Changing

Lanes
J O S E P H F. C . D I M E N T O A N D C L I F F E L L I S

F ew planning decisions have affected American cities as much as those

involving urban freeways. Massive freeway infrastructure projects have
reconfigured urban form, supplanted neighborhoods, displaced tens of
thousands of people, and cost billions of dollars. Congress and state legislatures passed
important new laws that guided where freeways could be built, what funds were available,
which types of consultation and analysis should be conducted, and what impacts were
permissible. Lawmakers and courts required that projects be planned and completed with
maximum sensitivity to the environment, with concern for relocating displaced residents,
and with active citizen participation.
This article is based on the book, Changing Lanes, published by the MIT Press in
2013. Both the book and the article tell the story of those freeways, recounting America’s
original love affair with them and the controversies that emerged during their construction
in dense urban areas.
The professionals involved in this story include highway engineers in the leading role,
as well as urban planners, landscape architects, and architects. Here we review the
evolution of freeway design as professionals responded to significant social changes in the
United States. We then examine changes in the regulatory environment of freeway
construction. Finally, we focus on urban freeway controversies and give special attention
to three famous cases—Los Angeles, Memphis, and Syracuse—each with very different
histories and outcomes.

Joseph F. C. DiMento is Professor of Law and Professor of Transportation Science and Planning at the
University of California, Ir vine (jdimento@law.uci.edu). Cliff Ellis is Professor and Director of the
Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning at Clemson University (cliffoe@clemson.edu).

A C C E S S 28
O RIGINS OF U RBAN F REEWAY D EVELOPMENT
Professionals and politicians viewed urban freeways from different angles and tried to
shift freeway policies to match their own priorities. As a result of the varying perspectives,
urban freeways filled divergent roles: traffic conduits, tools of economic redevelopment
and social policy, and components of national defense.
Highway engineers led the process of urban freeway construction, displaying great
confidence in their ability to assess traffic demand, analyze alternatives, and construct
elaborate infrastructure. City planners developed a more complex understanding of freeways
with a focus on long-term guidance of urban physical change, but played a subordinate role
in the process. Landscape architects pioneered parkway design during the 1920s and 1930s,
but became peripheral actors when freeways were scaled-up to handle massive urban traffic
loads. Architects generated many imaginative designs for urban freeways, but were only
brought in for consultation during the freeway controversies of the 1960s.
Between 1939 and 1945, the nation moved from economic depression to war. A vision
of the rational, modernized city replaced the 1930s view of urban parkways compatible with
existing urban design. The newly imagined modern city radiated only positive symbolisms:
elevation, clarity, hygiene, speed, rational order, and the beneficent use of state power. In
contrast, the old city was cloaked in negative images of disorder and decay.
As production shifted to war goods after 1941, highway construction was curtailed.
During this lull, however, state and federal officials forged the freeway plans that would ➢

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NUMBER 47, FALL 2015
 shape postwar America. Diverse strands of thought about urban freeways were united into
two key federal documents: Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939) and Interregional Highways (1944).
In these documents, highway engineers and city planners endorsed “radial-concentric”
freeway patterns. These patterns entailed new urban freeways that would penetrate the urban
core and be used to clear out slums and blighted areas. Inner beltways were envisioned
around renewed central business districts. Alongside these visions of urban freeways, the

Some urban Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 gave the federal government and the state highway
departments additional power to shape urban freeway patterns in postwar America.
planners warned Some urban planners warned that no amount of freeway building would ever solve the
urban traffic problem. These voices, however, were drowned by massive federal subsidies for
that no amount of
freeway construction. The passage of the Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956, which
freeway building provided states with a 90 percent federal match for all construction costs, removed all fiscal
obstacles to metropolitan freeways. The urban freeway program would now be fueled with
would ever solve billions of federal dollars, an irresistible force pushing old doubts and questions aside. Urban
the urban traffic freeway designs that were developed during the previous three decades became the
blueprints for actual construction from 1956 to 1970. State highway engineers, with the
problem. These support of local growth coalitions, pushed radial freeways and inner beltways through old

voices, however, neighborhoods and industrial districts, linking central business districts with emerging
regional highway networks.
were drowned by Urban renewal seemed to promise revitalization through clearing decayed central slum
districts. Planners and other growth coalition members saw transportation improvements as
massive federal
a critical element of central city revitalization. New highways would allow middle- and upper-
subsidies for class white-collar workers and shoppers to speed in and out of central business districts.
By the late 1960s, however, citizen protests over redevelopment and political stalemates
freeway over controversial freeways forced public officials to reassess the complex effects of large-
construction. scale infrastructure projects. The blind acceptance of urban freeways as emblems of growth
and prosperity gradually began to wane. Freeway protests grew louder, and pressures for
reform led to a wave of legislation curbing the construction of new freeways.
The evolution in urban highway planning was both reflected in and fostered by changes
in the regulatory framework in which planning decisions were made. Environmental legis-
lation in the late 1960s and early 1970s armed citizens and local governments with legal tools
to challenge unpopular freeway segments. These pieces of legislation had teeth and, by
providing opponents with a basis for litigation, they pushed the balance of power in freeway
controversies toward citizens and local governments. Table 1 lists some of the key pieces
of legislation.

