Needed: An expanded campaign to tear down urban freeways

The freeway removal campaign got a boost in March when the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released “The Life and Death of Urban Highways,” a 39-page report on the benefits that five of the world’s cities have gained by replacing limited-access highways.

“Decades of failing to deliver congestion relief and improve safety combined with the hard evidence of damaged neighborhoods have proven that the urban highway is a failed experiment,” former Denver Planning Director Peter J. Park declared in the report’s foreword.

Park, who resigned his Denver position last August after winning a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has been preaching the freeway removal message at Harvard and at the nearby Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, where he is a Lincoln/Loeb Fellow. He argues that the nation needs an expanded campaign to persuade officials and the public about the good things that come from eliminating urban freeways.

The report from ITDP, an organization that “promotes socially equitable and environmentally sustainable transportation worldwide,” makes these points:

• “When limited-access freeways are force-fit into urban environments, they create barriers that erode vitality—the very essence of cities.” Freeways block many nearby surface streets, making it harder to get from one place to another.

• “Residents, businesses, property owners, and neighborhoods along the freeway suffer but so does operation of the broader city network.” Park emphasizes: “During traffic peaks, freeways actually worsen congestion as drivers hurry to wait in the queues forming at limited points of access.”

• “Years of evidence has shown that highways in fact do not alleviate congestion.  While expanding road capacity might provide relief for the first few years, it is likely to have the opposite effect, even within the first five years of operation.”

• Cities may need some highways, but they should be primarily for trucks and long-distance buses. Those vehicles are noisy and produce a disproportionate volume of air pollution. Removing them from the surface streets can make the streets more attractive for everyday activities.

The report tells about the results of freeway removal in three US cities — San Francisco, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon — and Seoul, South Korea, and Bogotá, Colombia. Among the benefits those cities have received from highway removal are:

Increased property values:  After the removal of Portland’s Harbor Drive highway and the establishment of the Downtown Waterfront Urban Renewal Area, including a waterfront park, land values in the area rose from $466 million in 1974 to over $1.6 billion in 2008. 

Replacement of San Francisco’s double-deck Embarcadero Freeway with a surface-level boulevard led to a 300 percent rise in property values in adjacent neighborhoods and a dramatic increase in development.

Economic revitalization:  After the Cheonggyecheon freeway in Seoul was removed and the creek beneath it was reexposed, there were decreases in air pollution, noise, and traffic. The area became a popular destination for local people and tourists, attracting an average of 53,000 visitors each weekday and 125,000 each weekend day. The average price of apartments in the area went up at least 25 percent, compared to a 10 percent increase in neighborhoods farther away. Office rents rose as well.

In Milwaukee, removal of the Park East Freeway opened 26 acres for redevelopment and tax generation. Land values in the vicinity have risen faster than in the rest of the city.

Better mobility:  As freeways are dismantled, governments can provide more appropriate mobility options. Seoul instituted restrictions on car use and introduced bus rapid transit when the highway was replaced by a linear park. “Bogotá chose to invest in a whole mobility strategy that included bus rapid transit, bikeways, and greenways, instead of elevated highways.”  A 27-mile greenway connects low-income neighborhoods to downtown.

Accessible waterfronts:  When urban highways were first constructed, waterfronts often contained busy ports that relied heavily on truck traffic. Many port activities have since closed down or moved elsewhere, and waterfronts have been cleaned up. In Portland and San Francisco, highway removal helped reconnect the cleaner waterfront to other parts of the city.

Maintenance costs averted:  Removing Milwaukee’s Park East Freeway spur cost $25 million—a bargain compared to the $50 to $80 million that repairing it was estimated to cost.

In a lecture at the Lincoln Institute and an interview with Better! Cities & Towns, Park emphasized that freeways are both inefficient at distributing traffic and damaging to the urban fabric. “Where did a city or a neighborhood get better from a freeway running through or near a neighborhood?” Park demanded.  “How has it improved the life of the people nearby?” Freeways, in his view, have “left out fundamental design ideas and design aspirations that shaped civilization for thousands of years.”

