http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/02/it-or-not-most-urban-freeways-are-here-stay/8428/
By Earl Swift, February 20, 2014
This spring — April 27, to be exact — marks the 75th birthday of the
Interstate era. On that date in 1939 came the first unambiguous signal
from Washington that a coast-to-coast grid of superhighways was soon to
be a national priority.
The news came quietly, in a wonky and table-laden report prepared by
technocrats in the federal Bureau of Public Roads. Flip through
Toll Roads and Free Roads
today, and its status as early blueprint of the world's greatest public
works project is unmistakable. Here are maps that seem dead ringers for
the overland routes the finished expressways would travel. Here are
radical design details — broad and banked curves, gentle grades and wide
medians — that have become ubiquitous elements of the American
commute.
The report's central pitch is that the country needed superhighways
more urgently to ease urban congestion than to link its far-flung
cities. That bears repeating, because it runs counter to the
conventional wisdom: the interstates were not conceived as long-haul
roads that were then pushed into the cities, but as the reverse — they
were prescribed as urban fixes first, and to venture into the
countryside, second.
We'll get back to that, but for now, believe it — it's true. And the
highways we got were true to that prewar vision. So it is that nearly a
third of the interstate system consists of stretches through our cities,
in the form of loops, spurs and freeways. So it is that American
motorists drive nearly twice as many miles on urban interstates as they
do the lengthier rural legs. So it is that every metropolis in the
country has reorganized itself around these roads, and that they've
shaped where we live and work, how we shop, what we eat, and how we pass
our time.
And so it is, too, that as the system's roughly 14,000 city miles
approach the end of their life expectancy, we'll figure out ways to
raise the money to rebuild them, rather than tear them down. Because
with precious few exceptions, our cities need their interstates the way
organs need arteries.
• • • • •
I realize that declaration won't go down easy among readers who
question the wisdom of rebuilding interstate legs now crumbling with
age. And it probably seems especially contrary in
light of the debates now under way about replacing some short stretches of urban interstate. The future of I-81's elevated course
through downtown Syracuse
is under study. The fates of the aging viaducts carrying I-84 across
central Hartford, and I-10 over the historic Treme district of New
Orleans, are on the table, as well.
The same goes in Detroit, where state and city officials are studying
whether to rebuild, remove or downsize I-375, the Walter P. Chrysler
Freeway, a mile-long spur that ends near the city's Renaissance Center —
and is now falling apart. Freeway critics in Detroit, like those
elsewhere, charge that I-375 is brutalist overkill, that its broad,
depressed bed wastes land and shreds the social and economic fabric of
its surroundings. State officials don't necessarily disagree. They've
enlisted consultants to solicit and analyze proposals from the community
as to what form the future road might take.
But these discussions, and a scattering of others, don't signal a
trend. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the urban interstates
needing overhaul will be overhauled. In some places, they'll be rebuilt
bigger than they are. I'd bet that nationally, the coming few years will
see a net increase in urban interstate lane mileage, not a decline.
In most places there simply isn't much choice. Whatever their faults,
most of these roads shoulder a heavy load. Overtaxed, potholed, and ugly
from every angle, they nevertheless do what they were designed to do.
They move a spectacular volume of traffic. And alternatives that will
relieve that load are years from reality in all but a few places, if
they're realistic alternatives at all.
I-375 in Detroit.
The highways have mutated their host cities. Sunbelt subdivisions
follow their paths. Bedroom communities sprout at their exits. They've
sown shopping malls and big-box stores, midwifed satellite business
districts, sired factories, shipping centers, entire towns. They spawn
traffic even as they relieve it, much as mountains create their own
weather; over time they become utterly codependent with the territory
through which they pass.
Abetted by interstates, a metro area might have two or three or even
four high-rise business districts, might spill farther into the
countryside than imagination allowed when sprawl reached only as far as
the streetcar lines. Our daily wandering through these low-density
landscapes is far less neat than our urban travels of old, far less easy
to satisfy with fixed-rail transit, even bus lines. We've created a
North American style of daily living that is utterly dependent on the
automobile. You can lament that, and perhaps you should. But this is
what we have to work with.
Which is why, in Detroit, state and local officials are eyeing I-375,
and only I-375, as a candidate for redesign. Though occasionally slammed
with stadium traffic, the spur carries a far lighter load than other
freeways in town — and that means, says Kelby Wallace of the Michigan
Department of Transportation, that "there might be some options to do
things that you can't do when you're talking about hundreds of thousands
of vehicles."
Elsewhere in Detroit, interstates 75, 94 and 96 are too busy, and
essential to trade, to consider any reduction of capacity. As they wear
out, they'll be rebuilt much as they are.
• • • • •
It might be a bitter pill for an urbanist to swallow, but the adversary
here isn't officialdom, or the "automotive interests," or any other
monolithic bogey man; it's the very people whose lives said urbanist
seeks to improve. Americans don't drive because they lack an
alternative. We drive because we love our cars, no matter the price — we
cherish the individual freedom they offer over convenience, frugality,
common sense.
This is hardly news. The men who wrote
Toll Roads and Free Roads
prescribed urban freeways because by 1939, we were already the world's
preeminent car culture, were happily abandoning public transit in
droves, and were strangling America's cities with our traffic. Herbert
Fairbank, the Bureau of Public Roads thinker who wrote most of the
report, described the gridlocked approaches to U.S. downtowns as "a
fatal thrombosis."
"Some measures of relief are imperative," he wrote. "In the larger
cities generally only a major operation will suffice — nothing less than
the creation of a depressed or an elevated artery (the former usually
to be preferred) that will convey the massed movement pressing into, and
through, the heart of the city, under or over the local cross streets
without interruption by their conflicting traffic."
Fairbank and his colleagues were empiricists. They conceived the
interstate system not to remake the country, but in response to a
problem — "a multiplicity of short movements into and out of the city,"
as they put it. (The rural stretches weren't nearly so crucial, in
their judgment; out there, the report said, most of the system could be
two-lane road.) Their prescription was rife with unpleasant side
effects, as is inevitable when you force a four- or six-lane
superhighway through a densely settled metropolis; collateral damage was
extreme.
But the scars they left are now decades old, and the expressways have
become essential elements of our urban machinery. Highways such as I-375
are rare exceptions in a system with few expendable parts. If other
legs are to be removed, it won't be because they're ugly, or dissect
neighborhoods, or disturb the peace, but because, like I-375, they're no
longer necessary.
That may happen, in time. We may yet reduce demand to the point that we
can refigure these behemoths into less intrusive forms, can reimagine
these "integral cogs and pieces of our transportation system," as Mike
Hancock, the president of the American Association of State Highway and
Transportation Officials, calls them. But it will take weaning American
drivers off their dependence on the car, off their passion and
demand for it.
This is not an easy assignment, seeing as how cars are purchases we
make with our hearts, more than our heads. Logic won't convince
Americans to change their ways. What will? Maybe, over time, prohibitive
fuel prices and withering tolls, and, most importantly, investment in
useful and convenient public transit. Only when the carrot is
irresistible, and the stick stings too sharply to bear, will the shift
begin, and it will take years to play out.
In the meantime, the task for the civic-minded urbanist isn't to
imagine our cities without freeways, but to design ways to soften the
effects of these necessary evils. To help us better live with them.
Because we're stuck with them.
