SMS wrote:
Doug McDonald wrote:

Intentional congestion was tried for a while in one of our
downtowns (we have two, one a mile west of campus, one a mile east)
and not only did not work, it drove business to the corn
fields north of the Interstate. The city fathers just had not realized
that
this was the certain result of intentional congestion. They fixed the
congestion by reopening the street they closed, and offering various
incentives for business to relocate back there. This was actually
extremely
successful, with a now thriving restaurant-bar-boutique area.

The
big volume business remains where it moved to, with natural congestion,
but certainly adequate roads and very adequate parking.

Your error is in thinking that the big volume business moved out of the
downtown area simply because of traffic.

I didn't say that. It moved out because of that, plus
lack of parking, plus general decay. But NOT due to suburbs.
Yes, we have a couple of suburbs, and one has a WalMart.

But the general run of big businesses (chains, etc.) didn't
move to a suburb. They moved to the closest possible
area where there was cheap land, which was in fact only
one mile from downtown, separated from it by I74. The closest
suburb is 4 miles away the other direction.

Doug McDonald