Streetsblog New York City

The city is close to recommending that the Sheridan Expressway, a short, sparsely-used interstate that community activists have targeted for removal for years, be transformed into a street-level roadway that opens land for new development and improves neighborhood access to parks along the Bronx River.

The news came Tuesday night at a public meeting attended by about 60 people, where staff from the Department of City Planning, the Department of Transportation, and the Economic Development Corporation fielded questions after unveiling the draft recommendations, which would narrow the road width from 210 feet to an estimated 115 feet, create three signalized intersections along a section of the Sheridan, and open up new sites for development.

The next morning, the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance held a press conference on an overpass above the Sheridan. “That is a good start,” Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice Executive Director David Shuffler said of the surface road proposal. “But we still feel that they have a lot more ways to go.”

The plan’s two major components come with cost estimates: DOT says that new ramps connecting Oak Point Avenue with the Bruckner Expressway would cost $72 million, while transforming a section of the Sheridan into a surface road would require $45 million. These cost estimates don’t include other recommendations, such as pedestrian access improvements and decking over a portion of the highway.

“Closing things is always cheaper than opening them,” DOT federal programs advisor Linda Bailey said, adding that the project team was trying to keep costs down in order to improve the likelihood of the project’s most important components becoming reality.

The Oak Point ramps, in combination with the closure of a ramp from the southbound Sheridan to Westchester Avenue, would re-route trucks accessing the Hunts Point Produce Market off local streets and directly to the industrial area. Advocates want ramps to and from the west, as well, but DOT only studied east-side ramps, which would serve traffic using the Sheridan and reduce the overall project cost by tens of millions of dollars. Another DOT cost-saving measure was to redesign the off-ramp from the westbound Bruckner; instead of flying over the expressway, it would connect directly to street level at Leggett Avenue.

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While the city’s refusal to remove the Sheridan Expressway left South Bronx advocates frustrated, the fight to transform the under-used highway continues, with the city’s federally-funded planning study on track for completion in June. A presentation to community partners last week [PDF] shed new light on options the city is considering, offering some hope that the highway’s footprint could be drastically reduced, essentially becoming a surface road.

The presentation to the project’s community working group on March 7 was led by Tawkiyah Jordan, Sheridan Expressway project manager for the Department of City Planning, and Michael Marsico, assistant commissioner of modeling and data analysis at NYC DOT.

Four options were analyzed:

• “No build” would not modify the existing street and expressway network;
• “Retain” keeps the Sheridan Expressway as-is but adds direct ramps from Oak Point Avenue in Hunts Point to the Bruckner Expressway;
• “Modify-Separated” converts the Sheridan to a street-level boulevard, while also retaining the parallel West Farms Road and adding the Oak Point ramps;
• “Modify-Combined” merges the Sheridan with West Farms Road, creating a single street-level boulevard, while also adding the Oak Point ramps.

Prior to last week’s meeting, the city said only that it was considering an undefined “modify” scenario, along with “no build” and “retain.” Splitting the “modify” option into the “separated” and “combined” alternatives is a big step forward. Both would significantly alter the Sheridan between Westchester Avenue and the the Cross Bronx Expressway, leaving the southern section near Concrete Plant Park, which is adjacent to an Amtrak rail corridor, mostly untouched.

The two modify scenarios would also provide space for new development and bring pedestrian crossings to street level. Under the “separated” scenario, the road right-of-way would be narrowed from the existing 210 feet to approximately 155 feet; under the “combined” option, it would be reduced further to an estimated 115 feet.

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Beginning at Niagara Falls State Park, you can hike around the great gorge carved out of the base of the falls over thousands of years. But you’d best arrive in a car.

If you want to access this area from Niagara Falls neighborhoods on foot, you have to climb fences, scale embankments and race across a four-lane expressway — the aptly named Robert Moses Parkway.

In as little as three years’ time, however, this struggling town will be reconnected with the natural asset that serves as the basis for its economy. State park officials gave the thumbs-up last week to a plan to tear down a two-mile section of the Robert Moses Parkway, stretching from near downtown Niagara Falls to the town’s northern neighborhoods, and possibly further, The Buffalo News reports.

