Highway Removal

When Oklahoma City announced plans in 1998 to tear down the I-40 Crosstown Expressway near downtown, they envisioned a grand, tree-lined, at-grade boulevard that would help improve development prospects in the already resurgent "Core to Shore" area between downtown and the Oklahoma River. The route would be part of the planned five-mile streetcar corridor, buttressed by a 40-acre "central park" fit for the capital, the largest city in the state.

Tearing down highways, as New Haven, Connecticut is planning to do to a short section of Route 34, is a rare (though increasingly sought after) outcome in American transportation policy. Some highway removals are unintended consequences of neglect or disaster, like the collapse of New York's Miller Highway and the damage caused to San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Others are planned interventions, like Milwaukee's removal of the Park East Freeway. But the New Haven project is the first planned highway teardown to receive funding from the federal government, which awarded the project a TIGER grant in 2010.

The Bloomberg administration has abruptly ruled out the possibility of tearing down New York's lightly-trafficked Sheridan Expressway and replacing it with mixed-use development, jobs, and parks. Neighborhood advocates and electeds from the Bronx are vowing to fight the decision, which they say fails to follow through on the comprehensive analysis the city promised to conduct as part of a $1.5 million federal TIGER grant.

The "most defacing scar from the 1960's Urban Renewal era" -- that's how local advocates describe the Route 34 Expressway through downtown New Haven. Just about a year and a half ago, this small New England city won a TIGER grant to heal that scar. But another disfiguration may be growing in its place.

If you make your home on the Louisiana coastline, upstate New York or the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, chances are you live near a highway that really has it coming. It's big. It's ugly. It goes right through city neighborhoods. And it just might be coming down soon.

Most members of Congress are excited to cut the ribbon for a new stretch of freeway, but it's a smaller set indeed that will stand up for the removal of a highway, no matter how neighborhood-blighting. As of yesterday, count New York Senator Chuck Schumer among their number.

All cities have physical barriers that divide neighborhoods and social classes. In Syracuse, one of the biggest is Interstate-81.

In this week's episode of "Moving Beyond the Automobile," Streetfilms takes you on a guided tour of past, present and future highway removal projects with John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism.Some of the most well-known highway removals in America -- like New York City's West Side Highway and San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway -- have actually been unpredictable highway collapses brought on by structural deficiencies or natural disasters. It turns out there are good reasons for not rebuilding these urban highways once they become rubble: They drain the life from the neighborhoods around them, they suck wealth and value out of the city, and they don't even move traffic that well during rush hour.

It is an oft-lamented fact, both locally and nationally, that the city of Cleveland hasn’t taken full advantage of its position on the shore of Lake Erie. The national media, in its seemingly boundless enthusiasm for stories about the declining fortunes of the city where I live, is quick to point out that we haven't taken advantage of what may be our best asset.