Goodbye-ways: The downfall of urban freeways

The golden days -- when the traffic hadn't caught up with the lanes. (Photo by coltera.)

By Greg Hanscom

13 Mar 2012

 

"We can say this for our Great Urban Freeway Experiment: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The time was the 1950s and ’60s, specifically, and U.S. cities were watching their residents flee to the suburbs in alarming numbers. Their solution: Build giant freeways connecting city centers to the ’burbs, thereby allowing citizens to live the good life on the outskirts and commute to work in the urban core. It was an attempt to hang on to urban industrial might even as the city’s population bled (or drove) out.

When all was said and done, these freeways did salvage some downtown commerce, but they only accelerated the flight from the inner city. At the same time, they carved up historic urban neighborhoods, turned whole sections of cities into slums, and cut off many downtowns from their waterfronts. Legendary urban activist Jane Jacobs was among the first to fight the scourge of the urban highway, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had become all but impossible to gain approval for new highways through urban areas.

It’s one thing to stop building urban freeways, however, and another thing entirely to tear down existing ones. For many city centers, those highways still look a lot like lifelines.

But over the past few decades, urban freeways have begun to come down — from the West Side Highway in New York to the Embarcadero in San Francisco — and if a growing urban transportation reform movement has its way, many more will fall in the coming years.

This is the thrust of a report just released by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and EMBARQ, two organizations that promote equitable and sustainable transportation projects around the world. The report, called “The Death and Life of Urban Highways” — a tribute to Jacobs’ groundbreaking 1961 urbanist manifesto, The Death and Life of Great American Cities — declares that “the urban highway is a failed experiment,” and describes cities that have traded in highways for parks, mixed-use developments, and all manner of urbanist bliss.

At last! City leaders have seen the light! Power to the people! Critical mass!

Well, not really.

“Cities are not removing all highways because of a sudden awakening of environmental consciousness or realization that car culture is bad,” the report says. Instead, they’re doing it because they can’t afford to keep aging freeways from crumbling, and they’re realizing that the space these roads take up is a hell of a lot more valuable, both socially and economically, when it’s used for houses, businesses, and parks. And then there’s the raft of studies showing that freeways don’t relieve traffic congestion — they actually make it worse.

Death and Life documents all this, and then provides five case studies of cities that have removed freeways, starting with Portland, Ore., which in the 1970s tore out Harbor Drive, a freeway that walled off the downtown area from the Willamette River, and replaced it with a waterfront park that to this day is a central attraction in Stump Town. San Francisco tore out a raised freeway that was critically damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, replacing it with Embarcadero Boulevard, replete with palm-tree-lined pedestrian promenade. Most recently, in the early 2000s, under longtime Mayor John Norquist, Milwaukee dynamited the unfinished Park East Freeway, making room for three new neighborhoods, a boulevard, and a street grid that reconnects the city to its downtown.

In all three cases, land values around the demolished highways have skyrocketed, the areas have served as hubs for economic redevelopment, and, according to the report, the impacts on traffic congestion have been minimal — thanks in some places (Portland) to the construction of parallel roads, and others (San Francisco) to an increase in mass transit ridership. And just as remarkably, all three cities saved money over what they would have spent widening, rebuilding, or completing their existing freeways.

The report finishes out with a look at Seoul, South Korea, which in 2003 demolished the Cheonggyecheon freeway, “daylighting” the river buried beneath and turning the whole thing into a miles-long urban park; and Bogotá, Colombia, which chose not to build a planned Inner Ring Expressway, opting instead to invest its money in mass transit, bicycle paths, pedestrian walkways, and promenades. Too cool.

It’s pretty inspiring, especially when you compare it to what we would have been left with if the highway engineers had their way. In a recent interview with Next American City, John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who is now CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, described where that dream would have taken us:

The Detroit metropolitan area is covered with freeways … More than any other place in the country, the Michigan DOT pretty much got its way. And they have solved the problem that they identified, which was congestion … So by creating a transportation system that encouraged people to leave town — the population of the city is about a third of what it was since 1950.
[Detroit] had 300 miles of streetcars at the end of the war. That’s all gone … The street grid has been cut up, so it’s hard to move around on the surface streets. [But] the stated goal was to battle congestion, and in Detroit, they did it. And there are side effects.

Side effects. Sure — if you consider your city turning into a wasteland a “side effect.” (Sounds like a potentially terminal illness to us.) But if there’s a silver lining here, it is this: Highway construction ground to a halt much earlier in most burgs than it did in the Motor City, and now those freeways that were built are coming of age. It’s a perfect time to reconsider our approach to urban transportation.

In fact, we really have no choice. Being broke has a way of narrowing your options. Besides, with huge latent interest in urban living, it’s time to get serious about making cities work for city residents again, not just the folks who drive in from the ‘burbs.

Grist special projects editor Greg Hanscom has been editor of the award-winning environmental magazine High Country News and the Baltimore-based city mag, Urbanite. He tweets about cities and the environment at @ghanscom."

