Decommission I-95? State should think big

Three times in recent years, officials have floated a plan to rescue Hartford from its highways. None have yet gone anywhere, hampered by multibilliondollar price tags and the inertia that works against major projects.

Hartford, like nearly every other American city, needs rescuing because of infrastructure decisions made more than a half-century ago. When this country built interstates, it did so by leveling neighborhoods in center cities in favor of interchanges and multilane behemoths. The result was not only a loss of civic life, but an easy exit to the suburbs for anyone of means to escape.

Every Connecticut city, already hampered by their relatively small size, faces a version of this. Highways cut off downtowns and waterfronts, and dissuade easy access on foot by means of imposing overpasses. The interstate highway system was an impressive achievement at a time when the nation was still capable of major undertakings, but measured by ground-level damage, few projects come close.

In Hartford, the plans have included tunnels, bridges, replaced interchanges and redirected routes. Any portion would be a serious undertaking, and the idea of spending $17 billion to rescue a small American city is hard to imagine. Still, the proposals keep coming. It’s possible, however unlikely, the national climate could finally be right for such a plan.

What we haven’t seen is a similar batch of ideas for the state’s southern half. Bridgeport, New Haven, Norwalk and other communities have each dealt with the scars of long-ago infrastructure decisions, but there’s been no plan to take I-95 out of downtowns and reclaim street grids. It’s time to come up with one.

Interstate 95 is, of course, the main route up and down the Eastern Seaboard, with implications that go far beyond Connecticut. Most successful highway removals in this country, including the ongoing changeover of Route 34 in New Haven, take on spurs or redundancies. Connectors can sometimes be removed because there isn’t enough traffic to support two or three major throughways.

None of that applies to I-95. Connecticut is between New England and the rest of the world, and other roads in the state are not equipped to handle the load that would arise from taking out one of the busiest highways in America. The Merritt Parkway already offers the opportunity to spend up to an hour between exits 40 and 41 around rush hour, and can’t take much more.

That leaves tunnels or rerouted highways as the only alternatives, which is why those ideas keep coming up in Hartford. But unlike Massachusetts, which famously buried its biggest city’s downtown highway, Connecticut has no single urban focal point, which is a reason why its cities continue to struggle. We have a number of small cities competing for the same resources, and a state government that’s shown more interest in adding lanes than removing them.

Still, there’s momentum nationally around the idea of highway removal. One bill introduced in the U.S. Senate this year includes a $10 billion pilot program aimed at replacing urban highways with ground-level boulevards, and then rebuilding surrounding neighborhoods. Cities across the country from Syracuse to San Francisco have moved ahead on razing decades-old expressways to reclaim their land. Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. secretary of transportation, recently said, correctly, “It’s disproportionately Black and brown neighborhoods that were divided by highway projects plowing through them because they didn’t have the political capital to resist,” adding: “We have a chance to get that right.”

All that still leaves Connecticut cities out of luck. Each has been hurt by highway construction, and some have never really recovered; just think of the riverfront land that could be available underneath Waterbury’s Mixmaster, for one. It becomes much easier to imagine these cities’ recoveries without the elevated expressways slicing through them and cutting off their most valuable assets. The question is how.

The Biden administration is putting together a $3 trillion infrastructure plan. Its aims will include not just new construction, but reducing carbon emissions and fighting economic inequality. Wrenching highways out of Connecticut cities would contribute to all three goals. But first, like Hartford, we need a plan. Time to get creative.