Existing urban freeways that would not even be considered now

[Pete from Boston]

When I started this thread, I was thinking about places like Youngstown, Rochester and Niagara Falls and their existing freeways that are no longer needed due to population loss.  Erie is now 30% larger than Youngstown, but compare their respective freeway systems

There's an interesting wikipedia article on US cities formerly over 100,000 population.  Youngstown leads the list in both percentage and total number lost.

[briantroutman]

I think the more relevant question would be: What freeways are today unnecessary because of population or industrial base loss?

Surely, there are a few in the rust belt, particularly in Ohio, that might qualify. But many declining industrial cities–Allentown, Reading, and Pittsburgh come to mind–probably wouldn't qualify because their freeway systems were not developed that extensively to begin with.

That said, I have a suspicion that population, economic activity, and vehicular traffic aren't as directly linked as you might assume. Even though Detroit might be on the rocks financially, has that resulted nearly empty "ghost freeways" that were once teeming with traffic? My guess is no, and instead, you probably have a disproportionately high percentage of people traveling by car (older cars at that) and taking more circuitous routes as they work at lower-paying jobs, shop at lower-end stores, live in low-end housing.

Are there any such "ghost freeways" in an urban setting? The only ones I can think of are rural, such as I-180 in Illinois, sections of the Mon-Fayette Expressway, and other such cart before the horse economic development boondoggles.

[cpzilliacus]

All of them.  If the EPA had existed in 1955, the interstate system would have never been built.  If the EPA had existed in 1930, the massive land reclamation and hydro / irrigation projects that make life possible in places like southern California, would have never been built.

I agree with you.

Though it's not just the USEPA (and the NEPA law and related regulations) that make the projects much more difficult and expensive to plan for and implement.  Consider, for example, Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, which the U.S. Army  Corps of Engineers has primary responsibility for enforcing.    There's also  Section 4(f) of the U.S. Department of Transportation Act, which makes it difficult and expensive to use parkland for federal-aid transportation projects.

Then there are state and local laws that impose more obstacles.   

But I also believe all of those can be dealt with under the leadership of elected officials (especially state governors). 

But since about 1970, a lot of political careers have been made out of opposing highway improvements (and other needed large-scale projects like airports, dams (and aqueducts), power plants (and transmission lines).  And many opposed to such projects have great faith a stagnant future for the United States.

Draw your own conclusions as to what part of the country NOW favors NIMBYism and BANANAism the most.

Large areas of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts come to mind first.

[cpzilliacus]

Are there any such "ghost freeways" in an urban setting? The only ones I can think of are rural, such as I-180 in Illinois, sections of the Mon-Fayette Expressway, and other such cart before the horse economic development boondoggles.

But history teaches some of us that if a project is held until the residential population (especially) grows out to a highway corridor (even one where the right-of-way is in reservation or owned by a government agency), then at least some of those residents will be NIMBYs that don't want the highway constructed.

[paleocon121171]

All of them.  If the EPA had existed in 1955, the interstate system would have never been built.  If the EPA had existed in 1930, the massive land reclamation and hydro / irrigation projects that make life possible in places like southern California, would have never been built.

Draw your own conclusions as to what part of the country NOW favors NIMBYism and BANANAism the most.

Unfortunately, you're probably right. We wouldn't have developed as much as a civilized nation with the current regulatory policies of the EPA in place back in the early 1900's. Route 66 would have been fought at every turn (pun intended). On a different note, the EPA has more legislative influence than one might think, and every smoking ban in the last 20 years can be attributed to their controversial (and highly disputable) early-1990's study into the harmful, deadly effects of secondhand smoke. I could definitely see them finding a way to prevent one of the greatest achievements of the mid-20th century from being fulfilled.

[Brandon]

IMHO, Lake Shore Drive (US 41) in Chicago would be laughed out of the room if it were to be proposed today.

Mike

Yet, ironically, it is the very existence of LSD that keeps development (with the exception of Lake Point Tower) in check and serves as the boundary for development versus parkland.

[Revive 755]

Are there any such "ghost freeways" in an urban setting? The only ones I can think of are rural, such as I-180 in Illinois, sections of the Mon-Fayette Expressway, and other such cart before the horse economic development boondoggles.

The Amstutz Expressway in Waukegan, IL perhaps?

IN 912/Cline Avenue might count since the bridge has been removed.

