Cities are sitting on goldmines: beautiful parks and shorelines that are covered up by highways.
Successful highway removal projects along urban gems such as San Francisco’s Embarcadero waterfront, Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon creek and Paris’s Seine River demonstrate that broad-based efforts to reform urban mobility can result in restoration of natural beauty and economic vitality. Development along Embarcadero, for example, led to a 51 percent increase in nearby housing and a 23 percent increase in jobs.
Opportunities for such restoration abound in every U.S. metropolitan area, and prominent examples include DC’s Rock Creek, Manhattan’s East River Waterfront, and the space between Sacramento’s historic district and downtown.
Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC
Rock Creek Park, which the U.S. National Park Service manages, should be DC’s “oasis in the city.” Be it a sweltering summer day or the dead of winter, the park offers an escape from the stresses of life in a city full of political tension. The park’s scenery and hiking help suffice for the lack of a public transit connection to Shenandoah, the nearest full-on national park.
But thoroughfares for car commuting, including limited-access Rock Creek Parkway to the south and narrower Beach Drive to the North, deprive large swaths of the park of their purity. Drivers cut through the park in hopes of shaving a couple minutes off their travel times, only to encounter backups at the chokepoints where they must merge back onto main roads.
FDR Drive over the East River, New York City
People in most of the world’s megacities – including Seoul, where the Han River is a hub for social gatherings and outdoor activities – are able to enjoy their cities’ waterfront areas.
FDR Drive in New York City. (Check out the hilarious billboard on the right. Sorry, Mets fans.)
But New Yorkers hoping to enjoy a day on Manhattan’s East River shores are out of luck, thanks to infamous city planner Robert Moses’s FDR Drive. While the city managed to turn an elevated railroad on its west side into a nice linear park (the beautiful High Line, which the city credits for spurring $2 billion in economic development and annual $100 million increases in tax revenue), the island’s eastern shore remains an automobile haven. A bike and pedestrian path does parallel the elevated freeway, even running directly beneath it for some stretches. But the roar of the traffic makes it less likely that anyone will stop to enjoy the river or patronize businesses along the corridor.
Old Sacramento, CA
Sacramento’s historic district could be the French Quarter of the West. It lies near the confluence of the city’s two rivers and already hosts several world-class attractions, including the California State Railroad Museum.
But while green space and streetcar lines help make the French Quarter a cherished part of New Orleans, a sunken sea of concrete and metal – Interstate 5 – separates Old Sacramento from the bustling California State Capitol and vibrant development surrounding the Sacramento Kings’ new Golden 1 Center. Thanks to the freeway infrastructure, which has crumbled to hazardous levels, Old Sac remains a largely failed tourist trap when it could be a cultural hub of the increasingly exciting capital city.
The timing is perfect for these cities to dismantle highways in their parks.
Currently, it’s difficult for residents of DC, New York, Sacramento, or any other U.S. city to envision paved-over areas as anything other than conduits for cars. Existing roadways are already congested with automobile traffic, and all three cities’ transit systems have poor reputations that prevent much of the public from perceiving them as viable options.
But these three cities might be facing their best opportunities in a generation to redefine mobility and become human-oriented places. All three have major bus system overhauls, similar to what Seoul did in 2004, in the works. Additionally:
- New York is finally taking subway infrastructure renewal seriously after a series of high-profile rush-hour meltdowns brought years of glitchy service to a head.
- WMATA won its decades-long fight for dedicated funding, and transit opponents hell-bent on declaring DC’s transit system a failure can’t do anything about it.
- Sacramento, though by far the most auto-dependent of the three, has demonstrated surprising innovation in recent months. The City of Trees is one of just a handful of U.S. cities with an electric-assist bikeshare system and Sacramento Regional Transit just lowered its bus and rail fares.
As people in these cities gain an appreciation for their increasingly diverse transportation options and learn that mobility is more than just cars, they should encourage their leaders to help them take back urban space. Here are a few places to start:
- Washington: The pavement could simply be restriped to serve as the north-south artery for cyclists that DC currently lacks.
- New York: The existing bike and pedestrian path paralleling FDR Drive could become the centerpiece of a modern, pleasant linear park comparable to the Seine River’s car-free Lower Quay in Paris (restoration of which reduced car traffic on parallel thoroughfares as much as 30 percent.)
- Sacramento: Full closures of I-5 in 2008 for a construction project did not cause any major congestion problems and actually reduced traffic on some streets. Currently, the freeway currently is nothing more than a concrete trench. But Sacramento’s leaders could, as part of their continuing efforts to make the city more multimodal, turn the corridor into a human-oriented space embracing both a mysterious historic district and a modern, bright downtown.
History shows that we can’t take our parks for granted.
Today, we see the natural wonders of our cities as treasures people should embrace. According to research conducted for the International Federation of Parks and Recreation Association (IFPRA), parks increase peoples’ physical activity, boost property values, and provide relief from summer heat, among other benefits. Urban parks not only serve as hubs for first dates and beer league sports, but also provide important gathering places for wildlife.
But won’t dismantling highways make traffic worse?
Short answer: no. When the Embarcadero Freeway (which had carried more than 100,000 cars a day) was dismantled in 1991, 25 percent of the traffic simply went away.
Sounds crazy, but the Embarcadero is another example of the well-documented phenomenon known to transportation researchers as induced demand. The concept is simple: when a highway or road is widened, people perceive traffic to be reduced. Because of this, more people drive – which ultimately makes traffic worse. (For more information, check out CityLab’s great primer.)
Photo from Flickr’s Creative Commons.