Urban Freeways

 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.

Hmmm, maybe there's a reason Vancouver and London, with their lack of (downtown) freeways did so well in my CityBracket...after all, no one wants to live next to a freeway.

CityBracket 2025 Round 1, Matchup 3: Rochester, NY vs Baltimore

This time we feature possibly the most odd first-round matchup (in terms of my experience of the places) in the entire bracket: Rochester, New York vs Baltimore (Maryland, but there's really only one famous Baltimore). On the one hand, I lived in Rochester for 4 years and in Baltimore's metro area for only 3 months; on the other, I basically never visited Rochester outside of living there, whereas I visited Baltimore to see family for most of my life. So I know both cities pretty well, but in an odd mismash of ways; let's see how it plays out.

Category 1: Visiting Without A Car

a) How can you get to the city? 

I have taken many train trips from Rochester to Chicago, and I think one to New York; the city lies on the route between the two (or Boston, since the train splits around Albany). It's actually relatively well timed for a US train, if you're not the kind of person to get woken up by a train stopping---the both directions of the Chicago-Rochester train are overnight and you arrive at a pretty decent time. A pleasant experience if you managed not to wake up at the Indiana/Ohio stops.

Don't fly into Rochester and expect to get anywhere easily though; the bus does go to the airport but we aren't talking a useful or productive link.

Baltimore has the easy upper hand: sitting on Amtrak's Acela line, the closest thing the US has to a high speed line, with a direct train link (both light and heavy rail) from the airport to the city, and frequent bus service to other Mid-Atlantic destinations as well. Easy in, easy out, actual choice of times and destinations.

VERDICT: Rochester 0, Baltimore 1

b) How do you get around?

Rochester has a high density of destinations in downtown, so you can probably get around pretty well as a tourist. The Erie Canal links city and town centers in the metro area on a walkable, bikeable path, and is scenic itself. There is a bus system, though I'm not going to advertise the RTS to tourists.

Baltimore has major flaws in its transit system: the inherent racism of not interconnecting the somewhat-suburban (white) light rail and fully urban (black) subway is a lingering issue. There is a card you can use on both, so at least there are steps in the right direction. There's also issues of interconnectivity with the regional MARC train as well...but ultimately for this matchup there's no contest. As a tourist, you could pick one of those 3 and it would get you everywhere you need to go, plus access DC (another whole city in this bracket) if you use MARC. 

Light rail will get you places. Not all the places (see below) but some.

VERDICT: Rochester 0, Baltimore 2

c) What are the limits on a visitor without a car?

I think here we're more even, mostly because Rochester is more concentrated in terms of where tourists might want to go. I don't think there are really any visitor-heavy spots that are difficult to get to.

Sometimes they're even pedestrian friendly events, like this foodtruck rodeo.

By contrast, Baltimore has more to see, but it makes it harder to do without a car by navigating from spot to spot by different methods. For example, the one tiny hipster neighborhood in Baltimore (Hamden) is actually hard to get to from much of the city by public transit.

VERDICT: Rochester 1, Baltimore 2

Category 2: Living Without A Car

a) Can you expect to get to work?

I bought my first car in Rochester because the answer was no.

Also sometimes even that got covered with ice, as in this close-in illustration that was very pretty but annoying to drive with.

Admittedly, I worked at a university well outside the city center. But Rochester does not have commuter-oriented transit in a meaningful sense, and Baltimore does. Unless you live walking distance from work, Rochester requires a car to work, and Baltimore will give you a lot more options, even including distant suburbs on the various forms of rail if you work downtown.

VERDICT: Rochester 1, Baltimore 3

b) Can you live the rest of your life?

Rochester suffers here from a specific memory of mine: hiking a mile plus without sidewalks in the snow to go play boardgames because the bus that was supposed to connect me did not actually come/exist after all. The service ends too early at night, the radial bus network makes it hard to make any connections that aren't to downtown alone, and sometimes it literally doesn't exist.

Baltimore doesn't have great transit connections to things like grocery stores, and that might cost it in later rounds but right now it's not close.

VERDICT: Rochester 1, Baltimore 4

c) How are the basic amenities?

Rochester actually scores well here. The parks are good and, more significantly, that Canal link means it is much more walkable than transitable, ironically. 

Baltimore is also well equipped with parks, and sidewalks (see above about the Rochester metro for that). We'll get more picky about amenities in later rounds, but here it's another tie.

VERDICT: Rochester 2, Baltimore 5

Category 3: Miscellaneous

a) Are there people on the street?

In downtown Rochester? Sure. Literally anywhere else in the metro area? No. Baltimore is not great at that either, honestly; I've spent a lot of time in both cities as the only person on the street. 

VERDICT: Rochester 3, Baltimore 6

b) Where is the city's urbanism going?

Baltimore has had some...problems getting an extension of its rail system going. That's what happens when a governor cancels your project unilaterally! But they are working on some transit-oriented developments that were (very) recently announced, because the new governor is more supportive.

