How to Remove a Highway

Highways are a blight on the urban landscape and are difficult to tear down. But there are some factors that can make a highway easier to tear down, and that's what this video is all about.

Resources on this topic:

Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.
Written by Dave Amos.
Select images and video from Getty Images.
Black Lives Matter.
Trans rights.

[skellurip]

calling highway "endangered" make it sound like it is so important to preserve, probably need other terms for these crumbling piece of infrastructure

[PatricenotPatrick]

I lived in Rochester before the removal. Make no mistake, this was an easy removal because no one used that road ever. Rochester doesn’t have real “traffic” even at 5pm lol. Love the new boulevard they have now.

[zachrowe]

I’m so mad that NIMBYs here in Syracuse halted the 81 teardown for so long. So many parts of the city feel stagnant and disjointed because 81 runs right through it. The people that are complaining that removing 81 would impact their businesses didn’t seem to care when it took so many businesses and houses away from the city, but oh well

[goncalonunes]

The thing that i most like about city beautiful is that he gives exemples of real life and talks about how to change cities to better, most channels only talk about whats good or bad

[benceseger]

To me, as someone who grew up in Europe it's wild that so-called "engineers" think it's a good idea to build highways through cities dividing neighborhoods. In most European countries, highways go around cities, and then they join into local roads. In my local area, in a small country in Central Europe, there's a highway (not like a US freeway) that connects three county capitals (two university cities, and many smaller, but important cities). At one section, the highway used to go through the second largest city in the neighboring county. They decided to build huge infrastructure to bypass the city, and it connects the highway to nearby smaller towns and villages. They built an impressive roundabout on a bridge. This is what highways should be like.

[thelostborough]

Always nice to see us getting recognized for doing something right, even if it was originally something we did wrong. The intent of the Inner Loop is noble, to relieve the traffic commute for suburbanites into the Center City neighborhood for work, but its execution and immediate effects (razing houses and cutting neighborhoods up, and creating a visual moat around the central business district) were detrimental to city development. Also love that projections graph you shared, as a MAJOR complaint that Inner Loop supporters STILL gloat about is how much traffic the IL was funneling, which studies have contradicted, but supporters persist.

One small point of correction: Union Street is not the old Inner Loop. Union ran next to the Inner Loop and never changed, though the traffic pattern did (it's two way now, was one way before). The old Inner Loop is where the apartment buildings and parks are now.

Thank you for the positive light shed on Rochester! We need all we can get.

[seeranos]

We need a better phrase than "Endangered/Extinct highways". Those are words for animals worth protecting. "Candidate Highways" to "Rebuilt Highways" or "Malignant Highways" to "Excised Highways"

[justinking]

Albany NY, the only other major Upstate NY city you didn’t mention is also trying to tear down its downtown highway(I-787). The Albany Riverfront Collaborative and the State DOT have received funding for studying removal!!!

[coolboss]

As someone who is currently going to Syracuse University and studying civil engineering, I am really excited to see the I-81 Project take action. Phase 1 is going according to plan and I just cant wait to see when they finally tear down the viaduct!

[joshk]

The North Loop highway in Kansas City has been a candidate for removal. It's a really redundant highway that just cuts off the river market and Columbus park neighborhoods from the rest of downtown while carrying very little traffic

[Alex-cwrz]

The great thing about this, is that it focuses on places that are shrinking, these profits can bring a new life into the area or at the very least reduce or stop the devastation that can occur when places are just left to get run down i.e. Detroit or the former industrial towns in the North East of England, Cornwall, Midlands, North West and the valley's in Wales.

[sleepysteev]

Motion to call them "zombie highways". Calling them "endangered" implies they're valuable and worth protecting.

[therealpaulallen]

I live in Rochester and am so happy to see you use it as an example!

[dannydawson]

I-244 through Greenwood in Tulsa is another location with momentum. This section of highway was actually the main catalyst that destroyed Greenwood after rebuilding efforts following the Tulsa Race Massacre.

[ghost]

Kansas City really needs to get rid of I70 on the north side of downtown. It cuts off the beautiful River Market neighborhood off from downtown. I670 does the job as a sunken freeway to get people through downtown.

[trevor]

The Buffalo Kensington Expressway removal is currently in a state of contention where the DOT is proposing a partial cover over it, while the ROCC and ESP Coalition are proposing full removal. The link in the description is very helpful for anyone interested in making a difference for the project

[rwrunning]

Great video. Union St in Rochester looks INCREDIBLE, and I had no idea that stretch in Milwaukee used to be a highway.

[jelsner]

They're talking about removing I-94 between Minneapolis and St. Paul and replacing it with a boulevard and restoring the street grid.

[esgee]

hey city beautiful, would you be interested in doing a video on how much housing the us would need to add, by region, all else being equal (available jobs, employment rate, drug use, joblessness, poverty, homeless & drug polices and services) to significantly decrease unhoused populations? how would you go about modeling this? thanks for considering.

[thespanishinquisiton]

The one I hope gets torn down is the Gardiner in Toronto, but it likely won't happen. We're spending billions to fix it while parallel transit routes are going from good service for North America to world-class service, and it's definitely the most egregious freeway on the continent when it comes to being near places where lots of people work and live.