7 Urban Freeways To Tear Down Today–And What Tomorrow Might Look Like If We Do

Yonah Freemark and Jebediah Reed of The Infrastrcturist bring us this article on freeways that should be torn down.  Although there is a lot of crossover between this list and the Congress for the New Urbanism‘s list of Freeways Without Futures, they are separate and do have some differences.  Urban freeways function as walls, cutting off neighborhoods from the rest of the city with disastrous results.  They are often built along lakefronts and waterways, destroying what could be a great asset to a city.  When freeways have been torn down and turned into surface-level roads, such as in Portland and San Francisco, they have had wonderful results as far as revitalizing their neighboring districts.  Their list of freeways to tear down includes:

Cleveland: West Shoreway

Seattle: Alaskan Way Viaduct

Oklahoma City: I-40

New Haven: Route 34

Buffalo: Skyway

Syracuse: I-81

Baltimore: Jones Falls Expressway

I think it’s great that people are willing to re-examine urban freeways and the negative impacts they have on cities, and I hope more cities (including my hometown of Pittsburgh, which could afford to tear down both I-376 along the Monongahela River and I-579 which cuts off the Strip, Hill and Uptown districts from Downtown) follow the example of Milwaukee and others and tear down their freeways.