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Some cities want fewer roadways, not more
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Kai Ryssdal: Vice President Joe Biden took the wraps off the administration's most recent report card on the economic stimulus package today. The White House says -- and this number is probably subject to political interpretation -- that it has created roughly three million jobs in the past year or so. A lot of that work is being done on infrastructure, building and fixing bridges and highways. Dozens of cities around the country have just the opposite in mind though. They want to tear down parts of some freeways.
From WNYC in New York City, Andrea Bernstein reports.
Andrea Bernstein: Near the lower tip of Manhattan, Michael Sorkin is standing just yards from the East River and Brooklyn Bridge, but you can barely see them. So he looks up.
Michael Sorkin: We see traffic that is in at least three different levels. There's the FDR Drive. There's an interchange to get people onto the Brooklyn Bridge that's flying over the FDR Drive, and then flying over that is the Brooklyn Bridge.
Sorkin is an architect and head of urban design at City College of New York. He's drawn up a different blueprint for this patch of Manhattan. Tear down a section of the elevated highway, the on-ramps and cloverleafs.
Sorkin: You would see one of the most beautiful architectural achievements in the history of consciousness, the Brooklyn Bridge.
There would be parks, plazas, restaurants.
Sorkin: You would see boats cruising by.
Sorkin drew up these designs as part of an international exhibition by the group Institute for Transportation Development Policy. As crazy as it sounds, the idea of tearing down highways in dense urban areas is ricocheting around the country. Cleveland is planning to convert a lake-front expressway to a boulevard by 2012, and Seattle is moving to tear down a double deck highway by that same year.
Carmen Gand: I think it's ridiculous.
Back in New York, teacher Carmen Gand was walking her dogs near the FDR Drive. Her reaction to a proposed teardown is typical.
Gand: People are going to drive into Manhattan regardless, so why not make as many roads or possibilities to get into Manhattan as possible?
It turns out that New York actually tore down an elevated highway in the 1970s. Sam Schwartz was the chief engineer for the NYC Department of Transportation then.
Sam Schwartz: And people panicked. They thought that was Armageddon.
The highway had begun to crumble, so the city dismantled 60 blocks and replaced it with a regular street.
Schwartz: After that, we had trouble tracing about one-third of the people. Transit went up. We had the same number of people coming in, but they weren't coming in by cars.
San Francisco also lost freeways in the 1989 earthquake. Some years later, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a story about it. The headline: "Traffic Planners Baffled by Success: No Central Freeway, No Gridlock, and No Explanation." Engineers found that traffic volume had dropped from 93,000 cars a day to 45,000. But what happens in city where there isn't a lot of public transit?
John Norquist: "You want to do what? Tear down a freeway?" Oh, they thought I was nuts.
John Norquist was mayor of Milwaukee from 1988 to 2004. He wanted to take down the Park East Freeway, which ran through downtown.
Norquist: A lot of people realized it was ugly and all that, but they said what would you do with the 40,000 cars a day that use it?
Norquist is now the president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a group that promotes denser communities. He says in 2002, when he tore down the highway, downtown congestion didn't jump. Instead, it dispersed all around city streets and business activity in the area went up.
Norquist: I'd don't there'd be many people who say, "Milwaukee was a great place till that freeway got torn down."
Skeptics remain, like Robert "Buzz" Paaswell. He says goods and services must be able to move through cities.
Robert "Buzz" Paaswell: You just can't take out a link in a highway and expect nothing to happen.
Paaswell is an engineer who's interim president of City College of New York. He says without city highways, some people will find it harder to get around. New York officials haven't endorsed any plans to dismantle the southern tip of the FDR Drive. But around the country, mayors and governors are eying urban highway teardowns as the road to development, not congestion.
In New York, I'm Andrea Bernstein, for Marketplace.
Kai Ryssdal: The report is part of the public radio Transportation Nation project. For photos and links to some of the traffic studies, go to Marketplace.org.
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I'll second Sanford on the San Francisco gridlock problem, and raise the pollution specter. Cars stuck on city streets in stop and go traffic produce more pollution than freeways and highways.
