Freeway Trouble!
by Steve Rugare
(CUDC Quarterly 4:3 - Summer 2005)

Although its roots go back to the 1920s and 30s, historians usually date the American freeway system to 1956. In that year, President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act that officially created the Interstate Highway System. That date is significant today because many of the massive infrastructure projects authorized in that 1956 act are nearing, or have passed, their design life spans. The post-war era was responsible for making auto-oriented infrastructure the armature for urban development patterns in the United States, and the next few decades will present the challenge of making sense of that decision, and its profound effects on the American landscape.

Those effects are most obvious in the suburban places that were developed in the wake of the freeways. To keep traffic moving at high speed, exits can’t be spaced too close together. This defining truth of freeway engineering means that large flows of vehicles downshift from freeway hyperspace to surface speeds at specific, widely spaced points. These points become what developers call “power centers,” huge congregations of retail outlets and parking lots organized around an interchange or freeway exit. In aerial photos they look rather like tumors. Their draw and their scale is vastly greater than what we would think of as a traditional neighborhood center. One of their effects, therefore, is to discourage a mix of uses. Around the freeway-oriented commercial nodes, one tends to find equally uniform residential nodes. The result, as numerous critics have written, is that the vast majority of Americans end up needing automobiles for even the most routine daily tasks.

All of this is old hat, of course, but it bears repeating when we consider the effects that freeways have had on the urban cores and first suburbs that were developed before World War II.

In urban areas, the pattern is more complex, but many of the same rules apply. Parts of the city with direct freeway access can prosper commercially. Those without it tend to dry up (unless they can be packaged as niche-market destinations). The result has been a gradual re-ordering of urban development patterns that were originally organized around streetcar lines and major surface arterials. The city tends to develop an overlay of nodes on the increasingly decrepit framework of corridors. However, it’s impossible to generalize about these effects, because they are the result of a complex history.

The most important actors in this story were the traffic engineers, whose primary mission was to speed traffic from the periphery to the central business district. Another ingredient was the political clout of various urban neighborhoods and their leaders. Add into the mix that this was the period of urban renewal, with demolition for freeways often linked to wholesale demolition for development, and the result is a very complicated history with a wide range of outcomes.

Often the results were paradoxical, even perverse. In Chicago, the site identified in Daniel Burnham’s famous 1908 plan for a grand civic plaza was occupied by the city’s major freeway interchange, and a very different sort of public space was built nearby in the commuter-oriented campus of the University of Illinois (on top of the neighborhood that had once been served by Jane Addams’ Hull House).

No example from Northeast Ohio has quite that degree of poetic symmetry, but the dislocations were equally massive. Some of the freeways were routed through existing rail and industrial corridors. Cleveland’s I-77 and some of the system in Akron and Youngstown are examples. In other cases, the freeways were integrated with large-scale slum clearance projects. Cleveland’s Central Interchange and the institutional district south of downtown all sit on what was once a fairly continuous fabric of immigrant and African-American communities. 

On Cleveland’s East Side, Interstate 90 cut off the neighborhoods from the lakefront in a brutal and blatantly racist maneuver. In the working class communities of Cleveland’s near West Side, the freeways simply ploughed through the existing fabric, leaving isolated enclaves to subsequent urban decay (see map below). In many cases—the Tremont and Lorain Station neighborhoods being the most extreme—commercial streets were cut off from nearby residents, and children were forced to walk exposed pedestrian overpasses to get to basic services like schools and parks.

In the last few decades, transportation policy has evolved and attempts have been made to remediate some of the damage caused by the initial construction of urban freeways. The result has been a wide range of “enhancement” projects of varying quality. Pedestrian overpasses and sound barriers are perhaps the most visible evidence of this trend. Whether they mitigate much of anything is another question. The sound barriers, in particular, are open to criticism on both functional and aesthetic grounds.

During the same period, a handful of cities has taken a far more radical approach to “fixing” their freeways. With an assist from the 1989 earthquake, San Francisco rid itself of the eyesore Embarcadero Freeway, setting the stage for a major new development south of downtown. In the cases of Toronto, with the removal of elevated waterfront freeways, and Boston, with the infamous “Big Dig,” the key factor was sustained high level political support for a project that would transform the urban landscape. Something analogous may be happening in Cleveland around the comparatively modest proposition of downgrading the Shoreway to some sort of boulevard or parkway, the key element of long-term plans for improving the city’s waterfront.

