Freeways give way to boulevards — slowly

For every two successes, there seems to be one setback.

Toronto is moving toward razing a jumbo suburban-style highway interchange. Seattle expects Washington State to tear down the massive, elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct. New Haven, Connecticut, is mobilizing to replace a short expressway with a boulevard, and Trenton, New Jersey would like to do the same.

As those four examples indicate, cities across North America are anticipating, and in some instances vigorously campaigning for, the razing of sections of limited-access highways. In their place, what are often envisioned are slower-moving traditional street and road networks.

One of the several such projects that CNU has advocated — removal of the 53-year-old Skyway south of downtown Buffalo — has been stymied within the past year. Similarly, a proposal to convert the Rt. 29 expressway in Trenton, New Jersey, to a boulevard recently lost its backing from the New Jersey Department of Transportation.

Other expressway teardown projects, however, are going forward, at a very deliberate pace.

The benefits of expressway removals have been demonstrated in cities like Milwaukee and San Francisco. Demolition of Milwaukee’s Park East Freeway in 2003, a priority of John Norquist during his 15 years as mayor, has helped tie that city’s downtown area together and has set the stage for hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate projects.

After the elimination of the Park East, Milwaukee built a six-lane boulevard known as McKinley Avenue and reconnected streets that had been cut off for decades. Developers appear eager to fill much of the 16-acre expanse with condominiums, hotels, restaurants, offices — a lively mixed-use district that may get fixed-transit service to nearby sections of downtown.

Among the projects there are Manpower Inc.’s new 280,000 sq. ft., 1,200-employee headquarters; the recently completed five-story Flatiron condominium building and public plaza; preparations for developer Rick Barrett’s 30-story Moderne condo and apartment building; and the beginning of construction on the North End, a three-block complex of the Mandel Group that will include 395 condo units, 88 apartments, and 20,000 to 25,000 sq. ft. of retail, on what had been the most contaminated site in downtown.

Allison Rozek of the Department of City Development notes that Ruvin Development and Gateway Capital have opened a sales center for a 23-story hotel and residential project that will contain “the highest-price-point condos in downtown” — units selling for $600 per square foot and up. Many other projects have been built or are in the works nearby.

In San Francisco, the construction of Octavia Boulevard in 2005, in part of the corridor previously occupied by the elevated Central Artery, has helped revive the formerly depressed Hayes Valley neighborhood. Property values have shot up. “Parcels freed up by demolition of the freeway are being redeveloped into nearly 1,000 units of housing,” Nelson\Nygaard transportation consultants reported in a study of freeway removals, which the firm prepared for officials in the Seattle area.

Probably the worst things associated with the new Octavia Boulevard have been numerous collisions (some involving motor vehicles and bicycles) and a slowdown in some bus service. The collisions may have been brought on by a decision to build the boulevard’s side lanes — those intended for neighborhood traffic — wider than the designers had originally specified, and by a decision to pave them with asphalt rather than the textured, traffic-calming surface recommended by the designers.

Nonetheless, the overall effect of Octavia Boulevard has been positive. Similarly, the installation of a palm-lined boulevard on the route once occupied by the elevated Embarcadero Freeway have helped make San Francisco’s waterfront more populated and enjoyable.

What happens to traffic?
The biggest impediments to removal of urban highways are costs and concern over whether traffic will move at a snail’s pace after the expressways are gone.

Nelson\Nygaard’s study for Seattle, a city grappling with the likely demolition of the double-decked, 2.2-mile viaduct, notes that a reduction in roadway capacity “reduces the number of auto trips,” which in turn will help Seattle achieve its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent. The study says cities can accommodate necessary traffic through a combination of grid streets, other modes of movement (including mass transit), and “appropriate demand management and land use strategies.”

Norm Marshall of Smart Mobility consultants, which collaborated on the study, says the general thinking in Seattle is that half the roughly 103,000 daily trips on the deteriorating viaduct can be accommodated on replacement surface streets in the immediate corridor, another quarter of the trips will move to parallel routes, and the remaining one-quarter will “disappear.”

Urban battle sites
Among the freeway removal projects in the US and Canada are these:
• Toronto, Ontario, which is looking at two dismantling projects — removal of the Six Points Interchange in Etobicoke, about seven miles west of the Ontario capital, and demolition of part of the Gardiner Expressway near downtown.

After four years of study, City Council decided to get rid of a “spaghetti junction” highway interchange in Etobicoke. On most of the 15.5 acres that will open up, the city intends to create a traditional grid-like street and road system.

