FOR CONSIDERATION - CUDC Quarterly 1:4 - Winter 2001
Revising Infrastructure
The Ohio Department of Transportation’s ongoing Innerbelt Study is significant not only for the specific opportunities it presents to fix an unsafe stretch of road, but also for what it portends. Many of our region’s freeways are nearing their design life-spans. Others have already exceeded them. Fixing the freeway network will require a huge investment, so huge that it presents a perfect opportunity to take a fresh look at the freeways’ impact, especially in urban areas. In cities freeways are as much barriers as they are connectors, and the damage done to many urban areas during the heyday of freeway building deserves some remediation as the freeways themselves are repaired. Here are a few concerns that ought to figure into any plans for reinvestment in the freeway system:
Where freeways have been cut through a pre-existing street network, they often leave an appalling mess of shabby dead-end streets and confusing traffic patterns. The relatively few pre-existing streets that were allowed to cross over or under the freeway seldom work as connections for pedestrians or cyclists, and their presence does little to mitigate the freeway’s role as a divider in the cityscape. How can the process of rebuilding a freeway be used to fix some of this damage? How can we make under- and over-passes more inviting with lighting, plantings and other means?
Even worse than over- or under-passes are the skinny pedestrian bridges used to connect orphan residential areas with parks, schools, playgrounds, shopping centers and other neighborhood amenities that have been cut off by freeways. These bridges are invariably miserable and often frightening. Is there no other way to guard against thrown objects hitting cars than eight-foot high chain-link fences? Surely, there’s a way to design a pedestrian bridge that doesn’t look like the perimeter of a prison camp.
Although especially dramatic and complex freeway interchanges have been known to inspire awe, freeways on the whole are pretty ugly and dull. They are usually designed as purely utilitarian structures, even though they are among the most widely seen elements of our cities. Compared to the overall cost of freeway construction, the additional cost of providing for innovative public art would be fairly minimal, and mechanisms should be developed to mandate the inclusion of an art component in freeway projects. Going further, one could imagine really interesting collaborations between artists, landscape architects, architects and engineers to create new ways of dealing with the freeway environment of ramps, berms and retaining walls. Would it be too much to ask for the occasional beautifully engineered bridge, as well?
We need to think about keeping our options open. One of the biggest problems the freeways pose is that they were created as the key component of a single-mode transportation system. Even the most idealistic of us would agree that we can’t do without them right now, and those of us who drive Interstate 77 a lot would agree that some of the region’s freeways must be widened (short-sighted though that may be). However, with the exception of the current occupants of the White House, we almost all realize that this thing with cars and fossil fuels can’t go on forever. Is it possible to think now about how a revised freeway system might begin to work with other modes of transportation, including rail networks that are not economically feasible right now, but might become feasible in the mid-term?
Finally, some cities have identified freeways that could be replaced with surface level boulevards without much hindrance to traffic. Any candidates in our region? Could, for example, Cleveland’s lakefront be made much more accessible by turning the shoreway (the region’s first freeway) into a boulevard?
