Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways

Introduction

Introduction Visions of Urban Freeways: Magic Motorways or Daggers in the Heart of Town? Few decisions have affected American cities as much as those involving urban freeways. These massive infrastructure projects have reconfigured urban form, relocated tens of thousands of people, cost billions of dollars of transportation funds, and supplanted neighborhoods. This is a story of those freeways. We recount the original love affair with the newly invented mode of vehicle movement—the freeway, including freeways through cities. That love affair was influenced by actors ranging from the visionary to the very pragmatic. The professionals involved included highway engineers, urban planners, landscape architects, and architects, with the highway engineers taking the lead role. Both cooperation and conflict emerged as these (mostly) men struggled across half a century to shape urban freeway policy and construction. We review the evolution of their design ideas through time as they tried to respond to rapidly changing demographic patterns with a dramatically evolving concept of how to tackle inner city traffic congestion, ever-growing movement to the suburbs , interstate commerce, and national defense. We then describe challenges to urban freeway construction as the costs and perceived costs to their completion became increasingly recognized. We chronicle the history of controversies that occurred nationwide, but not in all locales. Changing Lanes sets the analysis within two contexts. We first address the competing visions of city form and development held by various urban professionals and decision makers. These images varied greatly. Some saw the urban highway as a symbol of modernism and efficiency that, using professional methods, could be integrated into the urban center to improve many elements of the quality of urban life. Others predicted that, xii Introduction without attention to aesthetics and multiple transportation needs, the inner city multiple-lane, limited-access road would counter good city planning. Whatever the vision, in the early decades of high-speed urban corridors the influence of the promise of a new machine age—a romantic one to be sure—was great. Professionals of all kinds believed that municipal problems in American cities would be solved using methods at their disposal. Our analysis then moves to a second context. We lay out the immensely influential major shifts in the regulatory environment of freeway construction (and the construction of other major public works) in the United States. The several-decades-long (from the 1920s on) infatuation with cars and an unquestioned reliance on urban roads as urban problem solvers changed dramatically in the years of the late 1960s through the 1970s. Congress and state legislatures passed important new laws that guided where freeways can be built, with which funds, after which types of consultation and analysis, and with what impact. Lawmakers and courts required that projects be planned and completed with maximum sensitivity to the environment, with concern for relocation of the displaced, and with active citizen participation, not solely that of technocrats , select business interests, and administrative officials. They required that policy makers consider alternatives other than what, in the 1950s, had become the traditional urban choice. The story of change is told first in an overall review of urban freeway controversies that arose across the United States. We then focus on three different cases: Syracuse, New York, a Snow or Rust Belt city that early on embraced freeways through its center; Southern California, which rejected some routes and then changed its plans and built what was then the most expensive urban road; and Memphis, Tennessee, which closed its core to Interstate 40. We aim to describe the history of urban freeways through both a broad overview of competing influences and a narrow focus on the details of cases where the competition played out very differently. As Oscar Handlin argued regarding how urban affairs needed to be described: “how these developments unfolded, what was the causal nexus among them, we shall only learn when we make out the interplay among them by focusing upon a city specifically in all its uniqueness.”1 Why Syracuse, Los Angeles, and Memphis? Why examine urban freeways in these three places? For those who know, or knew, these areas the local interest is clear. For readers who do not Introduction xiii know these places, the events in the case studies are part of a history that is not only national but also worldwide: the impact of the automobile on the way we live—from East St. Louis to post–World War II Germany...