New Orleans' Claibourne Overpass is this year's Congress for New Urbanism choice for "Freeway without a Future." Photo: CNU.org

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.

Plans for section of the Robert Moses Parkway in downtown Niagara Falls would turn the highway into a two-lane road and reconnect the waterfront with downtown. Image: Frank Report

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.

U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer announcing his support for tearing down a section of the Robert Moses Parkway, seen in the background. Image: Niagara Gazette

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.”

CNU lists three New York highways above the Robert Moses Parkway on its list of “Freeways Without Futures” — the Bronx’s Sheridan Expressway, Buffalo’s Skyway and Route 5, and Syracuse’s I-81. Though Schumer forcefully articulated the damage that highways can do to the urban fabric yesterday, don’t expect him to get out in front when it comes to the removal of those three highways.

While there is a local push underway to remove a much longer stretch of the Robert Moses connecting Niagara Falls to Lewiston, New York, Schumer said he’s staying out of that fight. “I’ll leave that up to the local folks. When the local folks determine that’s something is good and needed, and the facts bear that out, my job is to bring federal dollars,” Schumer said at a press conference, according to belowthefalls.com.

Schumer decided to support the downtown Niagara Falls highway teardown, his office said, due to a solid consensus behind removing the downtown stretch of the Robert Moses and the project’s particularly strong economic development benefit, given Niagara Falls’ 8 million annual tourists.

Still, it’s an exclusive club of United States senators willing to support a reduction in automobile capacity at all. Connecticut’s Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman each voiced support for New Haven’s plans to replace the Route 34 highway stub with a boulevard and development, and Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski — who got her start in politics fighting a freeway — cheered the teardown of Baltimore’s Route 40. Dianne Feinstein supported but didn’t succeed in removing San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway while mayor.

Of course, Schumer could really set himself apart by pushing for more than one highway teardown.

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.

The Sheridan team will also investigate how each option would affect real estate values and employment, not only at existing job centers like the food market but also on newly developable land along or on top of the highway’s footprint. Additionally, the city is collecting new traffic data to improve transportation modeling.

The overall framework put together by DCP includes a number of goals, like improving waterfront access and pedestrian mobility, that are essentially incompatible with the Sheridan as it currently stands. Other goals include improving truck access to Hunts Point, which could be sufficiently achieved through the new off-ramps and other Bruckner improvements, but might end up cutting against a Sheridan teardown.

Early in the study process, local advocates had voiced complaints about DCP’s method and outreach, but those were quickly rectified. For now, DCP is compiling an honest and complete accounting of the costs and benefits of tearing down the Sheridan.

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.

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.

West Farms Road, which runs adjacent to the Sheridan, is largely developed with light manufacturing uses, along with a few small residences. Under a proposal by former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, now a real estate developer, much of the road, including this site just across the street from the Sheridan, would be rezoned for larger-scale residential uses with ground-floor retail. Miller’s plans will be included in the city’s Sheridan study, said tour leader Vineeta Mathur, as the knowledge that someone already wants to redevelop the area is relevant to any plan for the neighborhood’s future.

Sheridan study project manager Tawkiyah Jordan told tour participants to imagine this building full of families who might want better air quality and more access for their children to the parkland across the highway.

A few blocks west of the Sheridan, large apartment buildings are the dominant building type. Next to the highway, it’s mostly one-story industrial uses.

Right now, the only connection to Starlight Park, which is currently being completely reconstructed, is across a single bridge over the Sheridan at 174th Street. When the new park opens, it will be a major amenity for the neighborhood, though one relatively hard to reach.

From the 174th Street Bridge, you can look directly down onto the Sheridan. This photo was taken at roughly 6:50 p.m. Traffic was still crushed on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, but light on the Sheridan.

This car parts salvage yard is surrounded by the Sheridan on one side and freight tracks on the other. Jordan noted that if the Sheridan were removed, it would suddenly be connected to the neighborhood, completely changing its development possibilities.

Here, an off-ramp from the Sheridan runs freely onto local streets, without a stop sign or traffic light to slow traffic. Two more one-way streets merge with the off-ramp to create what Mathur called extremely dangerous conditions for pedestrians. Half a block back from this intersection is a playground.

After crossing over the Sheridan, we walked through Concrete Plant Park, a major piece of the Bronx River Greenway. An active concrete production facility until 1987 and a brownfield afterwards, the site was transformed into a beautiful park, complete with salt marshes at the riverside and a boat launch. The state DOT is currently trying to connect Concrete Plant Park and Starlight Park with another stretch of greenway using eminent domain and bridges over train tracks. At the southern end of Concrete Plant Park, however, the greenway dead-ends directly into Bruckner Boulevard and the Bruckner Expressway.

The interchange between the Sheridan and Bruckner Expressways is at the heart of the state DOT’s plans for the area. Whether or not the Sheridan remains, the state DOT is planning a series of improvements to the Bruckner at this location to allow traffic to move more smoothly. A new off-ramp from the Bruckner will allow trucks to exit directly to the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, which handles 60 percent of all New York City’s food, potentially providing truckers an alternate route instead of using the Sheridan and then local streets.

To cross onto the Hunts Point peninsula from the nearest subway station requires crossing six lanes of traffic in each direction. These cars are about to enter the on-ramp for both the Bruckner and the Sheridan. Drivers, ready for the highway, floor it. The pedestrian crossing time appeared to be about thirty seconds long. Long-time Hunts Point residents and workers on the tour said this crossing was a consistently terrifying scramble.

Along Hunts Point Avenue, construction is underway for a planted median that will be part of the South Bronx Greenway. The median will add greenery to the neighborhood and have a traffic calming effect. Some hope that it will dissuade trucks from using this street, which is not a truck route, to get to the market.