The SF Bay Area has a bigger safety problem though. All of the bridges are crumbling and there is little money to fix them. When one of the bridges fails (and all of them have had issues), there needs to be redundant solutions for people to get home. Some of the necessary maintenance closures and congestion also increase strain and pollution on the other bridges.
Pushing real maintenance and public transit alternative costs onto drivers is part of the congestion solution without crippling necessary thoroughfares. SF really needs a North-South freeway.
:-))) Yet another convenient omission, by a coastal-based media outlet, of an aspect of America's second city that's very relevant to the story.
Other than it's elevated 0.8 mi stretch over the Chicago River from Ohio St. to Monroe St., Chicago won't have to do ANYthing about its 16.3 mile stretch of Lake Shore Drive (and its almost continuous, adjacent Lakefront PARKland) from Hollywood Avenue to 67th Street.
[ http://tinyurl.com/35fxa6r ]
Many thanks to Daniel Burnham,
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Plan ],
...and to Ms. Beck for her earlier post on this site.
[Ref: http://www.cnu.org/search/node/chicago ]
New York did not tear down the elevated highway in the 70's, the West Side Highway, it fell down killing and injuring many. New York has replaced the highway with a ground level street plus running, biking, and walking trails which go from Battery park to 59th connecting to Riverside Park. By keeping the automobile traffic away from the bikes, runners, and walkers. This activity blossoms
In Birmingham UK our 'villain' was Sir Herbert John Baptista Manzoni CBE MICE (21 March 1899 – 18 November 1972) who helped design a city 'fit for the motor car'. Nearly 40 years later I wrote on a flickr photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sibadd/2683195953/in/photostream/
.... Birmingham has long been the UK's most autodependent city. The automobile is one of its icons, obscuring the fact that long ago Birmingham was once the largest manufacturer of bicycles in the country or indeed Europe. Yet at the same time it was Birmingham Council that only six years ago took the bold political decision to demolish a section of one of its encircling dual carriageways to regenerate the economy of its 'Eastside' development, and break out of 'the corset' that adaptation to the car in the 1960s had tightened around the city centre, forcing anyone on foot to brave grim subways or climb pedestrian bridges to negotiate the city centre...
In order to enable Mr. Sorkin's vision, we need a vastly improved public transportation system - one that people will actually use. We believe that such a system is personal rapid transit (PRT). This concept has been around for many years but struggled to come to reality. It is finally comercially available from at least three different vendors. It has the potentiall to greatly reduce our reliance on the automobile. Visit www.prtconsulting.com to learn more.
The comments about burying highways are great, especially the one about the Big Dig in Boston. That cost $14.6 billion at completion, $22 billion by the time Massachusetts pays off all the loans, after an original estimate of less than $4 billion. Wishing your highways away may be a great past-time, but you might want to consider where the money is going to come from.
It was with interest that I listened to your story on tearing down highways. In theory, I like the concept. The reality isn't always so easy.
I have been a resident of San Francisco since 1982. I know the visual blight of elevated highways and how they can negatively impact a neighborhood. I also know we are an automobile centric society, even in cities with relatively good mass transit. I used the old Central Freeway when I needed to drive out of the city. I have lived with this new, and visually pleasing boulevard. However, I am not sure when the Chronicle report wrote that story about no gridlock. I found it to be a romanticized version of what it was meant to be, not what it is in reality. The number of cars using this egress from the city has not diminished and may have, in fact, increased over time. The queue to access the boulevard is often more than five blocks long. There is gridlock because drivers block cross streets to get ahead. Drivers will wait until the last minute to cut in to the lanes to access the boulevard to get ahead of the line. That creates back ups in those lanes.
The problem is really bad or next to no urban planning, cuts in mass transit, and a belief in the myth by tearing down roads, cars will go away. This change proved that point. I concede that the neighborhood has improved and the boulevard is more beautiful, but functionally, it is not as good as the freeway, which could accommodate more cars per hour. I'm not opposed to tearing down roads, it is just let's be honest about the potential trade offs.
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