A Move To Roll Up The City Freeway

BUFFALO, New York — The Scajaquada Corridor is a city dweller’s dreamland. Within three kilometers there is a Frank Lloyd Wright house you can visit, an art museum with Picassos and Gauguins, three college campuses and a history museum, all of it bordering a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. But an expressway runs through it. The Scajaquada Expressway, or Route 198, is a 5.15- kilometer tear in the urban fabric. Built in the early 1960s, it slices Delaware Park in half, isolates north Buffalo from destinations south, and makes walking or bicycling in the area a death- courting activity.

“People don’t cross the Scajaquada,” said Alison Merner, the communications coordinator for GObike Buffalo, who grew up in a neighborhood that borders the expressway. “If I were going to go for a run or a short bike ride, I would always stay on my side. You were kind of on an island.”

The Scajaquada is a poster road for a movement to tear down highways in cities and replace all that elevated-and-barricaded pavement with streets that favor pedestrians and cyclists and foster connectivity among neighborhoods.

One of the groups leading the charge is Congress for the New Urbanism. Since 2008, it has published a biennial list called “Freeways Without Futures,” which names highways whose elimination would, according to its website, “remove a blight” from their cities. The 2017 edition includes Route 710 in Pasadena, California, Interstate 70 in Denver, Interstate 375 in Detroit and, enemy Number 1, the Scajaquada Expressway.

Lynn Richards, the president of the group, said that removing a highway is “a somewhat radical idea.” “There’s a lot of analysis that needs to go into it about where the traffic is going to go,” she said.

But already several cities have done it, including Paris; Seoul, South