Streetsblog New York City

If you make your home on the Louisiana coastline, upstate New York or the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, chances are you live near a highway that really has it coming. It’s big. It’s ugly. It goes right through city neighborhoods. And it just might be coming down soon.

Latest week the Congress for New Urbanism released its updated list of “Freeways Without Futures” — 12 transportation anachronisms that are increasingly likely to meet the wrecking ball.

This year’s top finisher was New Orleans’ Claiboure Overpass — a 1960s-era eyesore that replaced a thriving, tree-lined commercial street at the center of the city’s oldest, most culturally vibrant black neighborhood. The teardown for this highway has some real traction; a master plan to remove the elevated portion is expected to be endorsed by City Council shortly, according to CNU.

The Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx is runner up, the same position it held in CNU’s 2008 Freeways Without Futures list. This riverfront disaster was bestowed by the master highway builder himself, Robert Moses. Residents of the Bronx have successfully fought off two separate proposals to expand the Sheridan, which runs right along the Bronx River. A coalition of community groups and advocates called the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance has led the charge to replace the freeway with housing and parks, and a group of cities agencies are now examining teardown scenarios with the help of a federal TIGER grant.

The third-place finisher is New Haven’s Route 34 (the Oak Street Connector), which is slated for demolition. New Haven received TIGER funds to convert the road into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard and local officials are currently haggling over the design details — there’s a chance they’ll opt to replace a highway with a road that feels like a highway.

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Most members of Congress are excited to cut the ribbon for a new stretch of freeway, but it’s a smaller set indeed that will stand up for the removal of a highway, no matter how neighborhood-blighting. As of yesterday, count New York Senator Chuck Schumer among their number.

“Right now, the Robert Moses Parkway stands as a Berlin Wall, with the state park on one side and the city on the other,” Schumer said at a press conference yesterday. “Our message to the transportation secretary is clear: Tear down this road.”

The highway in question is a short stretch of the Robert Moses Parkway in downtown Niagara Falls (the name adds a certain historical sweetness to its removal). The highway, which sits on an elevated berm, would be replaced with a lower and slower two lane “park road” and bicycle and pedestrian facilities. Taking down one mile of highway, said Schumer’s office, would open up 40 acres of the waterfront.

Schumer promised to secure $10 million in federal funds needed to complete the design work for the highway removal and urged Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to fast-track the project through federal review. “For years, this project that would help transform downtown Niagara Falls has been stuck in the mud. Enough is enough; we must tear down this road,” said Schumer in a press release. “Lowering the Parkway would connect downtown with the majestic views of the waterfront park, pumping new life into Niagara Falls. We absolutely have to get this done.”

The Congress for the New Urbanism, the leading advocates of highway teardowns nationally, celebrated Schumer’s support. “CNU’s John Norquist has long argued that freeways like the Robert Moses Parkway are monoliths from a disastrous planning era have no place in cities,” said CNU program director Caitlin Ghoshal. “But federal, state, and local governments are just now better understanding the financial and transportation implications that make teardowns a good decision for taxpayers.”

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The Department of City Planning continues to display an openness to the possibility of tearing down the Sheridan Expressway. A slideshow prepared for a September public meeting, recently posted online, shows how the agency is applying a comprehensive approach to the question of what to do with the lightly-used, Robert Moses-era highway along the Bronx River.

Funded with a federal TIGER grant, the DCP study will examine much more than the effect of a highway removal on traffic. Especially encouraging: The department wants to use a “triple bottom line” approach, measuring the impact of any decision on the economy, society, and environment. “For example, a road geometry change could reduce vehicle capacity but also reduce air pollution, maintenance costs, and injuries to pedestrians,” the agency explains in its slideshow.

That kind of perspective is a world apart from the New York State Department of Transportation’s approach. The state DOT’s most recent analysis of a Sheridan removal studied only traffic impacts, and based its evaluation on the unrealistic assumption that nothing would replace a decommissioned Sheridan.

DCP, in contrast, is studying three scenarios: one with the Sheridan kept in place, another with the expressway turned into a boulevard (think West Street or San Francisco’s Embarcadero), and a third with no road at all. In every case, major improvements to the Bruckner Expressway would be installed, including a new exit that would significantly improve truck access to the Hunts Point food market. Some of the opportunities DCP identified for the area, such as fostering development along the East Tremont Avenue corridor, could take place regardless of what happens to the Sheridan. Others, like the redevelopment of a small industrial zone sandwiched between the Sheridan and the Bronx River, DCP identified as contingent on changes to the expressway.

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The potential teardown of the lightly-trafficked Sheridan Expressway in the South Bronx is the most exciting street reclamation initiative in the works anywhere in NYC. For years, local advocates doggedly built the case for replacing the aging highway with housing, parks, and other uses. Recently we’ve seen some major breakthroughs that make the teardown an increasingly realistic scenario. Most notably, the U.S. Department of Transportation is funding a comprehensive study by the New York City Department of City Planning to determine what could take the Sheridan’s place.