Rochester has some nice ideas being studied, but nothing nearly so concrete as yet.

VERDICT: Rochester 3, Baltimore 7

c) Is it functionally diverse?

Well, no. 

We're talking some cities that have real, regrettably storied histories of segregation and racism, in living memory as well as in the deeper past. Rochester still has major issues with inequality and segregation along school district lines dividing the inner city from the suburbs. Baltimore has a massive issue with racist policing. As I've said in previous versions of this, there is no honor to be had here.

VERDICT: Rochester 3, Baltimore 7. If both get points for some things, sometimes both have to get no points too.

d) How do people there react to knowing you're not using a car?

People in both places will be a bit weird about it, in my experience, but in Baltimore it's more concern that you might not afford a car, whereas in Rochester it's sheer confusion. 

People do, in fact, use the light rail, even if many of them own cars.

VERDICT: Rochester 3, Baltimore 8

e) How do people react to people living close together?

The iconic Baltimore house is a row house. Rochester used to have those, but not nearly as much. 

In other words, Baltimore thinks it's pretty neat when people live cheek by jowl, while Rochester turned its back on that approach. Yes, Baltimore metro has a bunch of sprawl too, but so does all of America. Baltimore is still at least capable of imagining itself as close together.

FINAL VERDICT: Rochester 3, Baltimore 9

Vaporware Transit

There's a concept in software development called "vaporware": a product that's talked up and used to generate interest or investment but never actually exists or was never nearly capable of what was promised even if it technically existed in some form (the eternal "we'll add that feature in six months").

This concept can be applied more broadly, and today I want to discuss it in terms of mass transit and the promises we make about our cities, with three examples: two from my own experience and one famous recent example.

1. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

The most obvious recent example of vaporware in transit is Elon Musk's hyperloop, which promised immense speeds across long distances with untested technology and a proposed system all across the US.The article I just linked to is from 2018; it's not hard to miss that the fast supposed pace of implementation has not occurred. Instead, it appears that the idea was floated mainly to try to derail the California High Speed Rail project (a project that has had enough of its own problems that one might be tempted to add it to this list without Musk's help). 

What Musk's company (The Boring Company, and admittedly decent pub) has built is a tunnel for cars under Las Vegas. But it's not exactly beating high speed rail in speed; it's for cars and doesn't do a ton of actually useful stuff. I'm not saying all hyperloop ideas will eventually resolve into the current Vegas Loop. But I am saying that trains are, by now, a pretty robustly tested technology that works. Opting for or even considering untested or undreamed-of alternatives to replace trains is both an inefficient approach (just build the trains faster!) and leads to disappointment and a sense that major transit investments are all vaporware themselves. 

We don't need to find new solutions for transit; we need to actually build the ones we already know about 

Just build the dang train.

2. Don't let entrenched interests stand across progress yelling stop

My personal current White Whale of transit is the Quad Cities to Chicago rail link that's been unable to move forward for fifteen years despite allocated federal funding. That funding has been extended again, but there's no actual progress to report. Unlike the Hyperloop, this is tested, well-known tech. There literally used to be a train in the 20th century! But Iowa Interstate owns the tracks and isn't interested in playing ball.

This is unacceptable; we don't let private companies own the interstate highway system and prevent its use (some private companies do operate toll roads, but the government doesn't let them shut the road down). This project should under no circumstances have turned into vaporware. It's not a hard lift in terms of technology, engineering, or construction. It's expensive -- but the money has been allocated (and letting it delay only makes it more expensive both in inflationary terms and in terms of infrastructure decay). I'm not advocating for going back to blowing up whole neighborhoods for the highway, but when a specific corporation stands in the way of improving its own right-of-way to avoid having to let it be used for public good, perhaps that is a thing we should not support. 

Just build the dang train, again.

3. If you build it, be willing to operate and fund it

Finally, let us visit Rochester, NY, which ran a ferry to Toronto, ON, Canada for...generously...two years (it did not run most of that time). There were major problems with how the project was organized and implemented and, quite honestly, I am not saying that it was ever going to actually work. 

But dang, I wish it had; having lived in Rochester for four years (well after the ferry ceased operations), direct access to Toronto at a speed that (due to geography, going across rather than around a lake) was faster than driving would have been wonderful. A game changer. All those things the city was hoping for when the project was pitched.

Again, it was horribly mismanaged. But abandoning a project not expected to be actually financially sound for 2-3 during year 2 is a failure of financial planning and political will. Transit takes time to find its audience, and become part of people's lives. If you build an ambitious project, stick with it long enough to get to that stage, or any project can become vaporware.

Also, maybe write your contracts more carefully and vet your operating company if you farm it out. Just saying.

Vaporware is bad for individual projects, but it's killer for the idea of transit overall, especially in a country like the US that has seen a lot of transportation infrastructure either not built or decayed over the years. We need to avoid these pitfalls--overpromising with untested tech, letting projects linger unbuilt, and abandoning them before they find their users--in order to make sure we don't let promising ideas fall by the wayside. Or more positively, so we can have better transit for us all.