Not many (if any) other freeways in Northeast Ohio are serious candidates for downgrading, both due to traffic volumes and federal restrictions. Nor is another Big Dig in the cards, given the unending controversy and cost overruns associated with Boston’s mega-project. However, that doesn’t mean that freeway replacement can’t bring fundamental improvements to cities that have endured decades of freeway trouble. If the projects are done right, there could be qualitative improvements, not just remediations and enhancements that would be the civil engineering equivalent of “putting parsley around the pig.”

The key is to broaden the design parameters early in the process, so that overall urban quality is engineered into the project along with the efficiency and safety of traffic movements. To that end, federal transportation funding requires an extensive public process, including input from a wide range of public officials and citizens. The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) and its consultants have conducted just such a process for the Innerbelt reconstruction in Cleveland, the biggest and most complex infrastructure project planned for the region in the next few decades. This multi-year deliberative process has involved a large number of meetings, as well as print and electronic information campaigns. If anything, ODOT has gone beyond the bare bones of federal requirements in its efforts to keep in touch with the community.

That said, the outcome of the Innerbelt process remains very much in doubt. While the process has undoubtedly helped ODOT resolve some specific, localized issues, many who have observed the process closely think Cleveland may end up with a new Innerbelt that creates new problems for the city and does little to enhance the experience of arriving from the suburbs or the airport. It may be that a consultative public process can only achieve so much in relation to a project of this scale and complexity.

What’s the alternative? Experience elsewhere is fairly limited, but it suggests that infrastructure projects have much better outcomes if they have multi-disciplinary design teams from the beginning. At the CUDC’s “Making Good Streets” symposium in 2002, Yolanda Takesian showed inspiring examples of what has been achieved in Maryland when road projects are developed by teams of engineers, urban designers and planners. Those projects were for surface roads, not freeways, but something analogous is happening with freeways on the West Coast, where Caltrans (long one of America’s most loathed bureaucracies) is transforming itself. The nation’s largest highway authority now rewards innovative civic and environmental partnerships throughout the state and gives landscape architects and urban designers key roles in its projects.

Although the Innerbelt design process will soon be too far along to re-open some issues, such as the possibility of a world-class bridge over the Cuyahoga, it’s not too late to engineer civic values into key aspects of the project. The designs ODOT is developing involve some complicated trade-offs, and there may be ways that landscape, public art and urban design strategies could help reduce the down side of these.

Proposals for the a new central interchange need to be examined carefully, not just for the radii of the ramps or their affects on key employers nearby, but also or the overall experience they create for motorists. The interchange of I-90 and I-77 is a primary gateway into Downtown Cleveland for out-of-town visitors and for people from around the region attending sports events and visiting downtown attractions. The present interchange is disorienting and unimpressive, and it’s important to think about the new one a gateway continuous with the streets leading off of it. At the same time, urban design attention is needed to give an improved sense of continuity to the streets that now pass under (but may soon pass over) the interchange. This could improve connections with downtown, raise the value of property south of the interchange and create vital opportunities to enhance the surroundings of key institutions, especially Cuyahoga Community College’s Central Campus.

An even more important challenge is posed by the spacing of exits along the main Innerbelt connection east of Downtown. Ideally, one would like to connect with each of the major east-west streets, but the current exits are far too closely spaced and the ramps far too short for safety. The new Innerbelt is sure to have fewer exits into Downtown, and this means it could easily function as a bypass, speeding vehicles past a city center that is barely detectable from the recessed roadway. Given the huge investments made in Downtown in recent decades, an artful means of avoiding this bypass effect is essential. Without one, Cleveland’s decades-old freeway trouble could be about to get much worse.  

We don’t have to look to the ends of the Earth for examples of what can be done. Hargreaves Associates’ award winning work on the Louisville riverfront (now in its second phase) is a world-class example of inventive landscape design in and around a large-scale freeway. See more at www.hargreaves.com.

Above: Cleveland’s Innerbelt freeway looking north from Prospect Avenue. While the recessed configuration enhances the continuity of the surface streets that pass over it, there is little about this stretch of road that suggests the nearby presence of Downtown. Instead, motorists see scrubby urban vegetation and a few warehouses. This article disucsses one (admittedly speculative) suggestion for solving a similar problem.

Right: A historical map of Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood (click to enlarge), showing the fabric condemned to make way for the interchange of Interstates 71, 90 and 490.