This article should have been on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News ---- back in 1974!  I remember being appalled and amazed my first time in Anchorage, back in 1992, that there was not a highway connection through downtown Anchorage even then.  

It's pathetic that with all the oil money of the 1970s and 1980s that this highway-to-highway project was not completed decades ago.  I mean, in a city of almost a third of a million people, it is beyond ludicrous to have a highway suddenly turn into downtown streets with innumerable traffic lights, as if Anchorage were some backwater pre-interstate highway Lower 48 small town.  But when it comes to traffic planning in Anchorage (more precisely, the lack and/or absurdity thereof), I am no longer shocked by incompetence and idiocy.