Freeways Without Futures - Replacing Urban Highways

Report by the Congress for the New Urbanism identifies the ten greatest opportunities in America for replacing aging urban highways with boulevards or avenues and reconnecting the surrounding neighborhoods.

Inner Loop Rochester, New York

Inner Loop, prior to being filled-in. Image Credit: Stratus Imaging

First completed in 1965, the Inner Loop of Rochester, New York was designed to wrap like a noose around downtown. Combined with the rolling demolition of urban renewal, the Inner Loop served to lure and siphon residents out of the city center—and Rochester’s downtown population plummeted. “We built an evacuation route,” jokes Rochester City Engineer James McIntosh. “It worked. Everybody evacuated.”

In the past decade, however, downtown Rochester has staged a dramatic comeback. Business and retail activity has returned to the city, and its downtown population is expected to rise more than 400% by 2020. The partial removal of the Inner Loop, a groundbreaking project currently in its finishing stages, has helped drive that renaissance.

With community support and funding assistance via a USDOT TIGER grant, a one-mile segment of the Inner Loop is being filled in and restored as a walkable, multimodal at-grade boulevard surrounded by mixed-use development. While the original highway boasted twelve travel lanes despite only carrying 6,000 vehicles per day, the replacement boulevard design will require only three lanes of space—plus on-street parking, sidewalks, and green space.

Inner Loop during construction, circa 2015. Image Credit: Stantec

While other cities have removed elevated and surface highways, Rochester may be the first to fill in a below-grade highway, according to The New York Times. As part of the Inner Loop conversion project, north-south streets are being reconnected for two-way traffic for the first time in more than 50 years. In effect, the project has reopened downtown for residents of Rochester’s neighborhoods.

Thanks to the project, six acres of government-owned land, and more private land, is available for redevelopment. Every parcel has a developer on board, with a mix of residential, retail, commercial, and civic uses planned. One large residential project has already completed its first phase, featuring 70 new market-rate apartments, and additional for-sale townhouses and affordable apartments are planned.

“We had a moat that separated the East Side neighborhood from downtown,” Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren told The New York Times. “Filling in the Inner Loop gives people the ability to more easily get around. It gives us more space to develop. Before this, businesses had to stop development. They had nowhere to go because of that highway.”

Now, the City of Rochester wants to fill in the northern section of the Inner Loop, which carries just 20,000-25,000 vehicles a day, and replacing it with a surface street—reconnecting the entire east and north side of downtown to nearby neighborhoods. Studies have shown that the majority of the traffic can absorb into the downtown street grid, which is well-equipped to handle the load.

Beyond even that section, the remaining Inner Loop continues to pose physical barriers between the downtown and adjacent neighborhoods, and much of the land on the corridor is vacant with an opportunity for development. The Inner Loop transformation may continue to drive Rochester’s growth in the future—revitalizing neighborhoods, bringing businesses, and adding jobs.

Interstate 280 San Francisco, California

I-280 Spur today. Image Credit: Jessica Christian, SF Examiner

When the City of San Francisco chose to demolish rather than rebuild two earthquake-damaged freeways in 1989, it began a historic natural experiment in urban planning. Ultimately, that example would prove to the world that removing in-city highways could boost quality of life, economic development, and housing affordability.

Now, the City is looking toward its first fully voluntary freeway removal: 1.2-mile spur of I-280, north of 16th Street, which currently links US 101 to Mission Bay.

Just as the property tax base rose and thousands of units of affordable housing were added after the Embarcadero and Central Freeway came down, removing the I-280 Spur would open new opportunities for market-rate and affordable development in the city’s urban core.

The removal of the I-280 Spur and its replacement with a surface boulevard has been endorsed by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and studied by Bay Area nonprofit SPUR. In December 2012, a report by the City of San Francisco Planning Department compared the direct costs and benefits of replacing the 280 with a modern highway versus converting it to an urban boulevard alongside the redevelopment of the 4th/King Railyards.

Crucially for San Francisco, this project could reconnect severed neighborhoods like Mission Bay, Potero Hill, and SoMa. Once-undesirable land would be opened up to new housing and commercial development. In the face of the Bay Area’s housing crisis, this development could copy the highly successful Market & Octavia Area Plan—using diverse housing types and mixed-use buildings to fit into the established character of the neighborhood.

Drawing showing I-280 converted to an urban boulevard. Image Credit: SPUR

Moreover, the removal of the spur could serve as a catalyst for transformative projects such as the forthcoming Transbay Transit Center—scheduled to be completed late 2017—and a possible high-speed rail station where I-280 currently terminates. The freeway removal project, with its considerable political will and likely high return on investment, is a critical first step. The Railyard Alternatives and I-280 Boulevard Feasibility Study is currently underway to examine this removal.

A new neighborhood at the 4th and King Street railyards is one of many opportunities offered by the removal of the I-280 spur. “Together, these facilities consume more than 30 acres (about 1.3 million square feet) and represent antiquated uses in high value area,” wrote Gillian Gillett, the city’s transportation director, in a memo to Caltrain, which runs a commuter rail line on the San Francisco peninsula. “These sites also become the catalyst for the next round of center city job creation.”

She adds: “The region is in a position to undertake a series of major transportation moves to unify the high speed rail project, through the early investment in Caltrain electrification. It would be a mistake to move forward with electrification without also planning for transit oriented land use changes, such as an entire new neighborhood at 4th and King, that could produce significant ridership, create hundreds of millions of dollars of joint land use development opportunities and even more dynamic neighborhoods centered around the Caltrain stations.”