Everyone freak out: Carmageddon is back. Right now, several U.S. cities are scheming to shut down major freeways — permanently. In the push to take back cities from cars, this is what you’d call throwing down the gauntlet.
The drive to tear down the huge freeways that many blame for the inner-city blight of the ’60s and ’70s is one of the most dramatic signs of the new urban order. Proponents of such efforts have data to show that freeway removal is not at all bizarre, that we can return to human-size streets without causing a gridlock apocalypse. And that may be true. But pulling down these shrines to the automobile also feels like a bold rewriting of America’s 20th-century urban script: Revenge of the Pedestrian. This time it’s personal.
Ready or not, decision time is upon us. Many of these highways were built to last between 40 and 50 years — they’ll soon need to be either repaired or reinvented. “What’s going to happen in the next 10 years when we need to make a big investment to prevent them from collapsing like the one in Minneapolis?” asks John Renne, professor of urban studies at the University of New Orleans.
For some cities, this means a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reclaim a vast amount of downtown land and turn it into the public space of their dreams. A group in St. Louis is agitating for the removal of a one-and-a-half mile stretch of Interstate 70, which would reunite the city center with the Mississippi River and Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch. Advocates there hope that by opening the city’s “front door,” as they call it, for the first time since 1964, they’ll set the stage for a renaissance of St. Louis’ depopulated downtown. Trenton, N.J., has a similar goal, and is looking at converting the four-lane highway that runs along the Delaware River into a vibrant waterfront of parks and buildings. And as New Orleans implements a new master plan for the city following Hurricane Katrina, anything seems possible — including a pitch to tear down the Claiborne Expressway, the freeway that divided several of the city’s historically black neighborhoods when it was erected decades ago. It would be replaced with a vibrant boulevard that reunites those neighborhoods in an infrastructural act of poetic justice.
It’s hard to overstate the gravity of such proposals. Few urban design initiatives can instantly transform a large swath of a city like building (or unbuilding) a freeway. San Francisco saw this in 1991, when, ahead of the tear-down trend, the city demolished the bay-adjacent double-decker Embarcadero Freeway after it was damaged in an earthquake. Today, the area where the Embarcadero once stood has evolved from a forbidding dead zone to a bustling waterfront and tourist magnet. Standing there now, you’d never guess it was once the site of 16 lanes of through-traffic.
by Will Doig, Salon | Read more:
Illustration: iStockphoto/Diverstudio
