Key figures in the removal of highways from waterfronts in Milwaukee and San Francisco presented their experiences last week at a symposium at the NY Botanical Garden. The event was organized by proponents of decommissioning the Sheridan Expressway in the South Bronx.

Former Mayor John Norquist led Milwaukee to tear down the Park East Freeway, providing 26 acres for new development downtown. Architect Boris Dramov designed the Embarcadero waterfront district that was restored after a decision to eliminate rather than rebuild an earthquake-damaged freeway.

Norquist provided a general critique of transportation planning in and around American cities, noting that many of the street types found in New York City do not appear in today’s state DOT manuals or roadway classifications. "If you asked the DOT to build Lexington Avenue today, they couldn’t do it," he said. But he emphasized that because of the age of the American urban freeway system, questions about whether spending big money to rebuild its elements is good money after bad projects are cropping up all over the country. Norquist is now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Norquist emphasized the resilience and capacity of street grid systems that disperse and distribute traffic, as opposed to limited-access systems that concentrate it and are easily disrupted by systemic or occasional bottlenecks. Norquist illustrated the point with an analogy to the contrast between the water storing, filtering and cleaning power of a natural wetland versus flood and pollution-prone streams that have been diverted into artificial courses ― a point not lost on the many Bronx River restoration advocates attending the event.

Norquist said the Milwaukee street grid had handled traffic that previously used the Park East, but noted it took a lot of convincing to persuade drivers and business interests that people would be able to reach their destinations in the freeway’s absence. His answer to questions about how the end result was achieved amounted to: "I was the mayor." But he took the chamber of commerce president to Amsterdam to view the dense, highway-less city environment and forged a broad consensus, especially when the high cost of rebuilding the highway became known. For more on the Milwaukee case, see newurbannews.com/FreewayRazeJul04.html.

Dramov described the process he and the city ran to build a similar consensus for removing the Embarcadero Freeway. Even prior to the 1989 earthquake, urbanists had argued for the removal of elevated waterfront highways in the Bay Area, including the Embarcadero and sections of I-280 south of the Bay Bridge. Extensive quake damage brought the issue to a head. Again, it was the business community that required the most convincing. Tourism industry leaders in areas like Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf north of downtown were concerned that customers would be unable to reach them without the highway. Modeling showed again that the street grid would be able to efficiently absorb traffic. Indeed, the work found it was more effective to cut I-280 back even further than originally planned in order to expose exiting it to a broader section of the street grid. Dramov said a critical aspect of the work was to keep the emphasis on problem-solving and striving toward agreed upon goals, as opposed to letting the issue become a battle between polarized positions on the issue. Dramov’s company, ROMA Design, is now working with Seattle to replace the waterfront Alaskan Way Viaduct.

The Sheridan Expressway case offers some contrasts to these examples. Because relatively few vehicles use the Sheridan, capacity is not a huge concern — the rest of the Bronx network should be able to handle any diverted traffic. The main transportation issue is truck access to Hunts Point industries, and the fact that residents do not want trucks dispersing throughout local grids. The plan put forward by Sheridan decommissioning advocates addresses the problem by proposing a new interchange from the Bruckner Expressway at Leggett Avenue, a major gateway to industrial Hunts Point.

In next week’s MTR, we will describe how Bronx elected leaders, state transportation officials, local business groups, community representatives and others responded to the highway demapping presentations at last week’s symposium.

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