The tragedy of the Urban Interstate is finally being reversed
One of the great mistakes of transportation planning of the twentieth century in the US, if not the biggest, was the urban interstate. Instead of having interstates travel from city to city and then once arriving at the city limits going around the city (aka a belt highway), the way most european cities have built their major highways, in the US we rammed the interstates straight through cities and out the other side. In the process the US destroyed countless neighborhoods. In addition, the highways often traveled along or close to the waterfront, blocking access to the water from the city itself. Countless cities met this fate: Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston, St Louis, Kansas City, etc. Cities like St Louis that once had a vibrant downtown have been cut into pieces by urban interstates, ruining the neighborhoods in their path.
The good news here is that people have finally woken up to the fact that the urban interstate was never a good idea to begin with. The problem, of course, is that at this point the highways are full of cars and people, and spatial patterns have grown up around these highways. So just demolishing them is often impossible politically. There have been exceptions, like in San Francisco when the Embarcadero waterfront highway was demolished in 1991, when a urban highway was allowed to be torn down without a replacement built, but those have been few and far between.
So transportation planners around the US have begun to realize that the only way to fix these problem highways is to bury them or move them. Boston, with the much derided Big Dig, was the poster child for tunnels, although Seattle is heading that way as well. And despite the cost, the Big Dig has been quite a success. Now other cities are getting into the act. Providence, RI is moving its east-west urban freeway, Interstate 195, from the waterfront to a point much farther out of town and to the south. This is going to open up the waterfront, as well as acres of land that was formerly occupied by the elevated freeway, right in the heart of the city. Like in Boston, this is creating an enormous redevelopment opportunity, and one that is being greatly anticipated by the residents and institutions of Providence. New parks, mixed use developments and educations institutions are all planned.
One can only hope that more cities will examine this, as well as other urban freeway relocations, and plan their own. (St Louis, I am talking to you here!)
The New York Times reports below on the redevelopment possibilites in Providence:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/realestate/commercial/11iway.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
