• Stretching the imagination of a community’s highway-to-boulevard dreams

    IMAGINE: The Future Grand Rapids vision replaces US-131 in the Michigan city with a green, low speed boulevard and reconnected street grid.
    When people are forced to live for generations with destructive infrastructure, like an urban highway, they tend to restructure their lives to accommodate it and “work around it,” making it difficult to imagine that any other alternative will work. IMAGINE: The Future Grand Rapids is building a...Read more

  • Stop the freeway expansion, build a boulevard

    The West Toledo Expressway destroyed 900 buildings, mostly homes, in 1972 and accelerated a decline that continues to this day. Now, Ohio Department of Transportation wants to expand the highway. Instead, let’s bring people back with a boulevard.
    On December 15, 1972, the 9-mile West Toledo Expressway, today’s northern leg of Interstate 475, opened to fanfare. Headlines proclaimed it “a gift.” It’s doubtful that those owning the 900 destroyed buildings in its path—mostly homes—shared that view. The Ohio Highway Department Deputy Director...Read more

  • Removing I-794 is a ‘generational opportunity’

    A new study shows that demolishing a second freeway spur in downtown Milwaukee could provide housing for 4,200 people and $1.1 billion in property value.
    Milwaukee was a cradle of freeway removal in the US, with the pioneering teardown of the Park East Expressway. The $25 million project (in the early 2000s) has spurred more than a billion dollars in downtown development. Twenty-four blocks of mixed-use urbanism were opened up for redevelopment on...Read more

  • From expressway to parkway

    The plan for the Scajaquada Expressway would help bridge the divide in the central part of Buffalo, New York, bringing back the glories of an Olmsted-designed greenway.
    At the same time that New York State is looking at burying a freeway in Buffalo, the state DOT is also studying a plan to replace the 3.5-mile-long Scajaquada Expressway with a parkway and boulevard. Since the 1950s, the Scajaquada Expressway in Buffalo has divided a Frederick Law Olmsted-designed...Read more