Trucks at the Food Distribution Center are visible behind Hunts Point Riverside Park, illustrating the central challenge of the Sheridan area. The city does not want to reduce truck access to the food market, which employs 10,000 people directly, tens of thousands more indirectly, and feeds the city. Many of those trucks currently use the Sheridan. The city hopes that the needs of the market and of the neighborhoods can both be met, as at this park.

All photos: Noah Kazis

New York City agencies will study a much broader area when evaluating the potential removal of the Sheridan Expressway. The city's study will also go far beyond a transportation analysis to include a more holistic look at the benefits of new development for the area. Image: NYC DCP

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.

Even the city’s transportation analysis, said Balakrishnan, should improve on the state’s efforts. Whereas the state studied only the Sheridan itself and two interchanges on the Bruckner Expressway, the city is studying a number of other highway exchanges as well as local roads near the Sheridan and the Hunts Point market. That means the city can study, among other alternatives, whether trucks headed to the market from New Jersey could take the Major Deegan to the Bruckner and then use new off-ramps headed directly to the market — planned whether the Sheridan is removed or not — rather than the Sheridan. Moreover, the state’s data are eight years old, while the city is collecting new data now.

Perhaps most encouragingly, the DCP website promises that the city’s plan will include “a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of different options incorporating traditional and sustainable measures.” So the high cost of maintaining a highway will figure into the city’s calculations, with the social and economic benefits of new housing, jobs or parks figuring into the other side of the ledger.

That said, Balakrishnan also worried that the un-quantifiable benefits of replacing the Sheridan with development — things like better walking access to the river, which one might lump together under “quality of life” improvements — could still get short shrift. “The things that are harder to study are often devalued,” he said.

When the study and community outreach were just beginning a few months ago, advocates were less impressed with the city’s approach. As reported on Mobilizing the Region yesterday, early outreach efforts gave little emphasis to features like the new off-ramps to the Hunts Point market. Those off-ramps and other highway improvements, which are part of all remaining options for the area, are essential to maintaining business support; the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center directly employs 10,000 people and the cluster of food businesses surrounding it tens of thousands more.

The DCP website also originally claimed that 160,000 vehicles used the Sheridan each day; the correct count, now displayed, is only 35,000. Those kinds of errors have been corrected, however, in response to feedback from the SBRWA. Now, said Balakrishnan, the city’s “general tone seems very open.”

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.

The city of Syracuse is considering removing this highway that divides downtown from the Syracuse University. Photo: Onondaga Citizens League

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.

Nearby “Selina Street was the city’s main drag and it’s empty today,” Robinson said. “At one time — and I hear it every single day — I remember when there were stores. You just went down the list of all these different stores. Now these very same buildings, you couldn’t sell a pair of shoestrings.”

This tree-lined boulevard, many Syracuse residents think, would help improve the local economy by breaking down barriers to business and residents. Image: Onondaga Citizens League

Mario Colone, a project planner with SMPC, said public input thus far spans a wide range of ideas. The agency is remaining entirely neutral on the project proposals until the first phase of public input comes to a close.

Meanwhile, Robinson and the Onondaga Citizen’s League are trying to build support for the teardown option. In a report released last year, the Citizen’s League said converting the viaduct to a boulevard would help retain the region’s young professionals and boost the local economy without increasing traffic or impairing emergency personnel.

The group has been doing public presentations to explain to the community why a teardown could be the best option.

“People think that you take away a highway and you’re going to have more congestion; you’re going to have a harder time getting ambulances to the hospital,” said Barrett. “Actually the opposite is true in a lot of cases. You’re going to have improvements.”

Perhaps most importantly, the study showed removal would open up vast new areas of the central city to development, the type of development that might otherwise spill over from The Hill into the suburbs. More than 4 million square feet of development space is planned by Hill area institutions over the next two decades.

SMPC is hoping to wrap up the I-81 Challenge by the end of 2012. They hope to have the chosen proposal designed and under construction by 2017.

Meanwhile, public input from this period will be critical in determining what will replace the viaduct, and, in turn, how the city will evolve.

If the city is going to realize its potential, Robinson says, the answer is clear.

“Making it a boulevard, bringing in some economic development such as stores and retail, putting those back on the tax rolls… the city would benefit from it”

Is it really more important to keep this empty highway -- shown at rush hour -- than to build much-needed housing and parks? Photo: TSTC

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.

Richardson’s argument is based on the presumption that without the Sheridan, increased congestion will make trucking through the Bronx unaffordable. “There’s a very significant concern that the truck traffic that will be created will make the costs significant,” said Richardson.

However, there is no reason to think that such congestion fears would actually materialize. First of all, previous highway removals simply haven’t had that effect. When New York’s West Side Highway or San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway were removed, for example, there weren’t any long-term negative traffic impacts.

In the case of the Sheridan, a State DOT analysis did find that removing the Sheridan would snarl traffic in the area. But subsequent analysis showed that the study was riddled with errors. Half of the alleged benefit of keeping the Sheridan, it turned out, was due to mistakes in entering the data.

To really have a sense of what effect tearing down the Sheridan will have, we’ll have to wait for New York City’s study of the area to be complete, which should happen around February 2012, according to Byron. That study, a holistic look at both transportation and land use funded by a federal TIGER grant, will gather new traffic data and hopefully provide a more reliable picture of how traffic moves through the area.

Byron also pointed out that the bulk of Hunts Point market truck traffic are smaller vehicles delivering food to bodegas or restaurants across the city. “They need to get to Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx,” said Byron. “The Sheridan doesn’t benefit them at all.”

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.

State DOT Commissioner Joan McDonald had positive words for progressive transportation planning at today's NYMTC annual meeting. Photo: NYMTC.

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.