Local residents have been pleading for the teardown for years, and Senator Chuck Schumer recently came out in support of the idea. The town, which has suffered disinvestment and population loss while its Canadian counterpart thrives, hopes the expansion of the park will help spur more eco-tourism. The paper reports that the state plans to replace the segment with “native plantings and a multi-use nature trail that could feature hiking, biking, cross-country skiing, horseback riding and even zip-lining.” It also seems likely that the highway removal will increase property values and investment in the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the debate continues about the fate of another stretch of freeway from the city’s northern neighborhoods to the suburb of Lewiston. The Buffalo News reports that environmentalists are fighting to convert that portion back into forestland while the local state senator wants to turn it into a two-lane park road, matching the one in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

The work of a sustainable transportation reporter can be a lonely lot. But it’s a lot less lonely now that two McClatchy reporters, Curtis Tate and Greg Gordon, have taken up the mantle of exposing wasteful road expansion.

With their far-reaching and well-researched three-part series, published last Sunday, Tate and Gordon brought stories of highway corruption and waste to a mainstream print audience. They spent four months researching the series, digging into 15 years of campaign finance records and interviewing leaders inside and outside of the transportation field.

“America’s highway system,” they wrote, “once a symbol of freedom and mobility envied the world over, is crumbling physically and financially, the potentially disastrous consequence of a politically driven road-building binge.”

Kentucky and South Carolina still gripped by highway madness

Tate is from the same hometown as Rep. Hal Rogers, the powerful Kentucky Republican who wields the gavel of the Appropriations Committee in the House. Tate couldn’t help but notice that Kentucky was using its federal formula funds to build Rogers’ pet project (I-66) while borrowing against future federal highway funds to do badly needed maintenance and repair work. The state has even used $4.2 million in interstate maintenance funds for I-66, despite the fact that the project didn’t meet the necessary criteria.

Meanwhile, although surrounding states have given up on their plans to create a new interstate, I-69, Kentucky charges forth. Rogers and Democratic Governor Steve Beshear “have received large contributions from road builders and highway engineers” but deny that these donations have influenced their zealous cheerleading for the project. Kentucky’s part of the new interstate will essentially stitch together three existing roads and slap the number 69 on them – meanwhile widening them to four-lane highways simply to meet interstate standards. Tate and Gordon said that their “examination of campaign finance data revealed a mutually beneficial relationship between Kentucky highway contractors and their local and state elected officials.”

But this story doesn’t end with Kentucky. The push to get I-73 built in South Carolina is just as unsavory (although it doesn’t end, as the Kentucky story does, with the former governor and 15 members of his administration getting indicted on corruption charges related to politicking in the transportation department).

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The idea of removing the northern section of Highway 280 near Mission Bay in San Francisco is gaining more traction as planners look for ideal ways to usher in high-speed rail and transit-oriented development in the city’s core.

At a forum held by the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association last Thursday, Mayor Ed Lee’s transportation policy director, Gillian Gillett, sketched out a proposal to follow in the footsteps of the removals of the Embarcadero Freeway and a section of the Central Freeway, which revitalized the neighborhoods the roads used to divide. As Adina Levin at Green Caltrain reported, Gillett argued that replacing the elevated portion of I-280 with a street-level boulevard, from its current terminus at 4th and King Streets south to 16th Street, would improve the livability of the area, open up land to develop new neighborhoods, generate more tax revenue from real estate, and open up engineering solutions to facilitate the extension of Caltrain and CA High-Speed Rail to the planned Transbay Transit Center.

As past cases have shown, creating a surface street where that part of I-280 now stands and integrating it into the neighborhood would actually reduce overall car traffic. In a moment that would make the city’s mid-20th Century freeway protesters proud, Gillett told the crowd, “Let’s be San Francisco and take down the freeway.”

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe called the proposal “an exciting opportunity to re-orient our city around sustainable public transportation and create a more walkable city.”

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In the wake of the city’s refusal to consider removing the Sheridan Expressway, advocates from the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance gathered last night at a town hall meeting to revise their game plan. Although the long-term vision of removing the highway lives on, the discussion focused on other potential improvements along the Sheridan corridor.

“We started this campaign wanting a full removal of the Sheridan,” Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice Executive Director David Shuffler told the crowd of just under 100. “We’re at a different place now.”

“It’s off the table for now and the Alliance accepts that,” said Tri-State Transportation Campaign Executive Director Veronica Vanterpool told Streetsblog. “These sorts of grand visions often take decades.”

With or without a highway removal, many community goals can still be achieved, including improved pedestrian safety and redevelopment to support business incubation and affordable housing. The Alliance has long advocated for new ramps from the Bruckner Expressway to the Hunts Point Produce Market to reduce the impact of truck traffic on surrounding neighborhoods, but also wants to ensure that local residents get better access to new waterfront parks along the Bronx River.