Start planning now

With government resources under stress at the federal, state, and local levels, “our economic challenge is that we can’t afford to maintain or expand what we have,” Park said. The US Department of Transportation has in recent years awarded some grants for removal of limited-access highways, followed by construction of a more balanced transportation networks, or for modification of highways — capping them or putting it in tunnels, for example.

Even when municipalities don’t have money lined up for highway removal or modification, they should start the planning for those undertakings without waiting, Park said. The City of Milwaukee, where Park served as planning director under Mayor John Norquist from 1995 to 2003, began exploring removal of the mile-like Park East stub in the mid-1990s — a time when, he recalls, “we had no idea how we were going to pay for this.”

“We did a lot of planning without the money to do the projects,” Park pointed out. After the city had planned the freeway’s removal, Harley-Davidson approached the city with the idea of planning a big entertainment center in the area. “That got the ball rolling,” he said.

“Planning is something you have to do so you’re prepared for opportunity,” Park exhorted. “Establish a vision for what you want your city, town, or neighborhood to become. Prepare yourself; broadcast a signal to the private sector that you’re ready.”

“Harley-Davidson would never have proposed freeway removal,” but the planning done by the city enabled the company to recognize the opportunity that would open up once a better circulation system was in place, Park said.

“Was Wisconsin DOT receptive?  No,” said Park. “They said [the freeway removal] wouldn’t work.” But the governor wasn’t willing to fight the idea once the motorcycle manufacturer saw it as the linchpin for development.

At the Lincoln Institute, Park’s advocacy sparked debate about sources of support for freeway removal initiatives.  Park said that in Milwaukee, people warmed to the idea of getting rid of the highway because they recognized that the downtown had already begun improving: “Ten years earlier, there probably wouldn’t have been belief in the downtown.”

One Lincoln Institute attendee suggested that a regional governmental organization would be the natural place to turn for advocacy of freeway replacement. But Fred Salvucci, who teaches at MIT and worked with Governor Michael Dukakis and Boston Mayor Kevin White on lining up money to put Boston’s Central Artery underground, said regional organizations may be dominated by car dependent suburbanites and thus may be more interested in keeping freeways in place than in ripping them out.

Referring to the Big Dig project that depressed the Central Artery, Salvucci told Better! Cities & Towns: “If we had regional government, we’d be dead.”  The Metropolitan Area Planning Council was pro-highway, he pointed out.  Key support for major changes came, Salvucci said, from the mayors of Boston and Somerville, the City of Cambridge, and from citizens of those communities — all at or near the region’s core. “What helped was that the cities were small, and neighborhood groups had a chance to convert them.”

A national campaign

The Congress for New Urbanism has been conducting a “Highways to Boulevards” initiative — encouraging various cities, including Seattle, New Orleans and Buffalo, New York, to replace elevated expressways with surface streets, usually boulevards. Park argued for an even bigger, effort saying, “There’s an opportunity for a new campaign.”

An intensive national campaign, he said, might build on the same values — prosperity and freedom from congestion — that business and government used in the 1950s to gain approval for the Interstate Highway system. So far, said Park, “mayors are the ones who have mostly led these [freeway removal] efforts.”

“We need partners who have a lobbying structure,” said a Lincoln attendee said. She noted that AARP has a lobbying presence and should be interested in promoting walkable environments for the good of its members, ages 50 and up.

“The very first thing people will ask is: Where will all the cars go?” Park acknowledged. There’s more than one answer. Some motorists will switch to transit. Some will make fewer trips. Some will choose different routes. “A lot of the time, they will get to where they’re going faster,” Park asserted. “They will not have to overshoot their destination and backtrack,” as they often do on limited-access highways.

“Limited access,” he made clear, is not the solution to congestion. In cities, he said, limited-access highways have turned out to be less a remedy than an obstacle.