The land use study, which was funded by a federal TIGER grant, is the key to an honest accounting of the costs and benefits of a Sheridan teardown. Last year, state DOT officials said that they could only compare the current Sheridan to a shuttered but still standing highway, because no officially sanctioned plan existed for what would replace it. If McDonald is excited about working with the city on the plan, she would seem to be open to the idea that replacing the Sheridan with a new mix of uses would add more value to the community than the highway does.

There was one worrisome contradiction in McDonald’s remarks, however. While she said that “we need to address our aging infrastructure through fix-it-first strategies,” implying that repairs would take precedence over making more room for cars at the cash-strapped agency, McDonald also expressed support for three road capacity increases in the downstate area: on the Staten Island Expressway, on the Gowanus and BQE, and on the Tappan Zee corridor. “I think society demands it,” she explained after the event.

SBRWA will make a presentation about the state DOT’s two plans for the Sheridan and Hunts Point area, one of which would tear down the Sheridan and one of which would keep it in place. Afterward, participants will break into groups to discuss the details of each proposal.

The federal government gave the teardown option some momentum when it provided a $1.5 million TIGER II grant for the city to create an official land use plan for the area, something that could help make the state DOT realize the potential benefits of redeveloping the land now occupied by the Sheridan. Now local activists need to organize to push the teardown option over the finish line.

Tonight’s town hall will be held at 6:00 p.m. at the East Bronx Academy for the Future, 1716 Southern Blvd. Food and childcare will be available.

The end of the road. Will Charleston County elect to build eight more miles of I-526, a 40-year-old idea that many local residents oppose? Photo: The Post and Courier

But Charleston never got around to completing the arc. It comes to a stop about eight miles short of its planned destination in West Ashley, leaving the rural and suburban communities ahead un-scarred.

A few years ago, however, county officials decided to complete the 40-year-old highway plan after all. They applied for, and received, $420 million from the state transportation infrastructure bank.

Since then, the state has been moving forward with plans to construct an eight-mile stretch of highway from West Ashley through rural Johns Island to James Island, crossing the Stono River twice.

Under contract to Charleston County, the South Carolina Department of Transportation has continued to beat the drum for highway expansion even in the face of mounting public outcry and the introduction of a less-costly alternative proposal. In its refusal to consider ideas that do not conform to the limited-access highway model, SC DOT has staunchly upheld the bias for highway development that afflicts state transportation authorities nationwide.

In Charleston, reception to the I-526 expansion has been chilly, and an organized and outspoken opposition movement has taken hold. Locals question whether a 70s-era highway plan is still the proper formula for this historic yet increasingly modern southern city. Opposition has been strong enough that county officials have brought the plan to a standstill while they consider alternatives. But will advocates for a different approach successfully disrupt the entrenched practices of the state DOT?

Some of the loudest cries have come from rural and suburban communities worried they’ll be overwhelmed by the sprawling residential and commercial development — subdivisions, strip malls, parking lots — that come hand in hand with highways.

“What we’ve seen from the places where they have completed the horseshoe is crazy development,” said Rob Welch, a James Island Commissioner. “In the afternoon it’s very dangerous because the traffic literally backs up outside the exit of the interstate.”

“What we see it doing for us is just cutting an ugly scar through two beautiful islands and promoting development,” he continued. “Developers come in and build lots of big box stores.”

In a series of five public meetings on the project held by the South Carolina Department of Transportation, more than 1,200 residents turned out with a range of concerns — more than 62 percent of them opposed, compared to 32 percent in support, according to records kept by SC DOT [PDF]. Residents questioned whether the project would increase traffic and development and cost more than it is worth.

Kate Parks, land use program director with the Coastal Conservation League, said the extension will destroy wetlands and fuel sprawl. Parks says the project will jump-start rapid development on about 1,000 acres surrounding the new highway that are already zoned for development. But much of the remaining land is agricultural and could be rezoned. Parks also insists that the city’s major traffic problems are concentrated elsewhere, mainly along I-26, and questioned the wisdom of using the state’s limited resources on a project that won’t solve those problems.

When the state DOT requested proposals for the construction of the extension, the League submitted a plan called A New Way to Work. Their plan calls for street-grade changes to the region’s congested thoroughfares, like creating a more connected street grid. The League maintains that such improvements to the local street network could remedy the same congestion problems the 526 extension targets while saving millions that could be directed toward transit, more important regional corridors, or other pressing local concerns. (More about that plan in a future post.)

“A 40 year delay in getting a project completed might turn out to be one of the greatest blessings the city has ever been bestowed,” the League stated in its report. “Any project that proposes to spend a half billion dollars of tax revenue should do more than move cars from point A to point B. This investment should make life appreciably better in as many ways as possible.”

The League’s plan was one of 38 that were eliminated from consideration after a review by the state Department of Transportation.

The highway extension favored by SC DOT, "Alternative G," is pictured in dark green on this map. Image: SC DOT

The DOT’s “preferred alternative” is a four-lane limited-access parkway with at-grade intersections, to be divided by a 15-foot median. The road will have a posted speed limit of between 35 and 45 miles per hour, and, in a tinge of green, will be equipped with a path for biking and walking.

Make no mistake, this is still a massive road expansion. State officials estimate the project will cause the destruction of 17 acres of wetlands. It will create a noise impact on 137 homes and businesses and cost $489 million in 2009 dollars. Still, it is, on balance, the least destructive of the seven final proposals that cleared the state DOT’s screen, which were all variations on the highway extension theme.

David Kinard, project manager at SC DOT, acknowledged there were a lot of concerns about the plan “on both sides.” But the project has now been vetted through the agency’s public involvement process, he said, and the state DOT has been waiting on final word from the county before seeking additional environmental approval.

Now the situation is coming to a head. In the face of public opposition, county officials recently asked SC DOT to consider some alternative or modified proposals, including the Conservation League’s proposal.