Transit and Density (Probably Part 1)

One thing I know I will probably talk a lot about here given the nature of the Quad Cities is the relationship between transit and density: and in particular the false belief that only huge cities can have or support good transit.

Today, I want to talk about transit in outlying regions of large cities. That isn't too applicable to the Quad Cities, of course, since for all that we're sometimes interested in feeling like Chicagoland is coming to swallow us all whole, that's not really the case. But I think it's worth starting with perhaps the easiest case in which transit can serve places without huge density: the suburbs and exurbs of cities, where density falls off but they are still connected to the center.

1. Good transit can make places accessible 

As a US American, when I think of suburbs, I think of cars. And to be fair, that's often true globally, thanks to the historic trends of 20th century car ownership and development. But it's particularly true here. 

And when I think of that, I usually think of living in Rochester, New York and then moving to its suburbs (Brighton, then Greece)--and how in all three, but especially the suburbs, I simply could not operate without a car. And trust me, I tried. My friends and family can tell you stories of me trekking across the snowy front yards of suburban businesses to try to get from a bus stop to a board game store because "it's only about a mile." 

I did make it, but let's just say the urban design was not accessible for anyone who wasn't not only willing but able to dodge through accumulated snow without sidewalks from the only, once-hourly bus to the next major road that didn't even have a bus line.

We could contrast that with my visit to the French town of Noisy-le-Sec earlier this year. 

Noisy-le-Sec has trains. Now, trains are not inherently better than buses, but they often are, and they represent a serious promise of service that a bus stop sign doesn't (or at least, a promise that there was service at some point--thanks, crumbling US infrastructure). And I went to Noisy-le-Sec before their even-more-recent expansion of service, so things are even better than they are now.

Noisy-le-Sec is half the population of Greece, NY, and approximately the same distance from the city center. But it was much easier to get to because of, well, these guys:

Thanks, RER!

But also, the station, even though not actually in the town center, is conveniently located. There were sidewalks, but also just things you could access right there: the businesses I was walking by in Rochester weren't oriented towards walk-ins, but Noisy-le-Sec is much more so. Having transit made this a place I could access, but it also made it the kind of place that wants to be accessed; there is a virtuous circle there.

2. Good transit makes places discoverable

This is closely related to my second point: not only could I get to Noisy-le-Sec, I was infinitely more likely to go there because of the transit. Even more, I was infinitely more likely to know it was a place I could want to go, because it's on the train map.

Yes, Rochester had and has a bus map. I even was the kind of person (and still am) who read it! But the more integrated the transit, the more likely someone will become aware of places on the transit--and the better the transit, the more likely someone will both know to come and be willing to make the effort. I could and did explore Rochester through its buses (and the same with the Quad Cities) but literally only because I wanted to say I had. Nothing about either bus system actually encouraged me to use it to go places; it's more about making it minimally possible to go there if I had to (coverage) than actually making it easy or natural to do (real service).

My best example of this isn't from Rochester, but here in the QC. I wanted to go to the end of the furthest bus line, way out in Silvis, IL. And I did.

But I didn't get off the bus.

Why not? Wasn't that the whole point of going somewhere, to actually go?

Well...yes. But also, no. Because the bus runs once an hour, and the bus I'd connect to on the other end runs once an hour, and the bus I'd connect to after THAT runs once an hour. And none of those times linked up. So I would not have gotten home in three hours if I had gotten off the bus, and quite possibly longer, as I would have had to wait for the next one.

And as it was, I ended up walking all the way from downtown Moline home, over 5 miles, because one of those buses didn't come when I expected.

On the one hand this shows the potential of transit: I did make it to and back from Silvis only because the bus ran there. On the other it shows the need for actually decent service: I didn't contribute to the Silvis economy at all, because that was all I could do.

3. Good transit can make small cities part of big ones

The classic example of this is the Randstad: the megacity that is the main urbanized areas of the Netherlands. I took the train from Amsterdam to Haarlem, which is a separate city with a population of a bit over 150,000. It took less time than the bus takes me to get to work here (well, let's not overstate: it took the same amount of time) and it dropped me off here:

OK, that one is just pretty. Let's look more closely at Haarlem as a city:

Not super dense; just a little city street.

It's definitely a city. It's just not Amsterdam. But because of good, reliable (don't listen to the Dutch, they're spoiled so they complain about NS, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, their rail operator), fast transit, they're intimately tied together 

That's the true power of transit: not just regular suburbs or exurbs but even adjacent cities with their own traditions and histories can become fundamentally linked if you have good transit. And you don't need huge cities for this. Haarlem is a little smaller than the Iowa side of the Quad Cities. Yes, Amsterdam metro is big (2.5 million); but it's not just the big part of the metro that benefits. The little guys do too.