All the Alliance members — Mothers on the Move, Nos Quedamos, The Point Community Development Corporation, Sustainable South Bronx, the Pratt Center for Community Development, YMPJ and TSTC — were at last night’s meeting. Overall it was a young audience, with lots of turnout from teenagers involved in local community groups. ”I was a young person when I got involved in this work many years ago,” Shuffler told Streetsblog. ”What’s really critical is an inter-generational conversation. We engage their parents, as well.”

Participants broke into six groups to discuss how the area around the Sheridan Expressway can be improved without removing the freeway entirely. They looked at five zones along the corridor before reporting back to the entire meeting.

In addition to identifying opportunities for affordable housing, business incubators, and recreational space, participants discussed new approaches to reconnecting the areas that have been divided by the Sheridan, such as decking over sections of the highway instead of a complete teardown.

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When Oklahoma City announced plans in 1998 to tear down the I-40 Crosstown Expressway near downtown, they envisioned a grand, tree-lined, at-grade boulevard that would help improve development prospects in the already resurgent “Core to Shore” area between downtown and the Oklahoma River. The route would be part of the planned five-mile streetcar corridor, buttressed by a 40-acre “central park” fit for the capital, the largest city in the state.

But the state Department of Transportation had something different in mind. This spring, with the demolition of I-40 underway, city officials learned that ODOT was planning to replace much of the highway not with a picturesque boulevard, but with a partly elevated highway.

That plan did not sit well with some top-ranking city officials. The Oklahoman reported a few weeks ago that all eight City Council members have come out against ODOT’s proposal for an elevated roadway. ”You’re going to create the problem you set out to solve,” City Council Member Ed Shadid told Streetsblog. “A boulevard is by definition at grade.”

Many businesspeople along the route are also disappointed. Gary Gregory, manager of the local branch of global real estate giant Collier International, told the Oklahoman: “There is a reason this area became blighted, and it’s the barrier that was built: the Crosstown Expressway.”

Yesterday, the City Council told the local public works department and the Oklahoma Department of Transportation to go back to the drawing board. To their credit, ODOT is listening. The city and the state DOT have agreed to hire a private consultant to draw up alternatives that will make the road more bike- and pedestrian-friendly.

Steve Lackmeyer, a long-time reporter with the Oklahoman, described the situation as “a divide between traditional road design and modern urban planning.”

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Tearing down highways, as New Haven, Connecticut is planning to do to a short section of Route 34, is a rare (though increasingly sought after) outcome in American transportation policy. Some highway removals are unintended consequences of neglect or disaster, like the collapse of New York’s Miller Highway and the damage caused to San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Others are planned interventions, like Milwaukee’s removal of the Park East Freeway. But the New Haven project is the first planned highway teardown to receive funding from the federal government, which awarded the project a TIGER grant in 2010.

In many ways, transportation planning in the United States — which for decades has focused on adding more lanes to squeeze in more cars — has yet to catch up to this kind of project. What’s interesting is how the feds have funded an effort to turn a piece of infrastructure designed to move cars into a multi-modal, urban place, while at the same time requiring the replacement to operate much like a highway.

As Streetsblog reported earlier this year, the New Haven project, while a significant step forward, isn’t replacing the highway with a very pedestrian-friendly street. In the latest development, city officials dumped hard-won safety features — two pedestrian refuges nicknamed Porkchop Island and Meatloaf Island, for their shape – citing concerns that they would create hazardous conditions, which prompted local advocates to say the city has prioritized traffic over pedestrians and cyclists.

City officials responded that they have done everything they can to accommodate pedestrians within the framework provided by Connecticut DOT and the Federal Highway Administration. And in many ways the design does go beyond what is prescribed by the higher powers, namely the design manuals published by ConnDOT and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Because Route 34 is both part of the national highway system and a state highway, New Haven must get exemptions when departing from the standards in those guides.

To arrive at the current design, New Haven had to seek more than half a dozen waivers from ConnDOT and FHWA. They won approval from FHWA to narrow the travel lanes from 11 feet to 10 feet. They needed a waiver to eliminate 2-foot shoulders. They also won a waiver to reduce turning radii to make the road less highway-like and more pleasant for a stroll.