U RBAN F REEWAYS : I MPACTS AND C ONTROVERSIES

Occurring in dozens of cities, freeway controversies revolved around a wide range of
topics: aesthetics, commercial interests, transportation system efficiency, environmental
protection, historic preservation, and race concerns.
Syracuse, Memphis, and Los Angeles provide a temporal cross-section of the freeway
revolts. Syracuse embraced urban freeways early on but paid a steep price in quality of life.
The city is now involved in very tense decision making about whether to demolish sections
of freeways within its central business district. Meanwhile, Interstate 40 in Memphis was
stopped in its tracks, and the Century Freeway in Los Angeles was heavily modified from its
original plan.

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 TA B L E 1

YEAR LEGISLATION IMPORTANCE Key Highway Legislation in

the 60s and 70s

1962 The Highway Act Required the integration of highway planning with
metropolitan planning

1963 The Clean Air Act Required each Air Quality Management District to
develop plans to meet national standards for
criterion pollutants, and provided a means for
citizen law suits if those standards weren’t met

1966 The formation of the US Consolidated national transportation policies and

Department of Transportation programs into a single cabinet-level agency
overseeing federal highways, urban mass transit,
railroads, maritime transportation, and aviation

The National Historic Required federal agencies to evaluate the impact

Preservation Act of their projects on historic sites

1970 The National Environmental Required agencies to use a systematic approach to

Policy Act and its state versions environmental planning

The Federal-Aid Highway Act Authorized states to use urban area highway funds
for traffic-reduction projects and addressed the
need to improve air quality

The Uniform Relocation and Real Required that states ensure “fair and reasonable”
Property Acquisition Policies Act relocation payments, operate a relocation
assistance program, and ensure that adequate
relocation housing is available

1973 The Federal-Aid Highway Act Allowed cities to substitute transit projects for
withdrawn interstate portions

S YRACUSE : “T HE B EST T HING SINCE THE E RIE C ANAL !”

Interstates 81 and 690, which now traverse the heart of Syracuse, were first conceived
in the 1940s. In 1944, the Syracuse-Onondaga County Post-War Planning Council envisioned
a modern highway network for the city. The plan aimed to decrease congestion and traffic
accidents and, in doing so, help maintain the city’s economic vitality.
There was little controversy about whether the urban freeway plan should go forward.
All Syracuse mayors and most planners, businesses, industries, and major local employers
supported the plan. There was a bit more controversy over design, but even that was
relatively muted, and some of it didn’t occur until after construction.
By the mid-1960s, overhead interstate highways running north-south and east-west
divided the center of Syracuse. They displaced and dispersed Italian-American, Jewish-
American, African-American, and other ethnic neighborhoods. The city’s subsequent decline
cannot be attributed only to choices about urban freeways, but these decisions reinforced the
effects of industrial relocation and of economically and racially motivated suburbanization. ➢

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 M EMPHIS : I NTERSTATE 40 D EFLECTED AROUND O VERTON PARK
I-40 begins in Barstow, California. Coursing eastward and partially following old Route
66, it connects cities from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Durham, North Carolina. By the mid-1960s,
it was mostly complete except for a few short sections. One of these sections was a four-
mile stretch in the central part of Memphis that includes Overton Park, a large, publicly
owned park located within an affluent, predominantly white residential area.
Occurring in Memphis officials began to consider a highway in and around Overton Park in 1953.
In 1955, the planning firm Harland Bartholomew and Associates was employed to study
dozens of cities, interstate highway routes. Memphis and Shelby County adopted the basic transportation
freeway system plan that resulted from this study. In the plan, the east-west interstate was routed
through Overton Park.
controversies In 1956, the Bureau of Public Roads approved the corridor alignment of I-40 through
revolved around the park. Controversy arose almost immediately. Opponents were initially disorganized
but, between 1961 and 1964, opposition became unified and coordinated. It resulted in the
a wide range of landmark US Supreme Court case, Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, which saved
the park and helped establish the current framework for court review of transportation
topics: aesthetics,
agency decisions.
commercial
L OS A NGELES : T HE F REEWAY WITH A H EART
interests, In 1959, the California legislature created the California Freeway and Expressway
transportation System, authorizing a grid-like network of freeways overlaying the entire Los Angeles basin.
This network included a segment known as the Century Freeway, a standard ten-lane
system efficiency, highway. More than twenty interchanges were planned to service local arterials in the ten
environmental jurisdictions the freeway traversed. Construction was to begin in 1972, and the freeway
was scheduled to open in 1977. But building the $500 million project would displace an
protection, historic estimated 21,000 people living in the freeway right-of-way.
Almost from its inception, the Century Freeway was controversial. As land acquisition
preservation, and
and freeway design progressed, opponents organized. By 1972, however, more than 35
race concerns. percent of the needed parcels had been acquired, and another 35 percent had been cleared.
About 11,000 homes and apartments were taken.
In February 1972, one month prior to the planned start of construction, a newly
created public interest law firm, the Center for Law in the Public Interest, filed a federal
lawsuit on behalf of four couples living within the proposed freeway right-of-way. Several
national civil rights and environmental activist organizations were also parties to the suit,
including the NAACP, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Even the City
of Hawthorne joined the suit which sought to prevent the state from acquiring property
until Environmental Impact Statements were approved. The suit also alleged inadequate
relocation assistance, denial of equal protection to minorities and poor residents in the
corridor, inadequate public hearings, and violation of due process.
In July 1972, federal district court judge Harry Pregerson ordered the state to stop
work on the Century Freeway. The preliminary injunction called for preparation of a formal
Environmental Impact Statement, additional hearings focusing on noise and air pollution
concerns, further studies on the availability of replacement housing for those displaced by
the project, and specific assurance by the state that it could provide relocation assistance
and payments to those displaced by the freeway’s construction. The decision was upheld
on appeal. Work on the Century Freeway would be halted for the next nine years.

