There are many limited access highways across the country that cut of the water fronts in cities.  Most of these highways were built along waterfronts because it was cheaper.  There were not as many building to demolish or overpasses to create.  The thought process of highway planners during the United States highway boom was to build the most cost-efficient highway.  As a result, society is now paying for its devastating impacts.

When you lose a waterfront, you lose vitality.  People are less inclined to go to these areas if access to it is difficult.  When you have a highway that separates the land from the water, it makes it more difficult for people get to it.  And when you don’t have an influx of people in areas, the area decays and becomes run down.  This is what happened to many cities across the nation.

There are solutions to such problems that some cities have done to beautify and encourage people to go to waterfronts that have previously been cut off by highways.  Some cities have buried the highway completely granting full access to the water.  Others, have removed the highway and created grand boulevards lined with trees and shrubs with many stop lights for pedestrians to walk over.   And there are cities that have reinvigorated areas by taking in to account the landscape the highway goes through and building many bridges across.

The most expensive solution is burying the highway and the cheapest is to create a boulevard.  Cities should think about how to revitalize these areas that are cut off by enacting these solutions.  New York City did it on its west side and will benefit many generations in the future.  Look at my blog post about the West Side Highway.  It goes into a little more detail.

The West Side Highway Viaduct before it was demolished in 1989.

The current West Side highway is shown in the header image on the top of this page.  It is now a grand boulevard lined with trees and bikeways making it one of the most aesthetically pleasing streets in New York City.  Of course, by its name it lies on the west side of Manhattan and is a major thoroughfare on that side of town.

However, the West Side Highway was not always like that.  It was once a limited access viaduct that stretched from the World Trade Center to the Bronx.  New York City on the west side was primarily an industrial area and having the viaduct proved valuable for business and commuters.  It was an expressway that bypassed all the congestion of New York City traffic and was praised for just that.

During the late 60s and 70s maintenance on the viaduct was considerably lacking.  New York City as like many other cities was going through rough economic times and could not afford the upkeep of its highways.  It came to a point that the west side viaduct was so structurally deficient that a cement truck on its way to fix the road deck collapsed a section of the structure in 1973.  How ironic.

The elevated highway was immediately shutdown.  Instead of fixing the problem, NYCDOT   did not want to invest the $88 million to repair it.  The structure remained standing for sixteen years before it was finally demolished in 1989.  However, there were plans in 1977 for the structure to be rebuilt, but drivers found other routes to get to where they need to go.  City officials did not find the economic and societal costs worth it.  Officials instead made it into a grand boulevard in 1999 which made the area much nicer.

The new open area on the water front has revitalized the west side of NYC and has benefited generations of citizens.  There used to be an rusting and decaying structure that was the blight of the west side and people did anything to avoid it.  Now people, want to live there and walk along the waterfront.  Old factory buildings were restored to offer living spaces.  The removal of the west side highway has benefited NYC in so many ways and I believe other cities in this country should take this as a good example and apply it to highways that cut off their waterfront.

(http://www.nycroads.com/roads/west-side/)

When the United States was going through the highway boom in the 50s and 60s, there were a lot of planned routes through every major city.  Most came to fruition, but many were not constructed due to community opposition or lack of funding.  Interstate 78 in NYC is one of those unbuilt routes.  It currently ends in New Jersey at the Holland Tunnel entrance, but there were plans for it to go through the tunnel, through Manhattan via the Lower Manhattan Expressway (unbuilt), over the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, via the Bushwich Expressway (Unbuilt) to Kennedy Airport, then north to the Bronx. The map above shows part of the route.

I actually think about, how NYC would be different if all the routes that were planned were actually built.  It would have been a very different place.  These additional routes would have eased congestion on the road network, but destroy many communities.  Furthermore, if you build new roads it creates an induced demand where more people than before would drive.  So these new roads would have eventually become congested anyway.

Canal Street is the arterial street in Manhattan that drivers take to drive between the Holland Tunnel and the Williamsburg & Manhattan Bridges. These drivers exited highways in New Jersey and Brooklyn and have no choice, but drive on local streets.

But is it better to have congestion on the highways and not on local streets?  I think so.  This is how it is now in NYC.  I-78 would have traveled in lower Manhattan connecting the Williamsburg Bridge to the Holland Tunnel.  That is a major corridor for drivers to travel between Long Island and New Jersey, but there is no highway link between them.  Currently, vehicles crowd the street, sometimes taking over an hour to travel one mile.  I cannot imagine that being good for air quality.

The original plans for the I-78 Lower Manhattan Expressway called for an elevated highway for the majority of its route which would require a lot of condemning of homes.  That is one of the major reasons to why it was not constructed.  It would have been an eyesore like some of NYC’s current elevated highways.

So today NYC is plagued with crippling congestion in its downtown area.  I think the only feasible solution that people would support is a underground expressway connecting the bridge and the tunnel.  I can see that happening one day because we are delaying a problem that continues to get worse. It would be extraordinarily difficult, but I find it cool to just picture such an achievement and driving through it.

The unbuilt Lower Manhattan Expressway

(http://www.nycroads.com/roads/bushwick/)

(http://www.nycroads.com/roads/clearview/)

(http://www.nycroads.com/roads/lower-manhattan/)