Tomorrow the city will be hosting its first public workshop for local residents to weigh in with their ideas about the future of the Sheridan and the surrounding neighborhoods. From Vincent Pellecchia at Mobilizing the Region:

This Saturday, October 15 from 9:30am to 2:00pm, the NYC Department of City Planning will host a public charrette at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School - 1021 Jennings Street, Bronx, NY – 10460. Bronx residents and anyone interested in the future of the South Bronx should plan on attending.

A public charrette is essentially a workshop that allows citizens to get involved in the planning process by helping the City better understand the community and their visions of what the future of the community should look like.

The focus of the charrette will be to develop land use and transportation scenarios for the future of the Sheridan Expressway.

Basically, the City wants to hear from you. It wants to know what you think is the best way to use the Sheridan and surrounding land, and the best way for getting around the South Bronx more safely and efficiently.

When taking a tour of the Sheridan Expressway, the first thing you realize is that you’re also taking a tour of the Bronx River Greenway. The two pieces of infrastructure — one a 1.25-mile stub of highway, the other a still-piecemeal bike and pedestrian path reconnecting Bronx neighborhoods to the water — both run through the low river valley. The greenway and the cleaned-up river, products of decades of community activism, are signs of the incredible revitalization of the South Bronx.

The transformations visible from the side of the highway also include shuttered factories that would be redeveloped as 1,200 units of new housing under a proposal by former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller. On a tour I took of the Sheridan and Hunts Point areas last night, the scent of hot dogs still hung over one former frankfurter factory that would be replaced with apartments and a new school.

The tour was part of the public process for a federally funded study currently being undertaken by the Department of City Planning. The study is meant to augment the state Department of Transportation’s analysis of a Sheridan teardown by comprehensively and holistically imagining the potential redevelopment, parkland, and street improvements should the highway be torn down. The City Planning officials leading the tour were clearly already immersed in those possibilities, pointing out the properties and intersections that would be most affected by a highway removal, usually highlighting the positive.

Below are some photos I took on the tour, running roughly from the northern end of the Sheridan to the southern end.

At the very northern end of the Sheridan, the highway turns into East 177th Street, a local road. Behind the chain link fence immediately to the left of the highway is a future entrance to the Bronx River Greenway, due to open in May. As long as the highway remains, pedestrians and cyclists using the greenway will have to navigate across the exiting traffic.

One block further north, the ongoing construction of the greenway is visible through a fence.

The Bronx River itself, seen here from East Tremont Street, is lush and green at this point in the summer. This location marks the southernmost sighting of José the Beaver, the first of his species seen in New York City in 200 years and a sign of the environmental rehabilitation of the river.

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When the state Department of Transportation studied removing the lightly-used Sheridan Expressway, it considered two scenarios. One predicted conditions with the Sheridan kept as is. The other imagined closing the highway to traffic without making any other changes — simply fencing off the 1.25 mile structure.

Making a decision about the Sheridan’s future by comparing a traffic-carrying highway to an empty-but-still-standing highway was clearly inadequate, so with the help of a federal TIGER grant, New York City has launched a comprehensive and holistic study of the area. The new study includes not only an expanded transportation analysis looking at the area’s broader highway system, but also issues like access to the Bronx River, which is cut off from neighborhoods by the Sheridan, and the development of housing and jobs. That study is now well underway, and after some initial bumps, advocates for replacing the highway with new development are feeling encouraged.

So far, the city has already hosted an introductory meeting of the large working group set up to bring together stakeholders like elected officials, local activists and residents, businesses and city agencies. Walking tours of the neighborhood are being next Thursday and on August 20 (you can register by e-mailing sheridan_hp@planning.nyc.gov). The Department of City Planning has also set up a website to provide updates on the study and put information about the project in one location.

Ashwin Balakrishnan, the coordinator of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, acknowledged the broad scope of the study so far. “If you’re just looking at it from a transportation perspective, as the state DOT was, you’re not going to have any benchmarks or expertise for how it’s going to be benefited by other land uses,” he said. Including agencies like the Department of Parks and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which are both now part of the working group, provides “more expertise and more breadth,” he said.

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All cities have physical barriers that divide neighborhoods and social classes. In Syracuse, one of the biggest is Interstate-81.

On the east side you have the area known as “The Hill.” There, Syracuse University and its affiliated hospitals and research centers have fostered growth and prosperity.

On the west side of the highway, things aren’t quite as rosy. The west side is where most of the city’s 1,600 vacant houses are located. It’s also, significantly, where the city’s downtown lies.

This highway, like so many of its type, was built as an urban renewal project in the 1950s. And many of the neighborhoods surrounding it have never quite recovered.

Now, Interstate 81 is itself showing signs of age. And many in the community say it’s time to remove it.

“To increase accessibility to [The Hill] we need a better transportation solution,” said Sandra Barrett of the Onondaga Citizens League, a local nonprofit civic group. “We need to remove the elevated highway that just depresses real estate values in the area.”

The Syracuse Metropolitan Planning Council says that the elevated portion of the highway, the part near downtown Syracuse, is the most in need of repair. The viaduct will reach the end of its useful life in 2017. There is already an arrangement in place with local contractors for 24-hour emergency repair.

