• Crash diet for a freeway corridor

    Conversion to a boulevard would reduce the right-of-way of I-980 in Oakland by 75 percent, connecting neighborhoods and allowing mixed-use development where land now generates no tax revenues.
    I-980 remains a testament to the intense disapproval for freeway construction at the end of the highway-building era. Public opposition to its construction was so strong that the project was abandoned in 1971, only to be resurrected and finally completed over a decade later. Now, the excessively...Read more

  • A chance to repeat history

    Portland, Oregon, could open up the east bank of the Willamette River to adjacent neighborhoods and duplicate the success of the removal of Harbor Drive.
    Portland is a tale of two waterfronts. On the west bank of the Willamette River, Waterfront Park offers Portland’s residents direct access to the river in place of the former route of Harbor Drive, a freeway removed by the city in 1974. On the river’s east bank, I-5 deprives the growing Central...Read more

  • Restoring a parkway system in Buffalo

    The Kensington and Scajaquada expressways disrupted Frederick Law Olmsted's vision and divided neighborhoods, but that damage could be undone.
    Before the age of highways, celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed Delaware and Humboldt Parks, linked by the tree-lined boulevard of the Humboldt Parkway, in Buffalo, New York. The construction of the Kensington and Scajaquada Expressways in the 1960s marred this masterful...Read more

  • Never too late to stop the bulldozer

    Thirty-seven US urban highways were halted mid-construction by the communities in their path, saving city parks and neighborhoods from demolition.
    How late is too late for communities in the path of urban freeway construction to save their neighborhoods from the road’s negative impacts? Many may be familiar with the story of Jane Jacobs and other Greenwich Village community activists. In 1960s they opposed the construction of the Lower...Read more