Highways Future: A Global Movement to Reimagine Highways

The idea of highway removal or conversion is coming from a worldwide movement where many cities are asking, “What can we do with the space of this highway that no longer serves our needs and no longer serves the kind of future we want?” Renewed calls for social and environmental justice are bringing the highway issue to the forefront of national conversation, resulting in this movement to reclaim the space of highways for the city for people.

According to the Congress for New Urbanism, “18 American cities have either removed, covered, or committed to transform urban highway corridors.”[5] We’ve studied these precedents carefully and incorporated lessons from all these different places as much as possible into our plan.

Notably, in a lot of these places, the removal of the highway has been a catalyst for new investments and new developments. The following three case studies highlight these impacts in detail:

The Park East Freeway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was a one-mile freeway spur leading from I-43 to downtown Milwaukee. They found it was actually less expensive to tear it down than it would have been to rebuild it. The city demolished the freeway in 2003, for a total cost of $25M, where it would have cost $100M to rebuild the freeway as is. And so that was part of the value proposition here, and it opened up immense tracts of land for new development, which has now seen over a billion dollars of development happen, with more coming down the pipeline. Since the removal of the freeway, the Park East Corridor has seen over $1.06 billions of private investment in development projects, with the potential for an additional investment of $250 million on the few remaining undeveloped parcels.[6]

Boston’s Big Dig involved constructing a 1.5-mile tunnel and rerouting I-93 through central Boston. The tunnel and rerouting were completed in 2007 and cost $14.5B. Original plans for the Big Dig included many mass transit investments, including a transit tunnel to connect South Station and Logan airport, connections to existing subway lines, and restoration of historic streetcar service. As of 2022, however, only the new transit tunnel is built and operational. Despite the challenges and giant budget, this project did have some success, including the establishment of a heavily used linear park running along the former highway’s footprint.[7]

The Cheonggyecheon Highway in Seoul, Korea was removed from 20012005. In the 1990s, the Cheonggye area recorded the highest levels of noise and congestion in Seoul. However, in 2001 the plans for highway removal began as part of a plan to transform Seoul into a tourism hub. The final budget of the project was $323M and was expected to attract $9.2B of private investment. The project was centered on revitalizing the Cheonggyecheon Stream by removing the highway and creating a central plaza and multimodal roads. The project included increased bus routes around the area, as well as increased parking fees and stricter control over parking generally. It was also designed on a 200-year flooding interval assumption. The project is largely considered a success, attracting 64,000 daily visitors, an increased number of businesses, and reduction in the urban heat island effect.[8]