• 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

  • Time to restore the grid

    A costly freeway, feeding a shopping mall, is a poor foundation for a mid-sized city—a better choice is to invest in infrastructure that supports downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.
    I-81 in Syracuse is more personal, to me, than the other nine projects in CNU’s Freeways Without Futures 2019 report. I live about an hour from Syracuse in the small Upstate New York City of Ithaca. New York cities have been devastated by freeways. The state had a wealth of industrial cities in the...Read more

  • Ditch the ditch: Citizens respond to I-70 expansion

    A partly built reconstruction of the aging I-70 in Denver into a much wider sunken highway has elicited a more neighborhood-friendly proposal: Reroute the Interstate and turn the corridor into a boulevard.
    Note: CNU's sixth biennial Freeways Without Futures report was released April 3. I-70 in Denver was one of ten highways listed. Highways are known sources of pollution. Air quality decreases significantly for residents who live within 1,000 feet of a highway. Yet in Denver’s Elyria, Swansea, and...Read more

  • A boulevard rather than a freeway

    I-275 was built on top of Central Avenue and split Tampa in half. Transformation into a boulevard is gaining political traction due to economic and quality of life benefits.
    Note: CNU's sixth biennial Freeways Without Futures report was released April 3. I-275 was one of ten highways listed. The 11-mile stretch of I-275 that runs through Tampa touches every one of its downtown neighborhoods. Many of these neighborhoods have still not recovered from the damage done by I...Read more