A new movement is afoot: highway removal. Remember all those roads that we built, with the promise that they would alleviate traffic, stimulate commerce, put America on top?Some New Urbanists want them gone–at least, from our city centers. One of these groups in Louisville, Ky has been organizing for a few years now to remove the city’s waterfront expressway and reroute large portions of the highway, including a proposed bridge and highway extension project. The group is 86/64,and, as their name suggests, they want to eighty-six the highway, I-64.
“Widening roads to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity,” says Walter Kulash, the author of 86/64′s feasibility study of their proposed traffic patterns. Kulash is a prominent traffic engineer from Orlando, and buddies with New Urbanist planners. Certainly, if anyone knows anything about highways, it’s a traffic expert from Florida, an entire state of sprawl. I’m being droll, but you get the point.
At the top of My list of Things To Like About Highway Removal is the evidence that urban planners are responding to social justice activists’ calls for more equitable city development. Highways bisected, passed over, and obliterated entire communities–and, surprise, almost all the neighborhoods were minority communities. African-American neighborhoods were demolished and divided by highways, introducing hard-to-cross streets, dark underpasses, and destroying retail businesses along the underpasses. Removing these highways is a good first step towards ameliorating these effects.
The Congress for a New Urbanism has made a list of Top Ten Teardown Projects in an article called “Freeways Without Futures.” Louisville’s I-64 is on this list, no doubt due to 86/64′s carefully formulated (and well-branded) position. There’s a lot that I appreciate about this project and their message, but I don’t have space to go into that here. However, I am wary of many New Urbanist projects, and I’m not sure what 86/64′s organizational politics are. For example, they don’t have a page on their website for coalition groups, so I don’t know who they are allying themselves with.
There is a balance to be struck: how do we make our cities more pedestrian-friendly, encourage smart regional growth, but also work hard to combat the swift gentrification of neighborhoods (and displacement of their residents) that will arise from a visionary highway removal plan? Urban planning does not happen in a vacuum. If a city, such as Louisville, is going to encourage creative class development, they need to foster the development of a creative class, from the ranks of city residents. Too often, New Urbanists want to plan for a world in which political equity has been achieved; if we plan it, they will come around. 86/64 is an interesting plan, one that I will follow. Can they strike a balanced pose?
Ok, I didn’t mean to end on such a cynical note. Here’s the video from their homepage, complete with John Prine singing “My Old Kentucky Home.”
