Highways to Boulevards

Videos

There is a growing movement to removing aging urban highways to restore neighborhoods and revitalize our cities. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) believes that teardowns offer an attractive option for cities struggling with aging highway infrastructure. The strategies are proving themselves in adding value and restoring urban neighborhoods decimated by highway construction.

Death of the Urban Expressway?

An interview with Kyle Shelton, Fellow at Rice University's Kinder Institute, on The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Read more: The Life and Death of the Urban Highway

What happens to traffic when you tear down a freeway?

How highways wrecked American cities

From Vox: The Interstate Highway System was one of America's most revolutionary infrastructure projects. It also destroyed urban neighborhoods across the nation. Read more: Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them?

Observation Deck: How Tearing Up Highways Could Make Better Cities

In this video, Wired Magazine's Adam Rogers highlights CNU’s Highways to Boulevards initiative in this amazingly energetic.

Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal

Streetfilms takes you on a guided tour of past, present and future highway removal projects with John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU).

Academic Research

• Decisions, Values, & Data: Understanding Bias in Transportation Performance Data by Jeffrey Tumlin, Eric Dumbaugh, and Wesley Marshall, 2014.
• The Impacts of Road Capacity Removal by Jason Billings, 2011.
• The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US cities by Gilles Duranton, Matthew Turner, December 2009. 
• From Elevated Freeways to Surface Boulevards: Neighborhood, Traffic, and Housing Price Impacts in San Francisco by Robert Cervero, Junhee Kang, Kevin Shively, December 2007. 
• Did Highways Cause Suburbanization? by Nathaniel Baum-Snow, 2006. 
• Urban Design to Reduce Automobile Dependence by Peter Newman, Jeffrey Kenworthy, 2006. 
• Patterns of Automobile Dependence in Cities: An International Overview of Key Physical and Economic Dimensions with Some Implications for Policy by Jeffrey Kenworthy, Felix Laube, 1999.
• Regionalism in Transportation and Air Quality: History, Interpretation, and Insights for Regional Governance by Martin Wachs, Jennifer Dill, 1999, in 'Governance and Opportunity in Metropolitan America'.
• Land Value and land use effects of elevated, depressed, and at-grade level freeways in Texas by Carol Lewis, 1997. 
• Transportation and Urban Form in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis. Chapter 3, In The Geography of Urban Transportation by Peter Muller, 1986. 

Reports

• Rethinking the Urban Freeway: Options for Rebuilding, Replacing, Altering or Otherwise Addressing Aging Freeways, Mayors Innovation Project, 2013.
• Rethinking Highways in American Cities by Peter Park for the Congress for the New Urbanism, 2013. 
• Residential Construction Trends in American Metropolitan Regions by United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2012. 
• Walk this Way: The Economic Promise of Walkable Places in Metropolitan Washington, D.C. by Christopher Leinberger, Mariela Alfonzo, 2012. 
• [re] imagining Urban Expressways by University of Pennsylvania Planning Studio, 2012
• WalkUP Wake-up Call: The Nation’s Capital as a National Model for Walkable Urban Places by Christopher Leinberger, 2012. 
• The Life and Death of Urban Highways by ITDP, EMBARQ, 2012. 
• Do Roads Pay for Themselves? Setting the Record Straight on Transportation Funding by U.S. PIRG, 2011.
• Measuring urban transportation performance by Joe Cortright, 2010. 
• Twenty-One Sources of Error and Bias in Transport Project Appraisal by Peter Mackie, John Preston, 1998. 
• Federal Highway Funding: All the Basics by George Mazur, 1998.
• A Broader Context for Transportation Planning: Not Just an End in Itself by Hank Dittmar, 1995. 
• Magic Motorways by Norman Bel Geddes, 1940. 

Books

• Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use by Jonathan Levine, 2006. 
• Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape by Owen Gutfreund, 2004. 
• Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion by Anthony Downs, 2004.
• Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment by Alan Alstshuler and David Luberoff, 2003.
• Flexible Urban Transportationby Jonathan Gifford, 2003.
• The American highway: the history and culture of roads in the United States by William Kaszynski, 2000. 
• Nonlinear Approximation Theory. Springer Series in Computational Mathematics by Dietrich Braess,1986. 
• The Motorization of American Cities by David St. Clair, 1986. 
• The Interstate Highway System by Henry Moon, 1984. 
• The Age of Asphalt: The Automobile, the Freeway and the Condition of Metropolitan America by Richard Davies, 1975. 
• The Highway and the City by Lewis Mumford, 1963. 
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, 1961. 

Articles

• The Role of Highways in American Poverty by Alana Semuels, March 2016.
• A Departure From Decades of Highway Policy by Alana Semuels, March 2016.
• Do Freeways Belong Inside Cities? by Kaid Benfield, May 2015.
• Highways Destroyed America's Cities by Alana Semuels, November 2015.
• Cities Without Highways by Diana Lind, March 2013
• Six Freeway Removals That Changed Their Cities Forever by Alissa Walker, May 2016.
• How States Use Inflated DOT Forecasts to Rationalize More Highways by Alissa Walker, June 2015.
• The case for tearing down urban freeways by Timothy Lee, December 2014.
• Seoul Tears Down an Urban Highway and The City Can Breath Again, by Kamala Rao, April 2011. 
• Heart and Soul of the City by John Vidal, October 2006.
• Traffic Planners Baffled by Success, No Central Freeway, No Gridlock - and No Explanation by Carl Nolte, September 1996.
• Myths of the Oppressed Motorist: Freeways and Tolls by Urban kchoze, July 2014.

Websites

• Preservenet