Now they're thinking about it in New Orleans...

Speaking to more than 200 urban planners, developers, bankers and other land-use professionals, Mayor Mitch Landrieu on Thursday said he's willing to consider a controversial proposal to tear down the elevated stretch of Interstate 10 through downtown New Orleans.

Planners have introduced drafts for a new master plan for the city of New Orleans which would include the dismantling of the I-10 section through downtown. Pedestrians walk under the raised section of the I-10 that runs along Claiborne Ave. near St. Ann St. in March 2009.

"It could be a game-changer. It could reconnect two of the city's most historic neighborhoods," Landrieu told a gathering of the Urban Land Institute, an industry think tank that has played a key role in city planning since Hurricane Katrina. "I'm not saying I'm for it," he said. "I'm just saying it's worth thinking about."

New Orleans would join San Francisco, Milwaukee, Portland, and, um, Boston on the list of major American cities that have torn down elevated urban highways. (Most replaced them with nothing—surface streets and transit improvements—but Boston dug itself a tunnel and we all know how well that turned out.) Here's the standard we should apply when looking at those elevated monstrosities: if they hadn't thought to build it then—the elevated section of Interstate 10 that mutilated New Orleans, the Alaskan Way Viaduct that cuts Seattle off from its waterfront, the double-decker freeway that once cut San Francisco off San Francisco Bay—and building something like it now would be utterly unthinkable, then we shouldn't hesitate to tear the motherfucking thing down today. Via Atrios who says...

It's easy to see now how running a massive highway through midtown Manhattan or leveling most of the French Quarter in New Orleans are utterly crazy ideas, but many of the projects that were built were also... utterly crazy ideas which actually happened.