Removing Urban Freeways

Urban freeway in Rochester, NY before removal

Interesting feature in the New York Times today about plans to demolish urban freeways across the US, which is part of Biden's unpassed infrastructure program. These roads have always been controversial; many were fought before and during construction in the 1950s and 1960s, and quite a few planned roads were blocked. Most were routed through poor, minority neighborhoods, because that was a lot easier and cheaper than trying to demolish middle class white neighborhoods. 

Former freeway corridor in Rochester

The idea behind these roads was to make it easier for people with jobs in the city to commute in from the suburbs. Living in the city was not much on anyone's mind; middle class people were moving to the suburbs by the millions, and cities were desperate to hold onto their downtown office districts as their only possible lifeline to the future. If that meant demolishing a few square miles of "slums," so be it. I remember "city of tomorrow" drawings from that period that showed central cities with essentially no housing, just office towers and freeways.

Now people are hoping that demolishing freeways will revitalize inner cities by making them better places to live. And that could work. But, again, there will be a cost:

A common argument, said Mr. Dunwoody, the artist and community organizer, is that if the highway is removed “folks are now going to be looking at our neighborhood, and bringing in yoga studios and coffee shops to move us out. People don’t want to get gentrified, get pushed out, get priced out.”

But they most certainly will. If we move to a model where people live closer to their work, then the people who work in downtown office towers will have to move to inner city neighborhoods, bidding up the price of nearby housing. There is no other way to reduce commuting. Rents and house prices have been low in some neighborhoods because nobody with money wants to live there. If commuting decreases, that will change.

Across the country, attempts to prevent "gentrification" have almost all failed; we just don't have the stomach for the sort of draconian limits on who can live where that would stop it. Plus, cities all depend on property taxes for most of their revenue, so any policy that keeps property values low hurts them.

Of course the other solution would be to move the jobs out of the cities to new office parks in the outer suburbs, and making commuting to cities harder will probably cause some of that, too. Who does that help? It certainly won't reduce CO2 emissions. I know some of you are thinking, "switch to commuting by rail and subway," but just try to build a new rail or even streetcar line in the US today. It has taken 35 years to build Maryland's Purple Line and it still may not ever be finished, plus the construction of new transit stops drives up local rents even more than tearing down highways.

Two major trends in America are colliding here: the push to reduce CO2 emissions and the rising price of urban housing. It looks to me like they are going to keep colliding, and grinding a lot of people between them.

I am always bothered when people speak about one issue in isolation, not even considering how it relates to anything else. The people pushing to demolish urban freeways seem to have no broader vision for a nation with a rising population increasingly concentrated in the biggest cities. They just want the eyesore in their neighborhood gone, and they imagine that can happen without anything else changing.

I don't think that can happen.

Why America Can't Build New Infrastructure, Continued

Mark Dunkelman thinks the reason nothing can be built in America is a reaction by progressives against the sort of neighborhood-bulldozing projects epitomized by Robert Moses and the freeways he build around New York:

Since the mid-1960s—really since the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island—no major new piece of public infrastructure has been built within the five boroughs of New York City. 

A few things have been built or rebuilt, says , but

those changes are a pittance of what New York once built year upon year, and just a fraction of the public infrastructure a booming city demands. The subway system is falling apart. Entire neighborhoods are transit deserts. Century-old tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey are beginning to fail.

Why aren’t there new subway lines connecting impoverished corners of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens? Why does freight traveling from New Jersey to Long Island travel by truck across Manhattan and not by rail? Why does the Port Authority Bus Terminal languish amid calls for an upgrade? Why does luxury housing sprout like weeds while institutions that serve the middle and working classes are left to languish? Why, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a letter to Gov. George Pataki in 1995, does it seem as though America has “lost the touch for famous things”?

Penn Station, like so much of the region’s infrastructure, remains in tatters today not because men like Robert Moses are no longer on the scene, but because the system in which Moses operated has been replaced by an entirely new, and remarkably dysfunctional, architecture. Beneath America’s deep frustration with government is something else: a deep-seated aversion to power. Progressives resolved decades ago to prevent the public from being bulldozed by another Robert Moses—and the project to diffuse power to the public has succeeded. But the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. The left’s zeal to hamstring government has helped to burnish the right’s argument that government would mess up a one-car parade. The new protections erected to guard against Moses’ second coming have condemned new generations to live in civic infrastructure that is frozen in time.

My experience working on major highway and transmission line projects tells me that this is partially correct; it is hard to build things because we have made the system more democratic, and people don't want anything built near their homes. To build any new project -- for example, Delaware SR 1, the limited access highway from I-95 to the beaches, or the major power lines I worked on up and down the Appalachians -- takes decades of high-level political pressure.

But Dinkelman overlooks other parts of the problem. One of these is that any major infrastructure project attracts dozens of add-ons only tangentially if at all related to the core proposal -- for example, utility upgrades, improvements to nearby roads, beautification of nearby eyesores -- which lead to more delays and higher costs. I suppose this could be another facet of the same problem, that is, since it is so difficult to get any infrastructure project built, people try to attach their own pet projects to one that looks like it might actually be funded and pushed through. But it is one reason the cost of so many projects balloons, which is a major factor driving public cynicism.

There is also money. The cost to build any new infrastructure in the US is higher than in Europe or Japan, far higher for rail projects. The badly needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River is projected to cost $5.5 billion, a figure that led Governor Chris Christie to kill it the last time it came close to approval. (In a good example of my last point, the tunnel had at one point gotten folded into a complete redo of transportation routes across the whole region with a price tag of $14 billion.) The years of delay created by weak political authority do contribute to higher costs, but this is a mutually reinforcing relationship, in that high costs give stakeholders another reason to oppose building. Cost in itself really is a problem; California would certainly build its high-speed train line if they could afford to.

But anyway Dinkelman's essay is a great look at one part of a very serious problem we face, and which I think feeds the overall cynicism and negativity of the American scene.

Transbay

Despite its ongoing budget crisis, California continues to make big moves in public transportation. If the high speed rail line ever reaches San  Francisco --for reasons that escape me, the first segment to be built will be in the central valley, where nobody lives, rather than starting from LA -- it will pull into a gleaming new transportation hub to be called the Transbay Center.

Transbay is planned as a complete intermodal hub, with BART, commuter rail, buses, and intercity rail on four levels.

The building, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, will be LEED certified, highly energy efficient, with a gray water recycling program, and a 5.4-acre park on top. Besides serving as a transportation hub, it is intended to spur more construction south of the old downtown, where the preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods has led to a near complete ban on new building. The plan calls for now vacant land around the station to be built up with 2,600 apartments, 3 million square feet of office space and 100,000 square feet of retail.

It isn't cheap -- the total cost for the new station and extensions of the BART and Caltrain lines is about $4 billion -- but this this the kind of bold step that will keep our cities great.