A portion of the land now occupied by the interchange can be sold for development, recouping part of the project’s cost — $37 million Canadian ($36.6 million US). New buildings will add to the city’s tax revenues and will give the area “the feel and function of an urban core,” a planning document predicts. Robert Freedman, Toronto’s chief of urban design, cautions that “it will still need some considerable design work to make it truly urban and pedestrian-friendly.”

The dismantling of a 1.2-mile segment of the Gardiner Expressway was urged in June by a multi-government agency called Waterfront Toronto. A spokeswoman for the agency said the dismantling, in an area between downtown and the waterfront, should result in a “Great Street” — one designed to be inviting to pedestrians. The change is expected to add about two minutes to the commute of the 120,000 vehicles that use the expressway daily.

The project “should be viewed as part of an overall transportation movement that lessens automobile dependence and places greater emphasis on public transit,” the agency stated.

Once city approval is granted, it’s expected to take four to five years to complete an environmental assessment and another three years to carry out the project, at a cost of perhaps $300 million (Canadian). Local groups and Norquist, as president of CNU, had urged the city to tear down a longer section of the Gardiner, carrying 200,000 vehicles a day. Mayor David Miller concluded that would be too expensive.

• New Haven, which wants the state to rip out an approximately one-mile stretch of the Rt. 34 “Connector,” an expressway that runs from Interstate 95 to the city’s medical district. Mayor John DeStefano Jr. proposes to convert the corridor into a boulevard.

Reestablishment of a grid of local streets would allow the downtown to expand across what is now, for the most part, a pavement-filled trench. The reshaped area would be conducive to pedestrians and street-level activity and would generate much-needed property tax revenues, DeStefano believes.

“You should roll [the expressway] back as close to I-95 as you can, so that the urban street structure can be restored,” Norquist declared during an April discussion sponsored by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and the Urban Design League. The portion closest to I-95 carries 75,000 vehicles a day, after which the volume quickly tapers off.

• Seattle, which has been told by Governor Christine Gregoire that the state will demolish the Alaskan Way Viaduct in 2012 regardless of whether an alternative to it has been agreed upon. Voters have rejected two plans — one for a tunnel, the other for a new, larger viaduct that would put more of the waterfront in shadow.

In late June, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that officials were considering eight options: “two elevated highway replacements, two tunnels, three options dispersing viaduct traffic onto surface roadways and one option referred to as ‘the trench.’”

“There is no consensus yet on the various alternatives,” Jeffrey Tumlin of Nelson\Nygaard, who is working on the project as part of a combined city, county, and state process, told New Urban News.

• Buffalo, which has been the scene of a drawn-out struggle over whether to take down the Skyway, an elevated road that carries 41,000 vehicles a day across predominantly industrial and waterfront land south of downtown. After hearing Norquist inveigh against the 110-foot-high structure, which interferes with access to Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, three members of the city’s Common Council went to Milwaukee to learn about the Park East experience. Congressman Brian Higgins agitated for the Skyway’s replacement.

Nonetheless, the state DOT remained unpersuaded, and the anti-Skyway campaign ran out of gas, partly because of the cost and partly because the proposed ground-level alternatives were less than ideal. A publicly sponsored agency, the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp., is now pursuing plans for a $400 million retail-restaurant-office-entertainment complex, part of which would be built beneath the Skyway. This would make it even harder to dismantle the road.

• Trenton, which has been attempting to convert 1.8 miles of Rt. 29 — a four-lane expressway that separates downtown from the Delaware River — to an urban boulevard with at-grade street crossings, narrower pavements, lower speeds, and on-street parking, In 2004 the Capital City Redevelopment Corporation (CCRC) initiated an effort to transform the character of the thoroughfare, which carries 60,000 vehicles a day and is known for a higher-than-average rate of collisions. The expectation has been that developers would erect a considerable volume of new buildings on what are now parking lots along Rt. 29.

Trenton Planning Director Andrew Carten says the state DOT has withdrawn its funding commitment and has told the city to “investigate alternative ways by which to underwrite the cost of this highway conversion.” Consequently the city and CCRC will have a marketing consultant carry out a market study in the next several months.

“There has been another paradigm shift (back to the Ice Age) at NJDOT … and the new crew is all about highway widening,” says Carlos Rodrigues, New Jersey director of the Regional Plan Association. Says Rodrigues: “It’s a great project, first proposed in the 1989 Duany Plater-Zyberk Trenton Plan, and it needs a real kick in the pants.”