I grew up with urban highways, and I have never really lived anywhere without them, so I'm well aware of the costs of urban highways.
I also understand the impulse to build them.
When you're in a city and all you have is a car, or all you imagine your population will have is a car, then access to a highway feels like a necessity. You want to get places faster, don't you? You want people from elsewhere to come to you, don't you? You want to be integrated into the nationwide system, don't you?
Well, yes, you do. But that of course ignores the negative externalities of urban highways. And while from Seattle to Boston to Chicago to Rochester to the Quad Cities, I've never actually gotten away from them, I want to expand on why I wish I could.
1. Making Pleasant Spaces Unpleasant
A highway is a fine place for driving, usually. But underneath or around a highway is not a pleasant place for people.
That's usually fine in the middle of rural areas where there aren't many people to experience the unpleasantness, and those who are there generally have wide open non-freeway spaces to escape into.
It's less fine in an urban setting where the literal point is to have a lot of people.
It's even less fine when the freeway is not only urban but taking up prime urban real estate, places you should want people congregating. Places that, because of the positive aggregate effects of density, would be really pleasant if there weren't, you know, a freeway overhead.
I'm going to pick on Milwaukee here for the paradoxical reason that they've done about as well as I think you can do with an urban downtown freeway. The area around the Public Market is great. But it would be infinitely better without a literal freeway just above you.
They've used this space very inventively, and it's nicely decorated, and it's a space I want to spend time in when I'm there.
It's also impossible to pretend you aren't actually directly beneath a huge multilane freeway deck.
This is a space that is pleasant, and should be more pleasant, but the existence of the urban freeway depresses its excellence.
2. Disconnecting Cities
The Milwaukee Public Market is the best case in some ways because it is made less pleasant by the freeway but at least you can walk under the freeway. In many places, the freeway is an actual barrier, cut across only by a few overpasses or literally nothing.
Here in Louisville, yes, I'm taking the photo from an overpass. But look: no one is going to cross this in any direction down there. And while there are nice trees implying that you're in a rural area where you wouldn't need or want to cross, that's not actually the case. Behind those trees are city. If there were no highway, that city could connect across (but it doesn't, of course).
Even in some cases where the main freeway is elevated, like here in Toronto, the Gardiner Expressway is
accompanied by a big surface road, which breaks up the continuity of pedestrian or even just street-level non-car transportation. This is what Alaska Way is (or at least
was) with the viaduct and the surface street both blocking Seattle's waterfront when I was growing up.
There are more vile examples of redlining and the destruction of whole neighborhoods by urban freeways, but even when that didn't happen freeways tend to break apart a city.
Even when there is legally a sidewalk, there isn't necessarily connectivity, Boston. This is why I say Milwaukee is the best version here: it's made less pleasant, but they at least put a there there.
3. Noise
All of this is about the physical built environment. Now let's talk about there being cars going 55-75 mph at all times on a freeway.
This guy is quiet when parked, but not when moving.
The tires, the engines, the roar of traffic; freeways are loud. And if the cars aren't moving, that has other problems: gas fumes, to start, not to mention the removal of the supposed benefit of speed.
Basically this: almost every city I like has urban freeways but I'd like them a lot better without.
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