Syracuse is in the early stages of discussing what should be done with I-81. SMPC and the New York State Department of Transportation have embarked on a public input process they are calling The I-81 Challenge, asking local residents to weigh in on the problem. Thus far, proposals have included a Big-Dig-esque tunnel, relocation, rebuilding, and, finally, teardown and replacement with a street-level boulevard.

Some influential community leaders are coming out early on behalf of the highway-to-boulevard proposal. The most prominent of them is Van Robinson, president of the Syracuse Common Council (the city government’s legislative branch). For years, Robinson has been beating the drum for a teardown.

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The fight over the future of the Sheridan Expressway, a stub of a highway that Robert Moses built but never finished, heated up this week. The construction industry announced its opposition to any Sheridan teardown in a Crain’s op-ed this Sunday, days before experts at a Municipal Art Society panel forcefully made the case for replacing the underused roadway with housing and park space.

“I don’t think that grade-separated highways really have a place in the city,” said John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee and president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, at the MAS panel.

Norquist pointed to the revitalization of his city when it tore down the 0.8 mile Park East Freeway — Fortune 500 company now has its headquarters one block from the former elevated highway — and recounted how the predicted traffic woes never materialized. In neighboring Madison, he noted, the major job centers of the state capital and the University of Wisconsin both sit on a narrow isthmus. “There’s no freeway there, and somehow they get home,” said Norquist. “They make it.”

Joan Byron, who has worked with the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance on its plans for the Sheridan for years, offered some local context. Right now, the Sheridan is so lightly used that you can safely stand in its middle lane during the evening rush hour. State DOT plans to build new ramps connecting the Bruckner Expressway directly to the busy Hunts Point market — which has 11,000 truck trips in and out each day — will happen regardless of whether the Sheridan is torn down or remains, she pointed out, making the Sheridan that much more superfluous.

Instead of searching for ways to get more value out of the land that the little-used highway occupies, those who are fighting to keep it in place “are determined to make the Sheridan useful, come what may,” Byron said.

The opposition to the teardown added to their ranks this week, however, as Denise Richardson, the head of the powerful General Contractors Association, took to the pages of Crain’s to press her case for keeping the Sheridan. Richardson’s column assumed that the Sheridan is essential the keeping Hunts Point market, an important job center, in New York City. “The Bronx and the city cannot afford to lose more blue-collar jobs,” she wrote. “Instead of spending limited capital dollars to tear down the Sheridan, let’s allocate adequate resources to maintain the state’s transportation network and the jobs it supports.”

Curiously, Richardson did not mention construction spending or construction jobs — the top issues for her members — in either her column or in an interview with Streetsblog.

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In this week’s episode of “Moving Beyond the Automobile,” Streetfilms takes you on a guided tour of past, present and future highway removal projects with John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Some of the most well-known highway removals in America — like New York City’s West Side Highway and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway — have actually been unpredictable highway collapses brought on by structural deficiencies or natural disasters. It turns out there are good reasons for not rebuilding these urban highways once they become rubble: They drain the life from the neighborhoods around them, they suck wealth and value out of the city, and they don’t even move traffic that well during rush hour.

Now several cities are pursuing highway removals more intentionally, as a way to reclaim city space for housing, parks, and economic development. CNU has designated ten “Freeways Without Futures” here in North America, and in this video, you’ll hear about the benefits of tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx, the Skyway and Route 5 in Buffalo, and the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans.

Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

Coming two days after her confirmation as the new commissioner of the state DOT, Joan McDonald’s keynote speech at today’s annual meeting of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council offered her the chance to lay out her agenda for statewide transportation policy. McDonald’s remarks should provide cause for optimism among New Yorkers hoping for a more progressive transportation system: She strongly endorsed smart growth principles and indicated to Streetsblog after her speech that she welcomes the planning process that could advance the Sheridan Expressway teardown.

“I am a very strong proponent and advocate for those smart growth principles,” McDonald announced in her keynote, citing the fact that transportation accounts for nearly 40 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

She said that the state DOT has the responsibility to ensure that last year’s smart growth law is implemented and that she believes there is a real movement within the department to embrace it. “It’s going to take a little bit to get to the practical side of it,” she said after the event, “but I am committed to pushing that envelope as much as we can.”

In particular, McDonald highlighted the department’s nationally-recognized GreenLITES certification system as a model around which to build. “We are expanding it to all areas within the department,” she said. “We know that we need to go further.”

Substantively, McDonald said making NYS DOT a smart growth agency is “pedestrian improvements, it’s bike improvements, it’s always looking and making safety our top priority.” During her speech, McDonald also singled out high-speed rail as a necessary investment for the state.

Though she cautioned that she hasn’t reached any conclusions on the fate of the Sheridan, her comments suggest that her administration will be more in tune with neighborhood activists seeking to replace the under-used highway with new housing, jobs, and open space.

“I’m thrilled that the city of New York is undertaking a land use study,” said McDonald, adding that conversations have begun about the Sheridan between the state DOT, the city DOT, and the city Department of City Planning.

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