Highway Removal

Changing Priorities

Although some roads slated for removal were considered underused, the growing interest in highway removal reflects changing priorities far more than declining car use. Most of these roads are in urban areas where planners, activists, or developers have foreseen more valuable uses of the land consumed by the highways. The roads were also blamed for dividing communities and for blighting adjacent neighborhoods with emissions, noise, and dangerous traffic. In addition, proposals to remove a road typically reflected a growing belief that cities need to move away from car-centric policies in favor of alternative models of both transport and land use. Proponents of highway removal wish to rebuild city centers on a pedestrian scale and promote investments in mass transit and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. They have typically emphasized the value of reconnecting urban spaces—cities to waterfronts, businesses to residential areas, and roads to adjoining buildings.

Typical candidates for highway removal are elevated urban express roads built around the middle of the 20th century to open up congested city centers to free-flowing auto traffic. When these aging roads need major structural repair, it becomes more plausible to argue for the cost-effectiveness of removing or replacing them. Most are in the United States, since far fewer inner-city freeways have been built in other lands. Proposals to remove them have been initiated in part by city officials and in part by citizen initiatives.

An unusually early example is the removal of Harbor Drive in Portland, Oregon, in 1974, and its replacement by a riverfront park. This expressway into the city center, opened in 1943, was a typical mid-century urban highway, although it was [Page 739]connected to other freeways at only one end, and had been made partly redundant by two newer freeways. Even then, its removal can be attributed to unusual civic leadership. Another unique case was New York's elevated West Side Highway, which had to be closed in 1973 because of structural deterioration and which was eventually replaced by a boulevard—a decision that came only after controversial plans for an upgraded freeway were cancelled in 1985.

The decision to remove a road came more easily where it had never been completed in its full length or had been intended to connect to another road that was never built. (An extreme case is Baltimore's “Highway to Nowhere,” which was never connected to planned freeways at either end, and which was partly demolished after 2010.) Among the best-known examples are two from San Francisco. The Embarcadero and Central freeways were both elevated inner-city stumps, never completed, and damaged in a 1989 earthquake, after which the city decided to tear them down and replace them with multiuse boulevards. Other examples of removed freeway stumps from the early 2000s include Milwaukee's elevated Park East freeway, one end of Toronto's lakefront Gardner Expressway, and the Oak Street Connector in New Haven, Connecticut. The Chattanooga (Tennessee) Riverfront Parkway is a case of an underused highway that was downgraded to a narrower, slower street. A similar example is the Robert Moses Parkway in Niagara Falls, New York.

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