Fonte e imagem:

http://grist.org/cities/goodbye-ways-the-downfall-of-urban-freeways/

The Politics of Happiness, por Susan Ives

Enrique Penalosa, mayor of
Bogota, Colombia, 1995-1998.
Photo by Susan Ives

"The name Bogota conjures images of kidnapping, murder, and drug wars. But today's Bogota is safer than Washington, D.C., or Baltimore. A visionary mayor discovered the secret to making his city safe. Enrique Penalosa tells Susan Ives the story.

We really have to admit that over the past 100 years we have been building cities much more for mobility than for people's well-being. Every year thousands of children are killed by cars. Isn't it time we build cities that are more child-friendly? Over the last 30 years, we've been able to magnify environmental consciousness all over the world. As a result, we know a lot about the ideal environment for a happy whale or a happy mountain gorilla. We're far less clear about what constitutes an ideal environment for a happy human being. One common measure of how clean a mountain stream is is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It's the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

When I was elected mayor of Bogotá and got to city hall, I was handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren't even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We're telling people, “You are important—not because you're rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

We began to experiment by instituting a car-free day on a weekday. In a city of about 7 million people, just about everybody managed to get to work by walking, bicycling, bus, even on horseback—and everybody was better off. There was less air pollution, less time sitting in traffic, more time for people to be productive and enjoy themselves. Every Sunday we close 120 kilometers of roads to motor vehicles for seven hours. A million and a half people of all ages and incomes come out to ride bicycles, jog, and simply gather with others in community.

We took a vote, and 83 percent of the public told us they wanted to have car-free days more often. Getting people out of their cars is a means of social integration. You have the upper-income person sitting next to the cleaning lady on the bus.

Parks for urban peace

Parks have a very powerful role to play as equalizers of society. We almost always meet under conditions of social hierarchy. At work, some people are bosses and others are employees; at restaurants, some people are serving and others are being served. Parks are the gathering place for community. They create a sense of belonging. Everybody is welcome regardless of age, background, income, or disabilities. This creates a different type of society.

Today we see images of the beautiful Earth taken from a spaceship, and we think of it as our planet. But in fact, there are very few places on the planet to which the public has access. Most of the land is privatized, and public spaces are very, very scarce. The fact is, upper-income people have always had access to nature and recreation. They go to country houses, golf clubs, restaurants, hunting preserves. What do the poor, especially in the Third World, have as an alternative to television? All poor people have are public spaces, so this is not a luxury. They are the minimum a democratic society can provide to begin to compensate for the inequalities that exist in society.

Since we took these steps, we've seen a reduction in crime and a change in attitude toward the city. In the worst recession we've ever had, people were asked to pay a 10 percent voluntary tax to support various city services, including parks. More than 40,000 people did so, which I think speaks to the greater sense of community people feel.

If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time. Given our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success, and that could be in terms of happiness. It may be in how much time children spend with their grandparents, or the ways in which we are able to enjoy our friendships, or how many times people smile during the week. A city is successful not when it's rich but when its people are happy. Public space is one way to lead us to a society that is not only more equal but also much happier.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to world security is environmental and social sustainability in the world's fastest-growing cities. The population of cities in the Third World is growing by more than 80 million inhabitants per year, which means there will be some 2 billion people living in these cities within the next 25 to 30 years. In dense cities such as Bogotá, São Paolo, Jakarta, and Mexico City, there have been practically no places where people can come into contact with nature, safely play outside, or meet others in society as equals. And we have seen firsthand how living in poor conditions can lead to social problems, including extremism and even terrorism. We need food and housing for survival, but there are even higher types of needs—needs related to happiness. If you look at it that way, parks become as necessary to a city's health—physical and spiritual—as the water supply.

Susan Ives is a communications consultant (www.susanivescommunications.com) to organizations and businesses in the service of a natural, healthy and just world. This article was reprinted from Land & People, spring 2002, with permission from Trust for Public Land. For more information about Trust for Public Land, visit www.tpl.org. Since leaving office, Enrique Peñalosa has been a visiting scholar at New York University and speaking at conferences about his work."

Fonte e imagem: http://yesmagazine.org/issues/finding-courage/the-politics-of-happiness

Versão em português, traduzida por Jandira Feijó (muito obrigada):

http://jandirafeijo.blogspot.com/2009/11/politica-da-felicidade.html

Entrevista com Enrique Peñalosa

"As mayor of Bogota, Colombia, Enrique Peñalosa accomplished remarkable changes of monumental proportions for the people of his country in just three years.

Peñalosa changed the way Bogota treated its non-driving citizens by restricting automobile use and instituting a bus rapid transit system which now carries a 1/2 million residents daily. Among other improvements: he widened and rebuilt sidewalks, created grand public spaces, and implemented over one hundred miles of bicycle paths.

TOPP Executive Director Mark Gorton discusses with Penalosa some of these transportation achievements and asks what the future could hold for NYC if similar improvements were made here."

Fonte:
http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/interview-with-enrique-penalosa-long/