Can Demolishing Urban Freeways Help Revive Cities?

Q. As local lead­ers around the coun­try are now seri­ously con­sid­er­ing high­way removal in some form or another, how do you sug­gest con­vinc­ing con­cerned res­i­dents that such a move is right for them and their city?

A. Well, you have to change the dis­cus­sion from pure traf­fic count com­par­i­son to traf­fic dis­tri­b­u­tion. A robust street grid, with lots of con­nec­tions, will dis­trib­ute traf­fic much bet­ter than a few large freeways.

For exam­ple, when the Embarcadero Freeway, a double-deck free­way [in San Francisco], was torn down, a major­ity of the trips—according to a study by the city of San Francisco—got shorter and faster because of the increased con­nec­tiv­ity. With the free­way, there were a lot of trips where you over­shot your des­ti­na­tion and had to come back. It also attracted trips that didn’t add any value to the neigh­bor­hood: People going from Oakland to Marin County were cut­ting through San Francisco. When the free­way was torn down and replaced by a boule­vard, it sud­denly didn’t look so attrac­tive to go that way, and [dri­vers] found a dif­fer­ent way to get to Marin Country or, in some cases, didn’t make the trip.

Q. What is the best way to fund urban high­way removal?

A. A lot of free­ways are headed beyond their design life, so they have to be rebuilt. You can’t just resur­face them again. It’s cheaper to just tear it down and replace it with a sur­face street, so you win the cost argu­ment by com­par­ing it with rebuild­ing the freeway.

As far as other funds that are avail­able, you can try for some of the TIGER grants … But I think the biggest sin­gle way to finance these things is to com­pare them with rebuild­ing the exist­ing struc­ture. In the case of Milwaukee, it cost about a third as much to tear it down as it would’ve been to rebuild it.

Q. What are some of the high­way removal projects around the coun­try that you con­sider par­tic­u­larly admirable?

A. New York’s West Side Highway was closed in 1975. It fell down once in ’73, and they repaired it, and it fell down again in ’75. At the end of its 40-year design life, it fell down right on sched­ule. And it was just really expen­sive, and polit­i­cally unpop­u­lar, to rebuild it … The result of the West Side Highway com­ing down was [that] it really helped the rebirth of the real estate mar­ket in Chelsea, Tribeca, Battery Park City.

In Portland, the river­front sec­tion of the express­way was removed and there was a huge prop­erty value increase. People could see the [Willamette] River, and with­out the free­way in the way, that made a huge difference.

And then in Seoul, South Korea, is the most spec­tac­u­lar one of all: They took out a free­way with over 150,000 cars a day and replaced it with two mov­ing lanes on each side of a river, which they restored. And it works just fine because they have a really rich street grid in Seoul.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.