Highway Removal

In the wake of the city's refusal to consider removing the Sheridan Expressway, advocates from the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance gathered last night at a town hall meeting to revise their game plan. Although the long-term vision of removing the highway lives on, the discussion focused on other potential improvements along the Sheridan corridor.

When Oklahoma City announced plans in 1998 to tear down the I-40 Crosstown Expressway near downtown, they envisioned a grand, tree-lined, at-grade boulevard that would help improve development prospects in the already resurgent "Core to Shore" area between downtown and the Oklahoma River. The route would be part of the planned five-mile streetcar corridor, buttressed by a 40-acre "central park" fit for the capital, the largest city in the state.

Tearing down highways, as New Haven, Connecticut is planning to do to a short section of Route 34, is a rare (though increasingly sought after) outcome in American transportation policy. Some highway removals are unintended consequences of neglect or disaster, like the collapse of New York's Miller Highway and the damage caused to San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Others are planned interventions, like Milwaukee's removal of the Park East Freeway. But the New Haven project is the first planned highway teardown to receive funding from the federal government, which awarded the project a TIGER grant in 2010.

"I say my people! I got a story! We tell the TIGER team that this is our territory!"

Last month, the Bloomberg administration unexpectedly ruled out the option of removing the Sheridan Expressway and replacing it with housing and parks, telling South Bronx advocates that added truck traffic projected for local streets was a "fatal flaw" in the highway teardown. After a closer look at that truck traffic analysis, however, the coalition calling for the highway removal says the city overlooked some obvious options to keep trucks off neighborhood streets.

The Bloomberg administration has abruptly ruled out the possibility of tearing down the lightly-trafficked Sheridan Expressway and replacing it with mixed-use development, jobs, and parks. Neighborhood advocates and electeds are vowing to fight the decision, which they say fails to follow through on the comprehensive analysis the city promised to conduct as part of a $1.5 million federal grant.

Earlier this week we ran a story about why local livable streets advocates with the New Haven Urban Design League are disappointed with the city's decision to replace a section of grade-separated highway with a plan that remains, on balance, car-centric.

The "most defacing scar from the 1960's Urban Renewal era" -- that's how local advocates describe the Route 34 Expressway through downtown New Haven. Just about a year and a half ago, this small New England city won a TIGER grant to heal that scar. But another disfiguration may be growing in its place.

If you make your home on the Louisiana coastline, upstate New York or the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, chances are you live near a highway that really has it coming. It's big. It's ugly. It goes right through city neighborhoods. And it just might be coming down soon.