A C C E S S 32
 Only in 1993, following the requirements of a landmark consent decree, did the
“freeway with a heart,” “the intelligent freeway,” and “the most costly freeway ever built”
finally open. It was built with heavy landscaping, HOV lanes, extensive housing made
available to the displaced residents, and metered transition ramps. Plans for newly
mandated transit, now the Green Line light rail, were later realized. From inception to
completion, the project spanned more than 30 years—nearly triple the time normally
required to construct a freeway. ➢

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 C ONCLUSION
Jane Jacobs argued that cities are a problem of “organized complexity.” If that’s true,
then their evolution must be guided by ideas in proportion with that complexity. In the middle
of the twentieth century, the construction of a new generation of high-capacity roads for
American cities should have been guided by a strong and well-developed understanding of
how cities work. Transportation planners, land use planners, environmental planners, and
urban designers should have worked together in an equal partnership. Planning for roads and
public transit should also have been integrated into a single process. Unfortunately, this did
A narrow mode of not happen. Instead, a narrow mode of highway planning was used instead of multimodal
transportation planning, and we have been struggling with the consequences even since.
highway planning Instead of producing the gleaming, healthy, modernized cities portrayed in the utopias of
was used instead the 1930s, auto-centric freeways produced a polarized urban landscape, troubled inner cities,
and fragmented sprawl.
of multimodal In the last few years, however, many cities across the nation have proposed, approved,
transportation and begun demolishing urban highways, replacing them with housing, parks, bicycle paths,
commercial buildings, and traditional city streets. One reason is that many highways
planning, and we constructed during the postwar era are approaching the end of their useful lives
(approximately 40 years). But another reason is that there is an increasing perception that
have been
urban centers provide creative development potential. Hopefully, the future will see greater
struggling with modal balance with transit, walking, and cycling integrated into mixed-use, environmentally
sustainable regions.
the consequences Although not a panacea for our transportation problems, transit-oriented development
even since. does provide an alternative to more freeway building within metropolitan areas. In contrast
to freeway systems, transit systems do not destroy the urban fabric since they can be placed
on narrow rights-of-way, located underground, or operated on existing streets (as with
streetcars, trolleys, and buses). Furthermore, transit systems can be integrated with well-
designed, walkable city streets. It’s time for a new direction that places less emphasis on new
infrastructure for the motor vehicle and more emphasis on multimodal transportation as we
design our urban fabric for high accessibility. ◆

This article is a brief summation of the book, Changing Lanes, published by the MIT Press in 2013.

FURTHER READING

Jeffrey R. Brown, Eric A. Morris, and Brian D. Taylor. 2009. “Planning for Cars in Cities: Planners,
Engineers, and Freeways in the 20th Century,” Journal of the American Planning Association,
75(2): 161–177. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944360802640016

Joseph F. C. DiMento and Cliff Ellis. 2013. Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban
Freeways, Cambridge: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/changing-lanes

David W. Jones, Jr. 2008. Mass Motorization and Mass Transit: An American History and Policy
Analysis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?cPath=6040_6048&products_id=185706

Bruce E. Seely. 1987. Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/464_reg.html

David J. St. Clair. 1986. The Motorization of American Cities, New York: Praeger.
http://www.abc-clio.com/Praeger/product.aspx?pc=D3652C

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