Earlier this week, SC DOT fired back, refusing to go back on its recommendation for the highway expansion. State officials told the county they must choose between DOT’s “preferred alternative” or the “no-build” option. The county has yet to respond.

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. told local media sources that he remains supportive of the highway expansion. But some members of the county council have indicated they disagree.

In an editorial on the project earlier this week the Post and Courier encouraged the council to bring the project up for a vote, “if only to eliminate an unpopular option from future consideration.”

“In five hearings, residents spoke by a more than 2-to-1 margin against building I-526 across Johns Island, linking the James Island Connector and Savannah Highway,” the paper said. “So what was the reason for the public hearings? Applause?”

David Bragdon. Photo: Randy Rasmussen/The Oregonian.

Last week Streetsblog sat down with David Bragdon, the new head of the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, to talk about next year’s update of PlaNYC. A new version of the city’s sustainability plan is set to be released on Earth Day, 2011 (that’s April 22), revising the 2007 roadmap for a city that prioritizes transit, biking, and walking.

In the second part of our interview (read the first installment here), Bragdon talks about funding transit in a time of fiscal austerity and the future of the underused Sheridan Expressway.

Noah Kazis: When we’re talking about transit, the elephant in the room is really the MTA’s finances. It has a $10 billion hole in the capital plan over three years. What can the city, what should the city do to shore up those finances?

David Bragdon: The city is already a direct contributor. Certainly the mayor had a proposal four years ago, before I got here, that would have provided ongoing financial stability for transit. Other people may have thought that wasn’t a good idea, but we’d like to hear what their ideas are, because nothing else has filled that gap in the meantime. So it’s sort of on the to-do list.

I mean, it’s essential for the city. The city depends on functional transit and continuing to expand and improve the transit network, and certainly the resources aren’t there right now. So in terms of what the city does, I mean like I say, there was a solution that was proposed, and I think we’ll keep looking for solutions that will work. Working with the next administration in Albany is going to be important as well.

There are a lot of interesting pieces to that Sheridan story that I think we’ll finally be able to move forward.

NK: If the state doesn’t step up? This is the Doomsday scenario.

DB: Well I think we’ll try to be positive about it with the new administration in Albany, and we’ll worry about Doomsday if Doomsday gets here. I can’t speculate about it.

NK: In terms of the progress on the transportation pieces of PlaNYC, a lot of the 2009 milestones haven’t been reached [PDF] because the money isn’t there. But there are some things that are in the city’s control that haven’t happened — bus lanes across the DOT bridges, for example. Is there a reason for the delay? Is there a way to expedite them, or are there some initiatives that might get taken out in the update?

DB: In a variety of areas, the city’s fiscal situation, and in terms of transportation the MTA’s fiscal situation, have prevented those from being realized. The same would be true in the parks arena. I don’t think there are a whole lot of things that haven’t been done due to lack of commitment. I think there are some that are going to take longer because of the financial resources.

I think that is a fundamental difference in the context for the update in 2011. The first plan assumed ever-expanding fiscal resources.

NK: Rereading PlaNYC, it really reflects a totally different economic situation. The assumptions just look foreign today, only a few years later.

DB: I think that is a fundamental difference in the context for the update in 2011. The first plan assumed ever-expanding fiscal resources at the disposal of the city, so that we were proposing a $400 million program to plant a million trees, or eight new regional parks, each of which is between 30 and 80 million dollars. Well we don’t have that luxury in the update. It’s really going to have to address the economic realities of the city, and actually be part of the solution for them.

NK: Does that mean there’s going to have to be a fundamental rewrite of the plan?

DB: No, I don’t think there will be a fundamental rewrite. Remember, it’s a thirty-year plan, so short term economic cycles shouldn’t restrict our visions and our ambition to build a greater, greener New York. It does force us to be more creative and innovative, and that’s a good thing.

In terms of a way to reduce the cost of waste disposal, for example, the economics of recycling become different the more the costs of disposal go up, and the cost of disposal has gone up a lot in the last three years.

NK: We’ve heard waste is going to be a new addition to the plan. At the Bronx Community Conversation I also heard food distribution. Are there any other new topics that are being discussed?

DB: I think that the area that really did not get covered last time is solid waste. I think you’ll see new initiatives in the other areas, but it’s not going to be a major change in direction.

NK: In the transportation section of the original PlaNYC, one thing that got relatively less attention was freight. You have a background in shipping. Is that something you’re paying attention to?

DB: Yes. We’re going to be looking at freight access. The key areas in terms of access to JFK would be one example, and the role of cross-harbor freight.

State DOTs, which often are not actually DOTs but are actually highway divisions, and cities don’t always have the same visions.

NK: In an interview with Oregon Public Radio, you said something that sounded like a hint about the Sheridan Expressway. You said Robert Moses put all these highways through low-income neighborhoods, and now we’re moving to restore them. And then you mentioned the Bronx River right there.

DB: Yeah.

NK: What has your office been thinking about the Sheridan?

DB: Well we have federal grants to be [thinking about it] – and that just came in recently. And so we’re looking at what’s called the social return on investment, to define return on investment to include some of the very important non-financial issues that sometimes don’t get quantified. What’s the return to community redevelopment goals, or access to the river?

That’s going to be kicking off here pretty soon. And in fact the Department of City Planning is currently looking to bolster its staff to do some outreach efforts specifically around the Sheridan Expressway.

NK: That’s good to hear, since the state DOT is moving forward on its own timeline.

DB: And maybe not on the same page from what I’ve heard. That’s an issue I’m experienced with from my previous job. State DOTs, which often are not actually DOTs but are actually highway divisions, and cities don’t always have the same visions.

