Journal of Planning History

This essay highlights key themes of the five essays that comprise this special issue of the Journal of Planning History on the post-Interstate Era. It outlines in broad strokes the role of highway engineers and politicians in planning and financing the Interstate Highway System. The Interstates had a positive impact on economic growth and automobility, yet citizens groups in many cities challenged route decisions that destroyed neighborhoods and damaged sensitive environments. By the early 1970s, when the Interstate System was mostly completed, Congress opened up the Highway Trust Fund for mass transit alternatives. However, our authors emphasize the persistence of conflict over transportation planning and policy. Construction of late-developing Interstate segments in cities such as St. Paul, Minnesota and Huntsville, Alabama revived the freeway revolt, but unsuccessfully. Highway planners and policy experts developed controversial new strategies for moving traffic, as in Boston’s “Big Dig,” or for creative transportation financing, as with the Chicago Skyway and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. By the end of the twentieth century, planners and politicians in some cities sought to reverse poor route decisions of an earlier era by tearing down elevated freeway segments most judged ugly, onerous, and unnecessary. In the twenty-first century, the engineers, planners, and politicians who control the Interstate Highway System face new challenges as the aging highway infrastructure requires rebuilding and retrofitting in an era of economic decline and political cost cutting.

In 1972, an anti-freeway movement in St. Paul, Minnesota, successfully leveraged new federal Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) requirements to bring a halt to construction on the final leg of I-35E, leading into downtown. What began as a typical NIMBY (not in my backyard) battle soon produced a thoughtful environmental critique of urban freeways, sparking a debate over replacing the freeway with a low-speed parkway. Protesters ultimately failed to generate the political support necessary to cancel the Interstate, but when the last leg of I-35E opened in 1990, it was not as a classic urban freeway, but as a “parkway” replete with various “green” features.

In 1968, the Federal Highway Administration allotted twenty-one additional Interstate Highway miles for a spur into Huntsville, Alabama. This article details the long subsequent battle to build the Huntsville spur. Such late additions to the Interstate System stood to be challenged on all fronts amid the nationwide Freeway Revolt and a shifting legislative environment in Congress. Federal highway policy changes during the 1960s and early 1970s gave freeway opponents opportunities to challenge controversial highways. However, decentralized metropolitan growth encouraged Huntsville leaders and city planners to support construction of the new urban expressway. Despite concerns about environmental damage and racial impacts, Huntsville’s freeway revolt faltered. Further, this article argues that, despite Huntsville’s late addition to the Interstate System, the local highway planning process mirrored the earlier national vision of expressway-driven redevelopment of declining central cities.

While most analyses of late-twentieth-century highway policy suggest a shift toward open system design, bottom-up federalism, and the devolution of transportation governance, the history of Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel project, informally known as the “Big Dig,” runs counter to this trend. Though the project emerged in the 1970s during a time of unprecedented citizen activism in transportation planning, ultimately the privatization of political power proved to be the Big Dig’s most important legacy for twenty-first-century urban highway projects.

This article examines efforts to lease revenue-generating transportation facilities in the twenty-first century, focusing on two high-profile toll roads: the Pennsylvania Turnpike, operated by an independent public authority, and the Chicago Skyway, originally built and managed under the auspices of the City of Chicago. In 2004, the Chicago City Council unanimously approved a ninety-nine-year Skyway lease for $1.83 billion. In contrast, the fate of the Pennsylvania Turnpike was hotly contested, and in 2008 a long-term lease deal failed to win approval. The divergent history of these facilities highlights the close relationship between infrastructure financing and the locus of control, with important implications for transportation planning.

At least two dozen American cities have discussed or planned removals or teardowns of inner-city elevated expressways, and a few cities have already done so. In the 1970s, Boston, New York City, and Portland, Oregon initiated such teardowns, each with a different replacement: Boston began replacing its elevated Central Artery with a system of tunnels, later known as the Big Dig; New York replaced its West Side Highway with a street-level boulevard; and Portland bulldozed its Harbor Drive to make way for a waterfront park. Now, many cities are re-evaluating past highway policy that pushed elevated interstate highways through central cities, with consequent severe damage to housing, businesses, and neighborhoods. The teardown movement is high on the agenda of the Congress for the New Urbanism, now headed by John Norquist. A former Mayor of Milwaukee, Norquist pioneered the twenty-first century expressway teardown in an effort to eliminate an unneeded eyesore and spur downtown economic development. This article surveys the debate over teardown policy in several cities. It also analyzes the movement generally, suggesting that the main thrust is to compensate for past decisions that damaged central cities, but that the movement poses no threat to the heavily used urban expressways that millions of drivers rely on every day. Many teardown advocates have also promoted greater investment in mass transit and light rail.