The Indiana Toll Road sometimes seems like it would count between US 41 and I-80/I-94, but I haven't been on it during rush hour yet.

[jp the roadgeek]

Some I thought of:

1. Conland-Whitehead highway in Hartford, CT: Was supposed to be I-484 to connect I-84 and I-91; never did, now it ends in a traffic circle.

2. CT 8 north of I-84: Became a dead end when MA refused to build its section of expressway.  South of I-84 is useful, though

3. Vine St. Expressway in Philly.

4. RI 10 expressway: duplicates I-95.

5. I-384, US 6 Willimantic bypass, CT 695, US 6 Johnston expressway: all part of killed off I-84 to Providence.

[NE2]

CT 695: part of killed off I-84 to Providence.

Part of the original Connecticut Turnpike. Apparently there were plans for a continuation diagonally across RI towards Boston.

[froggie]

most revitalization/gentrification would not have happened if not for the "easy" access that a nearby freeway provides.

Kacie already mentioned Seattle.  There's also areas of both Minneapolis, DC, and Norfolk that put the lie to this argument.

Much of the urban damage caused by the first-generation freeways were because we were Doing It Wrong.

Agreed, but they did it that way because it was A) cheap, and B) the "path of least resistance".  To have done it right from the get-go would've considerably increased the cost, with results being a longer time to completion and/or cancellations due to cost.

We wouldn't have developed as much as a civilized nation with the current regulatory policies of the EPA in place back in the early 1900's.

I think it's a moreso a case where we would have developed in a different fashion than we wound up in.

[Scott5114]

Unfortunately, you're probably right. We wouldn't have developed as much as a civilized nation with the current regulatory policies of the EPA in place back in the early 1900's. Route 66 would have been fought at every turn (pun intended).

I don't know about that. Two lane highways like US-66's earliest form don't have very much environmental impact because the ROW is so narrow (and 1920s-era highway design often took the path of least resistance, curving around things that modern highways would plow under). Even these days you scarcely see opposition to a new two-lane road unless it goes through a sensitive area like a park or does something like provide logging access to a new part of a virgin forest.

[briantroutman]

Even these days you scarcely see opposition to a new two-lane road...

I don't think this is true. I have seen cases where simple two-lane roads were opposed out of the purest form NIMBYism–simply because they might bring "other people" to someone's corner of the world. In one instance in my hometown, the local township simply wanted to restore about 1/10 mile of local road that had been a gravel lane up until the '60s but had since reverted to nature. This was proposed in part so that an isolated nursing home would have a second exit route in case of emergency. And yet scores of homes anywhere near the proposed extension had professionally printed signs staked in their lawns: "SAVE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD - NO NEW ROAD". As if the road their homes sat on was ordained by the Almighty as a Justified Level of Development, but 500 ft. of new asphalt nearby would catapult their Utopia on an irreversible course straight to Hell.

Two lane roads or other non-grade separated arterials sometimes get a pass from the "smart growth" crowd because they are seen as at least being a lesser evil than a true freeway. And even then, they'll only acquiesce to such construction only to serve the most dire traffic needs–places that, 50 years ago, would have been guaranteed a new freeway.

US 66 might not be fought at every turn today only because much of its length lies in rural midwestern and western locales where access to roads of any kind is seen as a harbinger of economic development. But anywhere even remotely suburban or urban, I don't doubt for a second that a simple US route would today be fought by politicians and regulators at all levels.

[NE2]

Had Nixon created the EPA before Ike created the Interstates, we might have a system more like France: minimal urban freeways and tolled rural freeways with lots of bridges and tunnels. In other words, we'd come closer to paying the external cost of fast driving.

[roadman65]

GA I-675 was to be connected to GA 400 to be another continuous freeway across the Atlanta Perimeter.

[Kacie Jane]

most revitalization/gentrification would not have happened if not for the "easy" access that a nearby freeway provides.

Kacie already mentioned Seattle.  There's also areas of both Minneapolis, DC, and Norfolk that put the lie to this argument.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'd meant my original message to be longer. I can think of two revitalized Seattle neighborhoods that are right on the freeway -- Northgate and South Lake Union -- though they happen to be off two of the most congested interchanges, and their revitalization is also more likely tied to public transportation.  Lake City is about as far from I-5 as the neighborhoods I originally mentioned, but with far easier access, and no major plans to improve transit, so that revitalization you might be able to link to the freeway. But largely speaking, I'd consider I-5 to be irrelevant at best to revitalization in and around Seattle.