NK: The last meeting I was at with them, they were arguing the correct way to analyze what to do with the Sheridan was to consider the Sheridan kept open versus the Sheridan remaining up but barricaded.

DB: <laughs> No, state highway divisions and urban areas really don’t mix very well. At least in probably 47 of the 50 states. The Sheridan, I think that will be a good project, because it brings a lot of different elements together: urban redesign, housing, social equity, environmental restoration. There are a lot of interesting pieces to that Sheridan story that I think we’ll finally be able to move forward.

NK: What should we look for from the PlaNYC update process after the community conversations are done next week?

DB: We’ll try and assimilate a lot of the things that we heard, and try to convert those into some draft proposals to take back out onto the street in February/March.

Definitely No to the Freeway! (La Via Express)

While the world has gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss again a shared approach to Climate Chaos, action is already being taken in countless communities. On a visit last week to Guadalajara, Mexico, more than a thousand miles west of the Climate Meeting, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city. Interestingly, this movement leans primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

This is the current situation along much of the line. Train tracks down the middle. High tension electric lines on the right, underground gas and oil pipelines under the left.

Ciudad Para Todos gained Guadalajara's attention with a months-long campout in the green space at the far end of this road to protest a bridge.

I met Étienne von Bertrab and Negro Soto Morfín, two of the main Ciudad Para Todos activists, at the World Car-Free Cities Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2008 and later they invited me to speak to the 2nd annual Congress of Urban Cycling in Mexico held in Guadalajara in September 2009. We got together just after Thanksgiving and they filled us in on the new campaign.

In June 2010, just before they left for York, England for this year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

Avenida Inglaterra is just above the red line crossing the image; it is currently a rail corridor with utility lines and limited open space on either side.

Étienne and Negro brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day and made two guerrilla video responses. At first the Jalisco government protested to Youtube and demanded the videos be taken down on the grounds of copyright violation (they had garnered 12,000 views in just the first four days), but when that news broke, even more people went to see the videos. (Youtube did take down the videos for a while, but restored them after protests from Ciudad Para Todos.) All three are posted here, but this is the one primarily in English:

The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos were circulating and galvanizing local opponents, but the neighbors had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. We met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she announced her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

One of the signs alongside the proposed route.

This is posted on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Alicia's shop, indicating the places where neighbors have already begun the transformation.

A short time later Étienne was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and Negro and their colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Etienne and Negro hadn’t anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting there has been a regular Saturday work party ever since. There are now over 400 new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days. The independent Hotel del Bosque sits on an adjacent corner. They were at first cool to the activism, but became an enthusiastic participant, including their recent support of a mural painted by some local graffiti artists.

This mural was just painted in the past couple of weeks on a wall facing the corridor.

A university campus is adjacent too, and students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses has gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are getting better every weekend.

Neighbors have begun implanting a linear park on their own.

Homemade signs adorn the newly minted unauthorized park.

This lovely garden has obviously been growing for much longer than the rest of the efforts nearby.

Neighbors and passersby already make use of the shady trees and park benches that locals have installed as part of their guerrilla park-making.

Picnicking and hanging out in the grassroots linear park.

On September 22, 2010, World Carfree Day, our intrepid activists decided to install a monument in the middle of the contested terrain. They acquired a junked car, and turned it into a large flower pot, fixing it in place at one of the busiest intersections on Avenida Inglaterra. On the morning they were going to put it in place, the first arrival was pondering how to move massive concrete pieces into place when a man drove by on a big backhoe, most serendipitously! He quickly agreed to use his machine to move two big slabs of nearby concrete across the railroad tracks and even suggested a better placement for them. Voila! A new monument was installed, and we had fun visiting it last Tuesday. Here’s a few shots of it, followed by a video showing its installation, including the arrival of a Critical Mass-like procession by the GDL en Bici crowd.

The yellow sign above indicates this car was a public art installation for Carfree Day, 2010.

Heavy cement was moved by a guy passing by serendipitously on a big backhoe!

Flowers Not Motors!

This back seat is a rest stop for bike and ped commuters crossing a long way from one side of the city to the other.

The down-to-earth politics of this new Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!” She’d been gardening across from her house for years, but now there are hundreds of neighbors doing the same up and down the rail line. The doctor is already scheming ways to deepen the new community’s life. She was planning to establish a free outdoor library near the benches that had already been built. “Take a book to read, leave one behind.”

Adriana and Dr. Alicia in the park.

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

The dead tree with living "leaves."

Leave the closet and let's be citizens all the time!

Thanks to Adriana Camarena, my compañera who fully participated in gathering this story, and without whom I wouldn’t have been able to write it!

Exhibit A: The Mount Hood Freeway

“There was a period of ignorance, a period of enlightenment and catharsis, and a period of change.”

A drawing of the proposed Mount Hood Freeway. Former planning chief Richard Ross marked a red dot where his friend's house still stands, despite plans to pave over it.

Longtime local planning official Dick Feeney says Portlanders shouldn’t be too smug about their much-touted bicycle network and strides on transit. After all, he says, “Portland founded the Good Roads movement,” which had its basis in the gas tax. “And the gas tax became this monumental engine to give a private subsidy to the private automobile. It started right here, folks… part of our own destruction started right here.”

The Mount Hood Freeway was almost part of that destruction. Proposed by the Oregon State Highway Department in 1955, the road would have been eight lanes wide and removed one percent of all the private housing stock in the city. An estimated 3,700 children would have had to cross it to get to school.

In the 1960s, the city of Portland set about buying up houses they’d need to demolish to build the freeway – including the home next door to State Rep. Grace Peck, who wanted her neighbor’s house torn down early “to keep hippies from living there,” according to Richard Ross, former head of planning for the Portland suburb of Gresham.

