USA Today recently highlighted another victory in the burgeoning national movement to tear down or relocate urban highways and create vibrant neighborhoods in their place:
Oklahoma has a radical solution for repairing the state’s busiest highway.
Tear it down. Build a park.
The aging Crosstown Expressway — an elevated 4.5-mile stretch of Interstate 40 — will be demolished in 2012. An old-fashioned boulevard and a mile-long park will be constructed in its place.
The article quotes John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism as saying, “Highways don’t belong in cities. Period. Europe didn’t do it. America did. And our cities have paid the price.” Mr. Norquist recently spoke at a TSTC-hosted event about the benefits of replacing the Rt. 34 Connector in New Haven with a restored street grid.
Besides New Haven’s Rt. 34 Connector, other proposed highway removal/relocation projects in the region include I-84 in Hartford, Rt. 29 in Trenton, I-81 in Syracuse, the Buffalo Skyway, and the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx. The USA Today article mentioned several of these efforts, but the one tri-state area representative quoted, NYSDOT Region 11 (NYC) Director Doug Currey, seemed lukewarm on highway removal:
Doug Currey, regional director of the New York State Department of Transportation, says taking down urban highways is sometimes the right thing to do — and sometimes not.
“No two situations are exactly alike,” says Currey, who oversees highways in the New York City area.
While it would have been nice to hear more enthusiasm from NYSDOT, the neutral response is not surprising given that the agency is still studying whether a Sheridan Expressway tear-down is feasible. NYSDOT data does show that all four alternatives under study (including the two Sheridan tear-down alternatives) would reduce vehicle miles traveled, truck miles traveled, and truck hours traveled in the study area (see MTR # 535). Later on in the article, Mr. Currey cites the 1973 tear-down of Manhattan’s West Side Highway as a success story. Hopefully, Bronx community support can convince NYSDOT that a Sheridan tear-down could be similarly successful.
Why exactly is it better for the highway to go through a city rather than around it…?
To serve the city.
To go around the city entirely would have more of a centrifical force with encouraging development away from the city.
Chris- were you one of those people in a past life who stopped the trains in Manhattan from goin south of 42nd Street?
If a transit line is lacking, placing it directly though the center core on the existing I-40 alignment would make a lot of sense.
Can either of you tell me why, as an example, that the passenger rail line northwards of Miami is way inland along the I-95 corridor, rather then closer into town along the Dixie Highway corridor?
Highways promote development/land use patterns which are antithetical to a good, pedestrian oriented urban environment. As those cars need to be stored somewhere, this promote parking lots and low density which makes walking distances prohibitively long and promotes a car-dependent lifestyle. Essentially the urban form develops at an automobile scale.
I don’t understand the point of keeping development in a city if its just going to follow suburban development patterns.
If you want to serve a city, transit (particularly rail but also bus) provides for transportation at a human scale. It also eliminates the need for most parking in the city center.
You are conflating things here. Highways are just another form of road right of way as are streets. As it is, there is plenty of right of way available to automobile use in Oklahoma City as well as pretty much every other city in the world. There is nothing stopping you right now from driving into pretty much any American city. Rail lines are another type of ROW. The difference in NYC was that steam trains could not go south of 42nd street. Period. This may or may not have been a bad thing as the pollution that they produced was quite bad at that point in time. They were allowed south of 42nd street, of course, with the El’s and then, when they really behaved (i.e. were electrified) were allowed to go underground.
I don’t know anything about the development history of Miami so I can’t comment.
BTW, since when do highways relieve congestion? Have you ever heard of induced demand?
If the rail line in the corridor being chosen is restricted or eliminated by the new highway or is an abandoned line that could be reused for transit then I see this as a negative event.
What your excerpts neglect to mention is that the OK City stretch of I-40 to be removed is also being replaced with a 10-lane, below-grade freeway in new location. Teardowns of heavily used highways can only work when a reasonable replacement or alternative is available. The Milwaukee and SF examples were underutilized stubs — not major thru routes.
The highway still goes through the city, only upon the more logical route along an existing railroad-industrial corridor, and depressed rather than elevated. A comparable example regarding a much needed unbuilt urban highway — Washington DC’s North Central Freeway — is placing it along the B&O railroad corridor rather than an all new swath along/near Georgia Avenue (see tag North Central Freeway at my blog “A Trip Within the Beltway”.)
That’s an infinitely more logical solution then Norquist’s doctrine of all highway traffic around a city and/or upon the surface streets.
BTW- European city’s often DO have the highways within, but not directly through the central medieval core, where the demolition detriments would outweigh the slight traffic benefits opposed to a highway a few blocks away.
[…] that has raged or is still raging all over these days — from New York to Seoul to Oklahoma City. It can be characterized as new urbanists versus conservative planners, the city versus the […]
I have heard of induced demand regurgitated over and over for highways, but not anything else.
Why might that be?
Re: conjestion relief, I suppose you are unfamilar with NY’s Westchester County’s I-87. Works quite well, and way better than LI’s I-495.
Re: space for storing parking garages, I suppose that you never heard of parking garages?
You did not answer my point about swaping a commuter railroad to the existing I-40 corridor. As for the north Miami suburbs, e.g. Hollywood (I should have specified this), check out Google maps- it’s a great resource.
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