[Stephane Dumas]

For Toronto, the elevated Gardiner Expressway come in mind. For Montreal, Ville-Marie(A-720), Bonaventure (A-10) woudn't be built it all today.

[J N Winkler]

Had Nixon created the EPA before Ike created the Interstates, we might have a system more like France: minimal urban freeways and tolled rural freeways with lots of bridges and tunnels. In other words, we'd come closer to paying the external cost of fast driving.

As a counterfactual, I would say that outcome is distantly possible, but highly improbable given what was known of the negative externalities of automobility in the early days of freeway development.

The EPA from the start was primarily a regulator of point-source pollution, and it took a long time for awareness to develop that automobiles deserved its attention.  The first indicator was open crankcase ventilation, which was found to be an important contributor of noxious pollution in the Los Angeles basin in the early 1960's, and that took quite a while to snowball into a realization that auto emissions in general required broad-spectrum regulation at the state and national level.  In the 1950's it would have been politically premature to object to a freeway on the basis of pollution rather than planning-related considerations such as access and loss of light.

Immediately after World War II, the US had a housing shortage, and a real estate lobby (entrenched since the 1920's) which pushed the idea that the best solution to this problem was for the private sector to build sitcom suburbs for the middle class and the upwardly mobile working class, with government intervention being largely limited to assistance through subsidies and favorable tax treatment.  (The latter extended not just to private housing--where the mortgage interest deduction applies--but also to commercial development.  Accelerated depreciation of commercial real estate, enacted by Congress in 1954, has been identified as a driver of suburbanization.)  Women, minorities, and the poor were largely locked out of the power structure at the time, and some authors such as Dolores Hayden have argued persuasively that their participation in the political process, if it had been allowed to happen, would have favored different types of residential building development, including ones (such as multifamily housing, remodelling rather than new-build, etc.) which favor dwelling in the city center and relying largely on public transit.

In the 1950's the problem of urban freeway development was everywhere seen primarily in terms of city planning.  The US was far from alone in being oblivious to the problems of point-source pollution--in London, for example, it took the "Great Smoke" of 1952 ("Oops, we just lost 20,000 people in that") to drive restrictions on coal burning.  But in western Europe the conditions and institutional norms faced by urban planners were very different.  In 1947 Britain attempted to nationalize the right to develop land, and both Britain and France had very heavy public-sector involvement in housing development that dated from well before World War II.  (British local authorities had the "corporation houses," while France had the "habitations à bon marché"; these were the nuclei for council housing and HLMs respectively.)  Both countries had baby booms, but these were far smaller as a percentage of the pre-World War II population than in the US.  Public-sector housing providers were large and influential and private-sector real estate lobbies had very little leverage.  It was considered responsible planning to have freeways as lines on a map, and responsible budgeting to ensure that lines were all they were.  Automakers, housebuilders, and highway contractors had much less space than their US counterparts to set up the one-hand-washes-the-other relationships that promote freeway development.

Motorization in the US was also much higher, both in absolute and per capita terms, so although the western European countries started to catch up in the 1950's, they were never anywhere near US levels of per capita car ownership, and in many cases still aren't.  That adds to the pressure for freeway development of some kind, though not necessarily in dense urban areas, and this effect was inevitably stronger in the US than elsewhere.

So, to try to condense what is really a book-length argument, I would say a 1950's EPA would have said "Cars not known to be an environmental problem" or "Planning issues not in our remit"; and we already know it was Truman, not Ike, who affronted the real-estate interests by refusing to push the MacDonald-Fairbanks urban highway plan in the late 1940's, and he did that for budgetary reasons only, not because he had a strong opinion on either freeways or the basic concept of the sitcom suburb.  (Ike definitely didn't like freeways in urban cores, but I observe he mourned them without investing much effort in stopping them.)

Another possible scenario, assuming we had somehow been able to postpone freeway development to a more modern period of enhanced awareness of auto pollution and other negative externalities of driving, is Spain:  very high levels of public investment both in roads and in other forms of transport, such as urban public transit, interurban passenger rail, bicycles, etc., resulting in dense freeway networks both in rural areas and large cities which, however, do not penetrate the old urban cores except in tunnel.  Spain has had very high private-sector housing demand and activity driven largely by a private-sector real-estate lobby which had gotten out of hand (similar to the US in the postwar years).  If we followed the Spanish pattern, chances are you ("you" in this case being a generic middle-class person) would be in your own house (illegally built, maybe) with keys to your vehicle within reach, only the vehicle would be smaller and far less likely to be a pickup truck or minivan.

