Freeway removal is a public policy of urban planning designed to create mixed-use urban areas with a concentration of residential, commercial, and other land uses. Also known as activity centres, cities have begun removing existing or incomplete infrastructure to create parks, waterfronts, and boulevards. In the redevelopment of city landscapes, some cities remove freeways from urban landscapes in an effort to minimize blight and create better land use and smart growth. Freeway removal is an attempt to create transit-oriented development cities that are both walkable and bicycle-friendly.
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In some cities, strategies were implemented or planned for freeway removal policies to tear down highways that cut through neighborhoods. These freeways created blight that minimized use of land space and reduced the quality of life for city residents. The alternative that some cities have chosen for urban design is to replace elevated highways with boulevards to restore neighborhoods affected by highway construction. In some regions, freeway removal has been proposed but these plans have not yet been completed or funded. There are political battles, in many cases, between citizens' groups who are proponents of freeway removal proposals and governments supporting the vested interests that want to keep the freeways.[1]
To increase land usage, the demolition of freeways is often a part of the discussion for both city and state’s governmental strategies. Cities planning redevelopment of certain neighborhoods such as Washington, D.C.’s Whitehurst Freeway in the neighborhood of Georgetown, were set for demolition but were frozen so the city may do an environmental impact study. Other cities such as Nashville, Tennessee, whose government is planning to demolish the downtown loop where three major interstates converge I-65, I-40, and I-24, are planning replace these areas with parks, boulevards, and mixed-use communities that will reconnect their cores with adjacent neighborhoods.[2]
To counteract urban sprawl, some cities have made redevelopment plans around urban intensification. Urban intensification—also known as Compact Cities in Europe—is an urban planning technique which promotes high residential density with mixed land uses based around an efficient public transport system. Typically, cities redevelop neighborhoods to concentrate growth in the center of the city with the goal of better land usage to support a high concentration of jobs and residents. Smart growth principles and incentives generate residential, retail, and recreational development. The purpose is to transform deteriorating, low-density commercial corridors into mixed-use corridors, focused around transit-oriented development. Cities have implemented plans to use intensification corridors functioning as boulevards aimed at being transit supportive and pedestrian friendly, and providing a focus for higher density mixed-use development.[3] The success of transit oriented development along these corridors with subsequent increase in transit ridership has been well documented in neighborhoods such as Ballston and Rosslyn in Arlington County, Virginia.[4] Other cities, such as Portland Oregon, have implemented freeway removal policies to create intensification corridors. Much of this began in the freeway and expressway revolts of the 1960s and 1970s.
Some cities have removed freeways and replaced them with boulevards. Cities such as Harbor Drive in Portland, Oregon and Park East Freeway—which was replaced with McKinley Boulevard in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—were successful freeway removal projects that reduced traffic, created economic development and allowed for the creation of new neighborhoods and commercial districts. These cities have experienced economic and environment success and become models for alternative urban planning.
Many other cities have plans or are discussing the removal of freeways in their policies for redevelopment such as: