The cross-country road trip
It’s a quintessentially American tradition that's built upon an historic infrastructure investment.
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of the 1950s laid the
groundwork for the backbone of American transportation today.
But zoom in a bit closer and you’ll find towns and cities across
the country that were divided and whole neighbourhoods displaced by new highways.
Half a century later, many of those freeways are ageing and degraded.
And cities are grappling with the question – do we repair the highway
or do we tear it down? And what do we put in its place?
We've got a grand narrative of the achievements of the interstate highway system.
There is not as prominent a reflection of the costs of the interstate highway system.
Historians do say that the Tampa Bay area has highways that were
designed to displace minorities.
We see this sort of pattern where we are looking at decisions that were made
mid-century that really did change this community.
This became a dividing point for people who oftentimes traversed these neighborhoods back and forth.
“What we see now with this new infrastructure bill. we can actually make amends. Literally
mending back neighborhoods to hopefully bring back and revive what were in these areas.
In the future as far as our interstate, it’s all important as the railroads were important
to the community a hundred years ago.
Historians call the interstate highway system
the greatest public works project in American history, potentially even in world history.
LaDale Winling is working to map the effects of the interstate highway system across America.
It was intended and was a massive employment and public works project that put labor contractors,
whether it be concrete construction contractors,
to work in cities, metropolitan areas, states around the country,
and so like those equivalent of $500 billion of investment went into the pockets of workers.
To say the interstate highway system was a massive undertaking is probably underselling it.
Over 48,000 miles of highways were constructed across desert sands,
farmland, mountains and through cities.
The sheer scale and ambition of the project is astounding.
And the impact it had on American society is undeniable.
Moving from state to state, city to city, and to and from rural areas became a whole lot easier.
Travel, job opportunities and trade routes all opened up because of the highway system.
And America’s love affair with the automobile got a whole lot stronger.
Today, most American towns and cities are still designed to prioritise cars,
rather than pedestrians.
The way that the public understands the legacy and
the impacts of the interstate highway system is changing.
As the highway interstate program expanded into major cities, highway revolts began
popping up across the country, protesting the construction of new roads through urban areas.
In some cases, highway building was used as a tool to reinforce racial segregation
and transport people around and out of city centres.
According to the US Department of Transportation, more than 1 million
people were displaced from their homes in the first 30 years of highway construction.
Half a century later, the effects of these projects,
like environmental and noise pollution, are unequally felt by the people who live near them.
One of those communities split by a highway was Rochester, New York.
Now, they’re taking that highway down.
In Rochester in particular, we had what we call an Inner Loop,
which was literally a loop around the city, which cut off many neighborhoods, particularly
the neighborhood where I grew up in. And so you had this great divide. So we lost our resources,
lost our connections to what we did have in the neighborhood. And so that creates a decline.
Rochester’s 2.68-mile Inner Loop was proposed in 1947, and constructed between 1952 and 1965.
It wraps around Rochester’s downtown area and distributes traffic around the core.
Some residents have come to know it as a moat that’s divided the city.
Still, it's become a part of the fabric of daily life here in Rochester.
To talk about a removal, people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa,
slow down. Hold your horses. What are we going to do? What happens to traffic?
Ideas for the removal of the Inner Loop have been proposed since 1991.
Taking down part of the highway would give the city an opportunity to prioritise
walkability and development for all the neighborhoods around the downtown area.
But by the 2010s, the highway was in bad shape. Its bridge crossings needed
continuous investment to keep them functional.
And the East section of the Inner Loop was operating below capacity,
carrying just about 2,000 vehicles a day per lane.
So instead of fixing it, the city decided to take part of it down.
We've replaced this highway with generally a two to three lane roadway with on street parking,
wide sidewalks and a protected two way bicycle facility through the entire length.
Eric Frisch was in charge of managing the Inner Loop East project for the City of Rochester.
Pre-pandemic we saw a more than a more than doubling of bicycle and pedestrian traffic in this
area, and that's prior to most of the housing and other development taking place. So we know just by
removing this highway, by providing an environment that people would want to be and people are
coming. You can see it, and it's bringing new life and vitality to this part of town.
The Inner Loop East Transformation Project was one of the first
highway removal projects in the country.
Project managers said people's travel time has only gone up by a matter of minutes.
It cost about $20 million to pull off,
and the project got most of its funding from an Obama-era federal grant program.
It took the engineering firm Stantec nine months to remove 4,400 feet of 4-
to 6-lane expressway and three bridges, and clear out 6 acres of land for development.
Now, the empty land is being redeveloped to add new bike lanes,
businesses and large residential blocks.
The project has been so successful that the city wants to do it
all again and remove the remainder of the highway, called Inner Loop North.
This time around, the project is bigger, more technically ambitious and more complicated.
The city is proposing to take down a longer stretch of highway,
creating 20 acres of land for redevelopment with a budget closer to $90 million.
But of course, fixing the damage that’s been done by a piece of infrastructure like this
is more complicated than just removing a road and building something in its place.
There’s always the risk that redeveloping an area
could price out the current residents.
Currently on opposite sides of that Inner Loop, you know, 500 feet across from one another. You have one group
that's predominantly Black and brown. Most home sales are between $65,000 to $80,000.
And on that other five hundred feet, you have mostly older Caucasians. And home sales over there
are $500,000 to $750,000. So you've got to figure out how you create this, how do you mend this
and bring progress?
I was pretty inspired to learn that Shawn had formed a community group with
the residents in the neighborhood across the highway
to discuss what they want to go in the road’s place.
Their focus is smaller developments that can support single-family homes for local residents,
rather than the big megablock developments that are popping up in place of Inner Loop East.
We can actually physically try to design and create once again connected neighborhoods
and help facilitate homeownership, help facilitate community wealth building.
Rochester isn’t the only city tearing down its highways.
Congress for the New Urbanism has tracked at least 40 highway removal proposals across the US.
And while highway teardowns have been talked about by local communities for years,
the idea is now gaining more traction in Washington in recent years.
In an earlier draft of the US infrastructure bill, Democrats set aside $15 billion to fund
projects like this through the Reconnecting Communities Act.
But in the bipartisan bill that was ultimately passed, that funding was cut down to just $1 billion.
Now for context, one highway removal that’s being proposed in Syracuse,
New York is expected to cost close to $2 billion.
The reconnecting communities, that billion dollars, is something we want to get to work
right away on putting in the work.
It's going to be it's going to be the catchphrase for the next couple of years, you know, reconnecting communities
and rebuilding families, it's going to be there. And so that's why it takes folks
across the country to keep putting a hammer to nail and saying, Hey, you said this,
you've got to adhere to this, you've got to adhere to this. And that's that's important.
The next chapter in Rochester shows both the potential success
and nuance involved in removing legacy infrastructure.
Highway demolitons aren’t a silver bullet for a city’s problems,
but Rochester’s Inner Loop projects can serve as a sort of test case for other cities
as they decide what to do with their ageing infrastructure.
The greatest risk would be removal of interstate highway segments without consideration of
the most directly affected populations or without planning in the context of a broader
set of urban development considerations, including affordable housing, including recreational space,
including considerations of public transit, mobility and especially accessibility.
Of course, each city’s situation is unique. But highway teardowns point to a
bigger shift in how city planners are now viewing the role of cars.
We can serve the car, but it doesn't need to be the driving force, if you will. We
can create urban communities that you can drive in, but that are much more focused on people.
The interstate highway system forever reshaped America in ways that are still felt today.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
The highway teardowns happening now
are a powerful reminder of how we learn from the past to build a better future.
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