Long Beach

As the nation prepares for the expansion of the Panama Canal and all port cities go crazy deepening and widening everything in sight, the second biggest biggest port in the country is doing something unexpected: planning a highway teardown.

At an event last week for traffic and transportation engineers hosted by the Congress for the New Urbanism, I had the chance to talk to Rock Miller, who served as president of the Institute of Transportation Engineers last year. ITE and CNU teamed up in 2010 to produce a new guidebook, Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares, which Miller was promoting to other engineers at the event.