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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At the Transportation Research Board’s 91st annual meeting here in DC, it’s hard to miss the booth handing out copies of a bright blue pamphlet filled with illustrations of busy tree-lined streets, where bicyclists and buses work their way through a bustling urban bazaar. The booth is the Congress for New Urbanism’s “occupation” of TRB, and the pamphlet is their new illustrated Sustainable Street Network Principles, a document aimed at explaining in very basic terms what’s wrong with America’s streets — and how to fix them.

The goal of the Principles is to promote development patterns that add value to communities. The way to do that, said CNU President John Norquist, is to design streets to play three simultaneous roles: that of a transportation thoroughfare, a commercial marketplace, and a public space. “Typically, U.S. DOT and State DOTs tend to look at roads only in the dimension of movement, and even in that one dimension, their rural-style forms fail in the city,” Norquist says.

The principles are a plain-language counterpart to the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ “Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares,” a collaborative effort with CNU which came out in March 2010 and is written in “engineerese” according to Norquist. By contrast, “the Principles are very readable,” he said, “and can be used to encourage local public works authorities or departments of transportation to do something in cities that adds value to neighborhoods.”

Those authorities don’t always have a very good record in that department. For decades now, government transportation policy has been geared toward speeding up long trips, while ignoring issues of walkability and the corresponding value added to neighborhoods. “If one person has to cross the street to get to work, and another drives 25 miles to work in the same building, the government is obsessed with helping the guy who drives, even though the guy who walks contributes more net value [by using fewer resources, spending less time in traffic, etc.]” Norquist told Streetsblog. “If you look at the little blue book, it’s designed to challenge that idea.”

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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.

One of the foundational documents in our country's history of car-centric street design is what's known as the Green Book. These engineering guidelines, which have been published in various editions by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) since the 1930s, are only "green" if you're looking at the cover.

"We should take control of our streets. If 85 percent of our motorists are driving faster than we want them to, then we need to redesign the street."

Inside, the Green Book codifies an anti-urban design approach that transportation engineers have followed to disastrous effect in American cities and towns, creating wide streets where cars rule, speeding is the norm, and the greenest modes of travel have no place. While its recommendations are only advisory, the Green Book is often treated as gospel, implanting ideas like the "85th percentile" standard, which dictates that streets should be designed to "forgive" the 15th-fastest driver out of every hundred on the road. In the words of former Maryland transportation chief James Lighthizer, this is like building streets as though "everyone on the road is a drunk speeding along without a seatbelt."

Fortunately, these engineering standards are shifting. One important step is a new report co-authored by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). "Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach" aims to define a more humane engineering language for streets. The report is intended to supplement the Green Book by laying out a set of design standards that make sense in places where people can get around by foot or on a bicycle.

If, as U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood recently pledged, walking and biking are going to have equal standing with motorized transport, more enlightened engineering guidelines will have to play a significant role. To better understand how the CNU/ITE report can influence state DOTs and the way they shape streets, we spoke to one of the experts who helped develop it, Dan Burden.

As the founder and executive director of Walkable Communities, Inc., Burden travels the country helping people plan and develop more sustainable neighborhoods. In 2001, Time Magazine named him one of the six most influential civic leaders of tomorrow. Burden spent 16 years as bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the Florida Department of Transportation, so he was able to share with us his experience as both an advocate and an administrator.

Here's the first part of our interview:

Noah Kazis: Let's start with that new ITE and CNU report that you participated in. What's its significance?

Dan Burden: A couple of big breakthroughs occurred with that publication. One where we struggled hard, but finally broke free, is setting a target speed for roads. Before, there was always the driving speed, which had to be higher than the posted speed to provide "forgiveness" to drivers. Of course, drivers totally figured that one out, and they'd drive faster than the posted speed. In these guidelines, they're supposed to design the road for the speed that we want to elicit from the driver.

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As Aaron and Sarah have noted, the Congress for the New Urbanism is in the midst of its annual meeting in Denver. This spiffy short is the winner of this year's CNU 17 video contest. Created by independents John Paget of Paget Films and Drew Ward and Chris Elisara of First+Main Media, "Built to Last," in the words of the filmmakers, "explores the connection between New Urbanism and environmental issues."

Enjoy. And if you're really feelin' it, follow @naparstek and the #cnu17 feed on Twitter for to-the-minute insights from CNU speakers over the weekend.

OK. I've finally succumbed to Twitter and I'm using it to keep track of interesting quotes, observations and tidbits at the 17th annual Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Denver. There's a lot of great stuff happening here and plenty of interesting people. I'm not sure how much of that I can convey in 140 character text bursts. But I'm a professional haikuist so let's see what I can do.

You can follow me @naparstek. 

And you can follow other conference attendees at #cnu17.