Before long, the freeways became the polarizing issue in Portland, on which every aspiring politician had to take a position, firmly in one camp or another. Unions wanted highway construction to provide jobs. Environmentalists and farmers sided against it. Finally, popular opposition to the project reached the point where the city and county withdrew support, and the project died.

Exhibit B: Harbor Drive

Okay, Portland, you can get a little smug about Harbor Drive.

Harbor Drive today (otherwise known as Waterfront Park).

Portland was the first major city to rip out an existing highway, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer stretch of land. Harbor Drive ran along the western shore of the Willamette River in downtown. In 1968, as I-405 was being built, Governor Tom McCall appointed a task force to study the possibility of tearing out Harbor Drive and making it a park.

Urban planner Ernie Munch advocated for the teardown:

The committee went on and on and on and on until 1973 or 1974, when Tom McCall and Glenn Jackson, who was the head of the highway division, were going over that ramp onto the Markham Bridge, and they looked down on this area and they said, “Let’s just do it. Let’s just take it out.” So in 1974, Harbor Drive was removed. It was, at the time, the city’s busiest arterial. One-third of the traffic went to the freeways on either side of the downtown. One-third went in to the downtown. And one-third has never been heard of since.

What happened to those cars? Where did they go? It’s hard to say precisely, but the example of Harbor Drive stands as a good reminder that the amount people drive rises and falls with car capacity — and infinitely expanding roads won’t keep them clear of traffic jams.

It’s important to note that it wasn’t just one good man in power that made Harbor Drive the waterfront park that it is today. A whole citizens’ movement mobilized in support of the teardown plan. In the summer of 1969, Portlanders even organized “consciousness-raising picnics” along Harbor Drive.

Monday started with 15 different workshops that took place around the city, including one highlighting Portland’s “Lost Freeways” – the roads that were never built, and one that was actually torn out. These battles happened decades ago, but in many cities, highway fights continue to this day, and in some, teardowns are looking more and more possible. (Take note, readers in New Orleans, St. Louis, Seattle, New York, and New Haven.)

Traveling around on bikes and on foot, two groups visited some notable sites in Portland’s battles against freeways. First, we saw some battlegrounds where the anti-freeway movement lost.

South Park Blocks and I-405

Here's the block of the Goose Hollow neighborhood right next to I-405...

... and here's the highway that paved over two more blocks just like it. Photos by Shoshanah Oppenheim

In 1943, Portland invited New York’s master freeway planner, Robert Moses, to come to town. After a month of study, he came out with an 86-page document mapping out the “future of Portland”: 14 freeways and a tangle of limited-access parkways to re-make the city. Portland would have become what longtime local transit official Dick Feeney calls “a wonderful place to drive a car through,” where “the neighborhoods would have all vanished.”

Today, one of those highways, I-405, runs right through downtown. Tour guide Sarah Mirk, author of Oregon history comic books (including one about dead highways), took us to a little grassy patchy just across the I-405 overpass from the South Park Blocks, built in the mid-1960s.

This little marooned park over here is an orphan of when they built the I-405 freeway right here. The South Park Blocks are something people love in Portland; it’s a historic part of our city. And when they built I-405 through, they not only tore out two solid blocks of dense housing here in this neighborhood – which was really diverse, low-income housing – they also tore out two blocks of the South Park Blocks. People were really upset about that. And as a concession to people who were really upset about tearing out the park blocks, they said, we’ll do a ‘park-like treatment’ on the overpass coming over here. So you can see the overgrown bramble, and the cement, and the weeds. This is the ‘park-like treatment’ given to the South Park Blocks.

The freeway cut the neighborhood off from their school and library on the other side, becoming a “wall” between the residents and the services they used. Developers put in a bike-ped trail along the freeway as a concession.

That trail – unsigned, virtually unknown and unused – is known informally as the Ho Chi Minh trail. “Not to honor the Vietnamese leader,” says Mirk, “but because it was so dangerous and there were lots of muggings along here at night. There’s zero lighting, the neighbors have put up barbed wire, and it’s out of sight, out of sound. No one can hear you scream over the sound of the freeway.”

In my next post, I’ll get to the good stuff: the freeway plans that never saw the light of day, and one that came tumbling down.

New Haven was awarded $16 million to replace a limited-access section of Route 34 with development and a connected street grid. Image: TSTC

We reported earlier today that Ray LaHood is keeping mum about the TIGER II grant winners until the middle of next week, but the info is beginning to drip — and it’s members of Congress doing the leaking.

Word is out that New Haven, Connecticut has landed a $16 million TIGER II grant to convert part of Route 34 from a limited-access highway to an urban boulevard. That move will make the road more walkable and bikeable and restore 11 acres to the downtown.

The good news for livability goes on. The Peoria Journal Star is reporting that that city’s Warehouse District “got a significant boost Friday with the announcement of a $10 million federal grant supporting the narrowing of Washington Street.”

The street is going on a federally-funded diet, slated to shrink from five to two lanes in some parts and from seven to five in others. The TIGER money will help Peoria design and build “a complete street network that is safe, walkable and attractive” within the Warehouse District, according to Mayor Jim Ardis.

That information was leaked thanks to a news release from U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin.

Michigan Representative John Dingell did some leaking of his own, releasing news that the city of Ann Arbor is getting $13.9 million to reconstruct failing bridges on East Stadium Boulevard.

The two bridges, built in 1917 and 1928, carry more than 48,000 vehicles per day. According to AnnArbor.com, “Since January 2009, traffic has been reduced to one lane in each direction on the north side of the bridge after an inspection a small deflection in one of the beams under the eastbound traffic.”

Meanwhile, Maine and New Hampshire got news that they were green-lighted for a $20 million grant to replace the 87-year-old bridge between Kittery, Maine and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That one was announced by Maine’s two moderate Republican Senators and Democratic Congressmember Mike Michaud.

