speed. But, sometimes highways don’t carry so many cars as expected, and other uses start to appear.
An example of the re-use of highways was the Antonio Segni Bridge in Northern Rome, the east-west road in the photo here below.
(image: microsoft virtual earth)
Designed to be part of the Milan-Naples highway, the Antonio Segni Bridge has survived as an isolated stretch when the motorway was re-routed on a more external path. Closed to traffic for almost ten years, it has become the favorite place for pedestrians and cyclists’ sunday strolls. When it was opened to motorized traffic, few cars passed on the Bridge, and pedestrian and cyclists still continued to use its sidewalks as a shortcut to reach otherwise far neighborhoods.
Some improvement could be made in order to make the bridge a more interesting place:
- wider sidewalks and zebra crossings.
- more pedestrian connections to nearby neighborhood.
- a landscaped median.
Here is a similar example, from Minneapolis:
video: streetsblog.org
