Drastic Measures for Dealing With Highway Blight

With the pendulum of public opinion swinging in favor of transit, walking, and biking, highways have become the poster children for what is wrong with the transportation ideas of the past. Many of the urban highways in the United States were a result of urban renewal policies in the 1950s and 1960s that destroyed dense urban neighborhoods and separated the neighborhoods they spared. Today, urban highways are generally a barrier between a city center and its neighborhoods or a city and its waterfront.

Many city governments and residents have acknowledged the divisive nature of urban highways and have used a variety of strategies to stitch their cities back together again. In Syracuse, NY, local officials are taking public input about what should be done with I-81, the highway that runs through the city center. They’re looking at options like:

[R]emove the elevated portion (the viaduct) and replace it with a boulevard, route traffic onto I-481 and decommission I-81 between the I-481 interchanges, bury the elevated portion underground and cover it with a park, or rebuild the viaduct at a higher elevation with a more attractive design.

There are many ways of dealing with highway blight, but its clear that cities aren’t interested in mere beautification or simply ignoring the problem. Most cities are looking at one of two more drastic measures:

Cap/Bury

For highways that are already below grade, capping a highway can be an effective way to reconnect neighborhoods on either side of the highway. Burying an elevated or at-grade highway is typically much more expensive, but achieves the same end as capping. Capped or buried highways are typically replaced with their spiritual opposite, a park. The complete reversal of a swath of city land has a positive effect on the adjacent properties, adding property tax revenues to the city’s coffers.

In some cases, however, development interests hope to build on top of the new real estate offered by a capped highway. Done well, new development could do even more than a park in terms of healing the wound created by an urban highway.

USA Today did a great roundup of all the cities looking to hide their freeways. They highlighted Dallas, who has begun construction on a three-block cap that will link the city’s arts district with downtown. The cap is a park that includes a restaurant, botanical gardens, and sculptures that suggest Dallas is trying to replicate the success of Chicago’s Millennium Park.

The most notable example of burying a highway, Boston’s Big Dig, is also the most controversial. When interest is added, the project’s price tag will come to $22 billion. While the primary purpose of the Big Dig was to relieve Boston’s congestion woes, the city also got the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a mile-and-a-half long stretch of parks and public space through the city.

Remove

During the highway buildup of the fifties and sixties, many cities got more highways than they needed. Planners and transportation directors would build ring roads, connectors, spurs, and throughways with almost reckless abandon. As a result, many cities can remove sections of their highway network without significant traffic increases elsewhere.

Two examples of spur highways that were removed with positive results are the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco and the Park East Freeway in Milwaukee, WI. In the case of the Embarcadero, the 100 acres regained by demolishing the highway became a boulevard that was successful at reconnecting the city with the waterfront. After Milwaukee demolished their freeway in 2003, the existing neighborhood grid was laid over the reclaimed land.

Don’t Build Them At All

Of course, the best way to deal with highway blight is by not creating it at all. Portland, Ore., for example, hasn’t built a new highway since 1982, after a series of protests ended highway projects like Interstate 505 and the Mount Hood Freeway. The citizens of Vancouver, BC have also been successful at preventing any new highway construction for the past 40 years. With current attitudes no longer supporting urban freeways in any form, it’s some comfort to know that future generations won’t need to be removing or remediating highways created now.