Cities Are Moving to Roll Up Their Divisive Freeways
Korea; Boston; and Portland, Oregon.
Many in- city highways in the United States were built in the post-World War II boom years with easy money from the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act. They hail from an age when the car was ascendant and were built to quickly move commuters in and out of urban centers; many of these highways were used by white suburbanites and built in low-income minority neighborhoods (“white men’s roads through black men’s homes,” went a saying in Washington).
Perhaps the greatest argument that removal advocates have is that so much of this infrastructure is nearing the end of its life span. In this era of tight budgets and political gridlock, it may be easier for local and state governments to remove a freeway rather than repair or build a new one.
San Francisco did it. Its double- decker Embarcadero Freeway, which once skirted the city’s waterfront, was demolished instead of rebuilt after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
“The Embarcadero came out of the waterfront, and now the waterfront real estate is seeing tremendous value,” said Peter Park, a city planner.
Not only in San Francisco but also in every case where a highway has been removed, Mr. Park argues, “the city has improved.”
Mr. Park was the planning direc- tor for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when the city decommissioned the Park East Freeway spur in 2002.
“The basic argument for it was, people will never get to the city without it,” said John Norquist, Milwaukee’s mayor at the time, who spearheaded the removal campaign. “Well, how do they get to Paris? The arguments were left over from this glorious age of motoring after World War II.”
The bill to demolish the Park East and restore the street grid was around $ 30 million, significantly less than the $80 million to $100 million estimated cost to rebuild the 40-year- old freeway, Mr. Norquist said. He pointed to the rising land values and the slow- but- steady development along the 10- hectare corridor in the years since — and the lack of a traffic apocalypse — as signs of success.
Since the mid-1980s, civic groups in Buffalo have been arguing for the decommissioning of the Scajaquada Expressway. After more than a decade of environmental impact studies, and after a car traveling the expressway struck and killed a child in 2015, the state is now responding. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has earmarked nearly $100 million for a project that will convert a 3.5-kilometer portion into a lower- speed boulevard; organizers hope to start construction in 2018.
But even at a time when cities are embracing bike- sharing programs and mass transit; even when the end of the car (or the human driver anyway) is speculated; even when waterfronts and i ndustrial and low-income areas where in- city highways were built are being reclaimed through gentrification — it’s not easy to tear down a hunk of concrete in place for generations.
At a New York State Transportation Department public presentation last year, Stephanie Crockatt, executive director of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, learned that for some, the 19th- century Delaware Park is the problem, not the ’60s- era expressway.
She recalled that one attendee stood up and asked, incredulously: “Why in the world did you build this park next to this highway?”