With the mid-term elections just a few short weeks away, it looks like the DOT is passing the information along to members of Congress and letting them be the bearers of good news.

In total, the DOT will be granting $600 million for infrastructure projects that “will have a significant impact on the Nation, a metropolitan area or a region.”

The drawings released by Extell Development don't draw attention to the blank walls and curb cuts that would disrupt the sidewalk at Riverside Center.

A hearing on the Riverside Center mega-development yesterday revealed a popular hunger for a more walkable West Side and perhaps some interest from the City Planning Commission in the same. Extell Development is looking to build a housing and retail complex, including 1,800 parking spaces, on this waterfront site equivalent in size to two Manhattan blocks. Public testimony called for a slew of urban design improvements to their plan, including reducing the amount of off-street parking, integrating the site with the surrounding streetscape, and working towards burying the elevated Miller Highway.

As chair Amanda Burden and the other commissioners now deliberate over the approvals the project needs, they have the power to determine whether this block on Manhattan’s West Side will be dominated by the automobile or develop into a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, in line with the goals of PlaNYC.

Efforts to better integrate Riverside Center with the surrounding neighborhood and streetscape got the most play yesterday. In Extell’s plans for the project, retail faces the inside of the development and passersby would see largely blank walls rising from the sidewalk, with the streets sloping down to the waterfront and the buildings stationed on an elevated platform. That wall would be interrupted by a slew of curb cuts to enter Extell’s proposed 1,800-space parking garage and auto showroom and service center.

“The development turns its back on the street,” said Brian Cook, the land use director for Borough President Scott Stringer. “It systematically ignores the rich context of the area,” explained Community Board 7 chair Mel Wymore.

The City Planning Commission appeared receptive to this critique. “Does one see an auto showroom as something that enlivens the edge of the project?” Burden asked Extell president Gary Barnett after he testified. “What is going to energize the sidewalk and the street life at the front of this project?”

Other commissioners pressed the developers and architects about the effect of driveways, retail, stairways, and platforms on the pedestrian environment. The developer, in turn, outlined a few minor steps to address the issue, such as changing a staircase to 59th Street into a slope.

But one underlying cause of the streetlife-deadening platform is the excessive amount of parking that Extell is seeking to build, according to Ethel Sheffer, a CB 7 member and former president of the New York American Planning Association chapter. The platform “is there in large part because it satisfies an extensive request of 1,800 parking spaces on two levels,” she said.

The second level of Extell's proposed 1,800 space garage covers the entire four-block site. Image: Extell Development

Those 1,800 spaces, which require special permits from the commission, would create a development dominated by the automobile, perhaps to a degree unmatched by any project in the Clean Air Act zone below 60th Street. The community board and borough president each recommended against allowing 1,800 spaces at Riverside Center.

Parking received some attention from the commission at the very start of yesterday’s hearing. Commissioner Richard Eaddy cited the community board’s request for a smaller lot and asked Barnett why he didn’t agree with the board.

“We’re actually cutting out parking from the area,” said Barnett, arriving at that claim by adding the surface parking currently on the site to the number of spaces he thinks his tenants will demand. “We’re going to be down 800 or 1,000 spaces,” said Barnett.

CB 7 member Ken Coughlin laid out just how inflated Extell’s demands are. If the commission simply used the same calculations in effect at the nearby Hudson Yards project, he said, only 768 spaces would be built. “Should we be creating additional incentives to drive in an already congested and polluted urban environment?” he asked.

The commission has written that one of its goals for Hudson Yards was to “limit the amount of off-street parking… consistent with the objective of creating an area with a transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character.” Riverside Center could be the first large-scale development near Hudson Yards where the commission proves it is truly committed to that goal.

The elevated Miller Highway running in front of Riverside South. Photo: Riverside South Planning Corp.

Other testimony focused on ensuring that the project furthers efforts to bury the elevated Miller Highway between 59th and 72nd Streets. According to architect Daniel Gutman, who helped design the original plan for the Riverside South complex, the 1991 agreement required that the developer build the northbound tube for a tunnel while the state would build the southbound tube. Some of that construction has already taken place. Actually burying the road, however, would require additional funding that isn’t available yet — the highway was renovated only 15 years ago.

Even so, many urged the commission to do what it takes to move the plan forward, whether by extracting more funds from Extell or simply not obstructing the current slow progress toward a tunnel. “The space is still marred and made dangerous and oppressed by the highway,” said former Municipal Art Society president Kent Barwick.

“The vision that drove that compromise was the relocation of the overhead road,” said Barbara Fife, a former Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning under David Dinkins. She urged that the Commission require the developer to complete part of the southbound tunnel in order to gain approval.

Burden showed some attention to the potential of a buried Miller Highway, at one point asking Extell’s landscape architect how her plans would change if the highway were moved underground.

In addition to requests for design and planning improvements, testifiers made strong demands yesterday for Extell to build a new school and provide more affordable housing. To the extent that negotiations pit competing priorities against each other, the commission will need to fight that much harder to make Riverside Center a walkable place and not let sustainability fall by the wayside.

The Sheridan Expressway runs only 1.25 miles between the Cross-Bronx and Bruckner Expressways. This option, one of two remaining alternatives, would remove it entirely. Image: NYSDOT

At a public meeting last night, the state Department of Transportation released a traffic analysis of the proposal to tear down the Sheridan Expressway, the Moses-era "highway to nowhere" that separates Bronx residents from the Bronx River waterfront. The main conclusion appeared to bode poorly for the plan to replace the highway with housing and parks: According to the state DOT, removing the Sheridan would force traffic onto local streets.