But this development is driven partly by Spain's starvation of transportation infrastructure during the Franco years (he was interested only in building things, such as dams, factories, hotels for out-of-country tourists, etc., which could be used to pull in hard currency from abroad), an artificial condition which it is hard to imagine ever developing spontaneously in the US.

[Alps]

NJ 139: No other freeway in this region is built in a flood-prone trench and decked over with its own business route.
NJ 495: It's similar to the NYC expressways trenched beneath the streets, but something about the exposed rock faces and dozen overpasses is just so unlike anything NJ would normally do.
Pulaski Skyway: Who builds 5 mile bridges across a bunch of nothing? If the answer were NJDOT, we'd have already replaced it and built a few more good freeways as well.

[PHLBOS]

Some I thought of:
3. Vine St. Expressway in Philly.

Add I-95 through Center City & Penns Landing to that list.

Boston: the original Central Artery.

[elsmere241]

I-95 through Wilmington, Delaware.  I'd like to see the part between the I-495 junction and the Brandywine River bridge replaced with an urban parkway.  The area between Adams and Jackson would be a park, with a few public facilities - like a new Wilmington High - on it.  The rest could become I-195, and US 202 would follow DE 141 (with Tyler McConnell widened.)

[Henry]

I doubt that they'd ever try to route I-40 through Overton Park, and I don't think there's any viable alternative routing into Memphis to be considered. Same thing with I-70 in Baltimore.

[Urban Prairie Schooner]

Which EXISTING freways would not even be considered as needed.

The Florida Avenue Expressway in New Orleans is still officially on the books as planned, but given the events of 2005 and the fact that its proposed route serves the areas which suffered the most devastation and subsequent population loss, I doubt it will see the light of day any time soon.

Also, I question whether I-510 would be constructed were it still in the planning stages today, and/or not funded with federal interstate construction dollars.

The Earhart Expressway is underutilized and thus has questionable utility from a planning perspective, but this has more to do with inadequate connections to other roadways rather than genuine lack of traffic demand. I am sure LaDOTD is aware of this.

[TEG24601]

The problem with this sort of speculation is that many of the urban areas would not exist as they do without freeways.  There would be no suburbs, and the cities would be denser, more high-rises, like New York City (which really lacks the required freeways for a city of that size, even with great public transportation) or London.

It is likely that public transportation would have continued to grow, as while the price of gas would have been as cheap as it had been, the efficient storage of busses and cars would have prevented the massive expansion of road use, and demand would have likely stayed low.

[lordsutch]

I doubt that they'd ever try to route I-40 through Overton Park, and I don't think there's any viable alternative routing into Memphis to be considered. Same thing with I-70 in Baltimore.

I-40 could easily have been buried under North Parkway as cut-and-cover (it didn't even need to go under the park); they just didn't want to spend the money. And now they've ended up rebuilding two interchanges under traffic to fix the problem (and they're still not done), which probably will end up costing as much incrementally as just building it underground in the first place.

That said the north loop ended up underutilized anyway, because the suburban growth north of the Wolf River stalled out in the 70s in favor of moving east, so the loss of midtown I-40 isn't too bad, particularly since what eventually was built, including the parkway section, does 80% of what building the whole thing would've done.

The Earhart Expressway is underutilized and thus has questionable utility from a planning perspective, but this has more to do with inadequate connections to other roadways rather than genuine lack of traffic demand. I am sure LaDOTD is aware of this.

Indeed, once LaDOTD adds the proposed connections to Airline to the west and Causeway in the middle, Earhart will be pretty useful. Some sort of direct connectivity to Claiborne/Jefferson Highway at the parish line to/from the west would really help make it useful to people in Carrollton - as-is, if you're going to try to get on Earhart to go to the airport or shop somewhere in Jefferson Parish you might as well just go the extra few blocks to I-10, particularly since you can't turn left onto Earhart at Carrollton.

[NE2]

particularly since you can't turn left onto Earhart at Carrollton.

Is the Michigan Left setup really that bad?