As mayor of Milwaukee from 1988 to 2004, CNU President John Norquist made urbanism and livability top priorities. Some of his most notable achievements centered on the redevelopment of highway corridors with street grids and infill, culminating with the demolition of the Park East Freeway in 2002 -- one of the largest voluntary highway removal projects undertaken in America. Other projects, like the introduction of a light rail system, never reached fruition.

In the second part of our interview (read the first part here), Norquist discusses these victories and setbacks, and how federal policy can help cities and towns do the right thing.

Ben Fried: Expanding the transit system in Milwaukee has been a very long, protracted process. You wanted to build light rail. What sort of resistance did you meet from other public officials?

Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland -- the regional planning commissions they have really aren’t looking out for city interests, they're looking out for the exurban interests.

John Norquist: Any time I had to fix a problem at one level of government, there was another one that would pop up. We had a Democratic governor, but then we had a county exec who was against light rail. The mayor wasn’t really for light rail. When I got elected mayor, I was for light rail but the county exec was still against it, that was Dave Schultz in 1988. And then we had Tommy Thompson as governor who wasn’t for it. He said he was open to it at the beginning when Schultz was against it. And then once Schultz left, then Thompson became more against it. The right wing talk shows went after it and so he followed their lead, you know the local Rush Limbaugh types. And then it just seemed like every step of the way, we get one group that had to be for it on the other side. The county runs the transit system, so it’s kind of hard to do it without them. If the city had run the transit system we would have been able to do it right away.

It’s frustrating, because Milwaukee was always ranked by the Federal Transit Administration as one of the best places to put in a light rail, because it was built around the street car system. There was over 350 miles of street car in Milwaukee at the end of the war, 200 miles of inner urban. We had a really, really good transit system and by 1958 it was all gone. But the land use patterns were all built around street car lines. Now I think my successor, Tom Barrett, has got himself some clout with this. They put an earmark in the budget bill that just passed that gave him control of a nice big chunk of money, so he might be able to get that street car going.

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The news coming out of Washington last week jacked up expectations for national transportation policy to new heights. Cabinet members Ray LaHood and Shaun Donovan announced a partnership to connect transportation and housing policy, branded as the "Sustainable Communities Initiative." The second-in-command at DOT, Vice Admiral Thomas Barrett, told a New York audience that "building communities" is a top priority at his agency.

At the moment, however, the scene on the ground shows how far we have to go before the reality catches up to the rhetoric: State DOTs flush with federal stimulus cash are plowing ahead with wasteful, sprawl-inducing highway projects. Ultimately, you can't end car dependence or create livable places without enlisting the very people building those roads -- the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), state DOTs, and other entities that shape local policy. How can the feds affect their decisions?

The Congress for the New Urbanism has some intriguing answers. During the stimulus debate, CNU proposed a new type of federal road funding that would help to build connected grids -- the kind of streets that livable communities are made of. The proposal didn't make it into the stimulus package before the bill got rushed out the door, but the upcoming federal transportation bill will provide another chance. CNU President John Norquist -- a four-term mayor of Milwaukee who first got into politics as an anti-freeway advocate -- was down in DC last Thursday to share his ideas with Congress. Streetsblog spoke to him afterward about what's broken with national transportation policy and how to fix it. Here's the first part of our interview.

Ben Fried: During the stimulus debate you sent a letter to James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and among other things you said that discussion of national transportation policy often presents a "false dichotomy" between transit funding and road funding. What did you mean?

They are taking this stimulus money and using it for roads that people really don’t even want.

John Norquist: Well, maybe "false" is the wrong word for me to have used, but it’s a dichotomy that’s very limited. If the debate is about transit versus roads -- and currently the battle lines are drawn at 20 percent funding for transit, 80 percent for roads -- it’s a really limited debate. It leaves out the whole discussion of what kind of roads to build. So if you have a city with boulevards and avenues and no freeways, it’s going to be a lot more valuable. You look at Vancouver, they have no freeways whatsoever, and they have a fabulously intense and valuable real estate and job market. And then you look at the places that have invested all the money in the giant road segments and they tend to be degraded. It's not roads versus transit -- it's good street networks-plus-transit versus mindless building of out-of-scale roads. I mean they're basically putting rural roads into urbanized areas and it’s counterproductive, it reduces the value of the economy, it destroys jobs, destroys real estate value. For what, so you can drive fast at two in the morning when you're drunk?

Freeways don’t work in rush hour; they're slower. Like in Washington, DC, Connecticut Avenue is faster at rush hour than the Potomac Freeway. The Potomac Freeway goes down to about two to six miles an hour during the peak hour, whereas Connecticut Avenue goes down to about eight to thirteen miles an hour. So you're really talking about the federal government investing billions and billions of dollars in stuff that reduces the value of the economy. How bad is that?

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