In response, advocates for transportation reform and environmental justice warned about potential flaws in the methodology behind DOT's traffic analysis. They also questioned the assumptions behind the agency's impending environmental review, which won't take into account any of the benefits of what will replace the Sheridan. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign's Kyle Wiswall called the DOT's environmental analysis "an exercise in futility" that "seems to be engineered to reach a preconceived result" -- keeping the highway in place.

For years, the state DOT has been studying ways to improve the highway system near Hunts Point, a regional food distribution center that's a hub for truck traffic. Currently, trucks travel onto the peninsula via local roads, destroying the quality of life for area residents even as the many highway interchanges in the South Bronx -- the Sheridan, the Major Deegan, and Bronx River Parkway all run between the Cross Bronx and Bruckner Expressways -- snarl highway traffic.

Thanks in large part to a sustained advocacy campaign, under the umbrella of Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, the teardown option has gradually gained momentum and entered the official discussion of what to do with the Sheridan.

The DOT has now narrowed their proposal down to two possibilities. In some ways, they are identical. Both would add an exit on the Bruckner that could connect more directly to Hunts Point, intended to keep truck traffic off local streets. Near where the Bruckner meets the Sheridan, it briefly narrows from three lanes to two, before widening again; both plans would add a lane on that segment to eliminate the bottleneck.

But the difference between the two plans is a big one.

One would keep the Sheridan Expressway in place; the other would remove the highway altogether. That would be the first highway teardown in New York since the West Side Highway was removed in the 1970s and 80s. The state DOT will make a final choice in early 2012, according to Gill Mosseri, the project manager with the consulting engineering team. 

The Sheridan is only 1.25 miles long and serves as a redundant connection between the Cross-Bronx and the Bruckner. The Major Deegan connects the two only four miles west of the Sheridan, while the Bronx River Parkway connects them less than a mile east of the Sheridan. The Cross-Bronx and Bruckner merge directly only two miles east of the Sheridan. The Sheridan is so underutilized that on some days you can safely stand in the middle of the highway at rush hour. 

With the highway gone, 28 acres of newly available space could be put to use as badly needed affordable housing or parkland. The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance's community-based plan would replace the highway with 1,000 units of housing and a greenway along the river, creating an estimated 700 jobs.

The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance plan to replace the Sheridan with housing, retail, and open space.

That analysis may not stand, however. "We're going to get the underlying data and pick it apart," said Kyle Wiswall. "The last time we did that, we found errors in both the inputs and the outputs." Coding errors and faulty assumptions about how traffic would grow marred earlier traffic predictions, he said.

Though activists haven't yet had a chance to look at the DOT's model, Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development pressed DOT representatives last night about "the meta-assumption that traffic will increase no matter what."

Mosseri responded that the department was using the model recommended by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (the region's federally designated planning body), which assumes that traffic will increase with population. 

The DOT now begins preparing an environmental impact statement for each proposal, with drafts expected to be released in early 2011. Because the EIS includes categories like "visual resources," "land-use and social conditions," and "environmental justice," you might expect that document to look more favorably on park space and housing than on a highway. That's not what the EIS is likely to do, however.

Claiming that there isn't any official plan for what would replace the Sheridan, the DOT and their environmental consultant argued that they can't factor in any benefits of what would replace the highway. "You just lose the Sheridan," said Guy Lamonaca, the project engineer with DOT. "Maybe you put up a barrier, you put up a fence."

In other words, said Wiswall, in the analysis, "the removal isn't a removal. It's a highway left to rot." 

By not assessing any benefits of highway removal, DOT is putting a finger on the scales, argued Byron. She worried that keeping the Sheridan will end up the department's preferred alternative because DOT's assumptions will lead to the conclusion that "having a highway is better than not having a highway."

Byron called on the New York City agencies which would have authority over the freed-up land if the Sheridan is torn down -- City Planning, Parks, DOT, and the Economic Development Corporation -- to intercede with the state DOT and assure them that the land wouldn't be allowed to lie fallow. "It's their prerogative to insert themselves into this debate," she said.

The new plan for the Seine's left bank will transform space for highways and parking into space for people. The area outside the Musee D'Orsay will host outdoor film screenings. Image: City of Paris.

A few weeks ago, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced a plan to transform his city's waterfront, closing 1.2 miles of expressway on the left bank of the Seine and slowing the highway along the right bank to the speed of a city boulevard. For an added bit of historical irony, the city's waterfront expressway is named for Georges Pompidou, the president responsible for scarring the nation's cities with highways -- the French Robert Moses, if you will.

Delanoë's plan is the latest development in an incremental transformation that's been years in the making. Soon after he became mayor in 2002, he instituted Paris Plage -- a month-long transformation of the Pompidou into a riverfront beach, complete with sand and swimming -- as a way of bringing summertime recreation to those not able to leave the city for vacation. Paris Plage was itself an expansion of the practice of giving the highway to pedestrians and cyclists for a few hours on summer Sundays. In 2006, it became "Paris Plages," as the popular beaches multiplied along the Seine.

Even this permanent highway closing isn't the final word in Paris's rediscovery of its river. "This is only a step," Denis Baupin, Paris's deputy mayor for the environment, told Time Magazine. 

The politics of reclaiming so much space from the automobile -- "reconquering the Seine," in Delanoë's words -- were a lot easier thanks to the massive investment in walking, bicycling, busways, and commuter rail that Paris has made over the last decade. The Paris city council votes on the proposal in July. 

More pictures below the fold: 

Parisians will have a new vantage point from which to take in the Pont Alexandre III, architectural highlight of the 1900 World's Fair. Image: City of Paris

Much of the reclaimed space would be converted to parkland, consistent with Mayor Delanoë's emphasis on bringing fresh air to Paris. Image: City of Paris

The highway along the Right Bank would be reimagined as an urban boulevard. Image: City of Paris