I know that there are too many highways in general, and I am on board with removing parts of the IDL, but what is shown in that graphic is so beyond what anyone has asked for that it just seems bizarre to me. The idea of funneling regional traffic around the edges of the city sounds appealing, but we already have the Creek Turnpike and I44... Gilcrease might help with the north-south truck traffic, but I'm mainly concerned about the ability for thousands of downtown workers to move in and out efficiently with no mass transport system. Not to mention the oft-mentioned concerts, conventions, events, and general downtown traffic from dummies like me who go there to hang out all the time. I don't think regional through-traffic is really the issue.
Congestion IS a killer. It's why we have such a suburb culture throughout the country. Many of those cities are painful to live in, with people spending much of their lives commuting and dealing with congestion headaches. At least they have mass transit systems though, not to mention much more density than we have. Highways may have been given too much precedent, but they serve people too and it's not always a binary choice between highways and "people". People do what they can in many of those cities because they have to. Don't have much choice in NYC or DC because those are international hubs of business and government. Tulsa is Tulsa. If we had that type of congestion people would leave this city so fast that congestion wouldn't be an issue for long.
It's also worth noting that this plan essentially still calls for building more highways, but just pushing them out into ever expansive "rings", which is where sprawl really explodes. Look at how BA has sprawled out to fill in the Creek Turnpike void. Soon East Tulsa will sprawl out there too, once they can build enough sewer and water lines to accommodate all the developments that have been proposed. I know of many developers just chomping at the bit to fill up every space that can be served by a highway.
I think lowering and capping large sections of the east side of the IDL would be a better solution. Still very expensive, but something that could be done iteratively. There are already proposals to cap some of the south side. Maybe someday we'll just have a whole network of underground car pipelines around the central part of the city.
You'd be surprised how many of the downtown workers access downtown via the IDL - 11th Street for example has almost as many people access downtown daily as does the Cincinatti/Detroit on and off ramps. Together that Cincinatti/Detroit have a total of 13,256 with around 3,000 of those use the Cincinnati ramp to access Maple Ridge. So only 10,000 use that to get on and off the BA which is the biggest downtown commuter corridor that is a highway to downtown. 11th Street has 12,011 cars per day at the Gunboat Park/Home Depot intersection.
Another example is the Denver exit on the BA. There's only 5,253 that exit there daily based on INCOG traffic counts. Denver has 5,630 cars per day access downtown from 15th Street. Cheyenne at the BA has 4,513 cars enter/exit downtown daily. Boulder has 6,657 daily enter/exit downtown. Main has 8,039 daily. Boston has 8,852 daily. 13th Street has 3,558 daily enter/exit downtown.
So for our heaviest highway corridor for commuter traffic into downtown for workers, way more people still access downtown through our street grid from Midtown/South than the highway system.
You have somewhere around 30,000 cars per day enter/exit downtown via the BA whether it's at Houston, Denver, or Detroit/Cincinnati but you have around 35,000-40,000 cars per day access via Houston, Denver, Cheyenne, Boulder, Main, and Boston on city streets. That's the beauty and efficiency of a street grid because none of those street have any semblance of congestions going north/south.
For example on 244 you have 17,124 enter/exit on 1st & 2nd Street just west of the on/off ramps to 244 with around 6,000 of those accessing 1st & 2nd via Admiral/1st not from 244. Yet 3rd Street has 5,427 cars per day, 4th has 4,486 per day, and 4,406 via Archer. You have more people accessing downtown via city streets there than from 244. This is true of every highway in and out of downtown.
The impact on commuters would be far less than people think, especially when you are able to rebuild the street grid completely.