Then there were waivers from ConnDOT. The city needed waivers to do bike boxes, raised intersections, and pedestrian-only-phase signal timing, even though Connecticut has a state-wide complete streets policy.

New Haven officials said they received every waiver they applied for and that FHWA and ConnDOT had gone out of the way to accommodate them. The removal of the islands, they added, was a local call. But officials said there were regulatory and practical constraints in how far they could go for pedestrians and cyclists.

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“I say my people! I got a story! We tell the TIGER team that this is our territory!”

Cheers supporting the removal of the Sheridan expressway rang out during a mile-long march from Hunts Point to a community meeting last night about the future of the Robert Moses-era highway, as roughly forty protestors chanted, clapped and whistled while parading down Southern Boulevard.

“Bloomberg, we pay our taxes! We want, our waterfront access!”

The same cheers broke out early in the meeting when three-quarters of the participants walked out in protest. The event was the first public forum since the city declared that it had ruled out removing the Sheridan before completing the full teardown study. Residents and community leaders wanted the opportunity to make their case for putting a teardown back on the table.

The Department of City Planning facilitators, however, refused to discuss the issue, saying that no city staff at the meeting were empowered to touch the topic that was supposed to be at the heart of the planning process. When they resumed their conversation about small-bore improvements to the neighborhoods surrounding the highway, it was to a room of mostly empty chairs.

The Bloomberg administration halted the study of the Sheridan teardown last month, declaring that the plan had a “fatal flaw”: more truck traffic on local streets. But the traffic analysis seems to have been killed before it ever really got going as a result of political pressure from distributors at the Hunts Point Produce Market. The analysis failed to look at ways to mitigate truck traffic, such as making it easier to turn from the George Washington Bridge to the Major Deegan. Rather than study how a teardown would affect trip choices, the city simply assumed that each and every trip taken on the Sheridan would continue to be made after the highway was removed.

Speaking on behalf of Congressman José Serrano, Anna Vincenty called the results “premature and not in keeping with the aims of a full study.” Serrano helped secure the TIGER grant that funded the Sheridan study, which was expected to examine a teardown in greater detail than the state DOT had previously been willing to do. “Our borough deserves a fair shot at reclaiming the land under the Sheridan,” said Vincenty.

In the meeting, Department of City Planning staff members, who are coordinating the study of the area, attempted to stay on the scheduled topic for the meeting — land use — and rebuff residents’ demands for a chance to revisit the Sheridan teardown decision. “There are actual opportunities to create change,” said Tawkiyah Jordan, the Sheridan study project manager.

But residents weren’t willing to let 11 years of activism for a Sheridan removal go for nought, nor did they accept a conversation that didn’t include the teardown. “I don’t own the Hunts Point Market,” said one meeting attendee. “If I did, or if I was a millionaire, this would be a different discussion.” After being told that the Sheridan wouldn’t be up for conversation during that meeting, most of the audience marched out.

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Last month, the Bloomberg administration unexpectedly ruled out the option of removing the Sheridan Expressway and replacing it with housing and parks, telling South Bronx advocates that added truck traffic projected for local streets was a “fatal flaw” in the highway teardown. After a closer look at that truck traffic analysis, however, the coalition calling for the highway removal says the city overlooked some obvious options to keep trucks off neighborhood streets.

When the city’s Sheridan team started meeting with South Bronx community groups last year, they indicated that the teardown decision would take a wide range of factors into account, like economic development and pollution reduction. But at a meeting with advocates on May 10, the city changed course and ruled out removing the highway based only on an analysis of truck traffic. The about-face came while the NYC Economic Development Corporation is negotiating a long-term contract with wholesale distributors at the Hunts Point Produce Market, which some trucks access via the Sheridan. As WNYC reported today, the market was opposed to the teardown, and city officials have indicated privately that the removal plan was a casualty of the negotiations.

Now the South Bronx River Watershed Alliance — the coalition that supports removing the Sheridan — is highlighting flaws in the truck traffic analysis and pressing the city to resume a full study of the teardown plan.”They have taken the worst-case traffic scenario and used it to justify dropping this alternative from further study,” said Veronica Vanterpool, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

The Sheridan teardown plan includes measures to keep truck traffic off residential streets — specifically, the construction of new ramps from the Bruckner Expressway to Oak Point Avenue, giving trucks a more direct route to the Hunts Point market. But the city asserted that under the teardown scenario, trucks would not switch from the Sheridan route to the Bruckner route. Here’s why advocates say that assumption is off-base.

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