Cover them up or tear them down? Freeway fights enter a new era
Advocates are questioning the wisdom of freeway caps, insisting instead on the full removal of urban freeways.
The New York State Department of Transportation was all set to begin construction on an ambitious infrastructure project designed to heal the harms freeway builders perpetrated on Buffalo’s East Side decades ago. The project would construct a three quarter mile park above the trenched Kensington Expressway through a predominantly Black, low-income neighborhood, providing acres of new green space and knitting the street grid back together. But now, the project is on ice.
This “Reconnecting Communities” project is precisely the kind of Biden Administration initiative that President Donald Trump has sought to kill. In this case, however, Trump is not the cause of the delay. It’s a group of local activists called the East Side Parkways Coalition who think the project isn’t ambitious enough.
In February, a judge granted the community group’s request to halt the Kensington Expressway project until the state does a more extensive environmental review, effectively delaying it for at least a year. That gives the East Side Parkways Coalition more time to advocate for their preferred solution: the complete removal of this two mile freeway stub, and the restoration of the entire Frederick Law Olmsted-designed parkway that it paved over.
All the details are in my CityLab story from this week. It’s a follow up on my more detailed feature on the Kensington Expressway debate from last year.
In this post, I want to zoom out and consider what this court ruling, and this project, say about the state of America’s freeway fights.
As I’ve written previously in this newsletter, freeway covers are one of the hottest trends in American urban planning. These caps or tunnels eliminate the surface-level unpleasantries of urban freeways while retaining maximum car access to the city center. A long list of cities are pursuing these kinds of projects, many of them with funds from the Biden Administration’s Reconnecting Communities program, including Buffalo, Portland, Detroit, Austin, Baltimore, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and the Bronx. (Some of those funds are in jeopardy from the Trump Administration's attempted clawbacks, as I explain in my latest CityLab story.)
But there have been flickers of dissent. In Buffalo, advocates cried foul about the plumes of unfiltered exhaust and particulate that would come out of either end of the tunnel, worsening air quality for the people who live nearby. In Austin, advocates describe a freeway cap as a means of “greenwashing” an otherwise destructive freeway widening. In Portland, advocates I’ve spoken with lament the “opportunity cost” of these billion dollar freeway fixes that don’t really improve transportation or mobility.
Even when they represent an improvement over the status quo, freeway covers quite literally entrench urban freeways for generations to come. They foreclose a future with fewer freeways, not just nicer freeways.
The freeway fight currently underway in Buffalo is the first to seriously debate these stakes. Ben Crowther, advocacy director for America Walks and the head of the Freeway Fighters Network, told me that this is the first time to his knowledge that an environmental lawsuit has halted a freeway cover. That’s a reflection of the dubious environmental benefits of these kinds of projects.
Of course, that’s not the whole story. I spoke to people in Buffalo who are upset to see a project put on hold that will in many ways improve upon the status quo. The delay is of a piece with America’s stultifying culture of NIMBYism and proceduralism that prevents big things from being built in cities. It’s no wonder many would assume that more environmental review will simply mean that nothing will ever get built.
It’s also true that paradigm-shifting infrastructure projects are really difficult and require visionary political leadership. If New York State and Buffalo were to move forward with the removal of the entire 1.8 mile Kensington Expressway, it would be one of the longest freeways ever dismantled in an American city. And it would be taking place in an area that is much less transit-rich than the cities where other such projects have previously occurred, like San Francisco and Manhattan. Even if the community were to come to a consensus on removing the freeway, they might have to navigate a slew of “anti anti-car” policies from Republicans in Washington in the coming years.
Pushing for the removal of the Kensington Expressway is a huge leap of faith. But, a growing chorus of Buffalonians believe, it could be worth it in the end.
I do not love the caps either, but I would take the caps where we can get them ONLY IF THE PROJECT DOES NOT ADD CAPACITY. I believe our fight should focus on no added freeway capacity. In regard to freeway removals, my trope is we need to stop the stabbings before the doctors can sew the wounds.