The New York Times
June 25, 2006
Idea Lab
A Slow-Road Movement?
By ROBERT SULLIVAN
This week, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Interstate highway
system, a convoy will arrive in Washington, D.C., after driving I-80
across the
country. It began in San Francisco and consists of ecstatic highway engineers
and road historians; automobile-club representatives eager to build more
Interstate highways; a leader of the "Go RVing" campaign, which serves the
nation's eight million recreational-vehicle users; a descendant of President
Dwight Eisenhower, who rode in the convoy that is being commemorated, as
a young army officer in 1919, when he saw firsthand how ineffective the roads
were; and Andrew Firestone, a descendant of the tire magnate Harvey
Firestone. The original two-month-long convoy was sponsored by the United
States Army. This one, expected to last 13 days, is sponsored by Bridgestone
Americas, the tire company, and the American Association of State Highway
and Transportation Officials, known in the road business as Aashto
(pronounced ASH-toe); Bridgestone is calling it the "greatest road trip in
history."
Which can't possibly turn out to be true. Just think of Jack Kerouac or the
Merry Pranksters or Odysseus or the Cannonball Run or even Lewis and
Clark, just to name a few. Also arguable is Aashto's description of the
Interstate as a "symbol of freedom." The Interstate is no longer about just
freedom. In 2006, with congestion rising and traffic delays up nationwide, it
also symbolizes a kind of commercial and personal strangulation.
At least since the 60's, the Interstate has been the system that all state
roads
and, more recently, many local suburban roads have sought to emulate. And,
frankly, the Interstate System is amazing. Just look at how it has moved us;
according to the Automobile Association of America, in 1956, Americans
drove 628 million miles; in 2002, 2.8 billion. The even bigger story is
trucks. In
1997, according to the Department of Transportation, the Interstate System
handled more than 1 trillion ton-miles of stuff, a feat executed by 21
million
truckers driving approximately 412 billion miles.
But the Interstate System has also given us a lot that we didn't expect. In
building it during the 60's, the U.S. destroyed nearly as much public housing
as it put up. Then again, in a backhanded way, the Interstate System helped
spawn the modern environmental movement, with the battle over I-40 through
Overton Park in Memphis, for example, and with the fight over I-75 though the
Everglades. It gave us historic preservation, after wiping out middle-class
black neighborhoods in New Orleans. It also gave us sprawl. It gave us
Atlanta. It gave us the modern South.
The first Bush administration's plan for a second Interstate System
thankfully
never took off, and the alternative has become new state-grown plans to build
different kinds of road. State highway departments have been taking big
roads and narrowing them, adding bike lanes and trails. In the last 10 years,
engineers have increasingly looked for ways not to speed cars along but to
slow them down. "You can design a road that addresses mobility but also
makes them want to get out of the car," says Tom Warne, a former executive
director of Utah's Department of Transportation who is working with New
Hampshire's D.O.T. "It's the stuff that's along the street windows,
benches,
street furniture, greenery. There's meandering." In Pennsylvania, where
general traffic increased by 63 percent and truck traffic by 82 percent
between
1984 and 2004, there are plans to make communities across the state more
walkable, to build new highways at grade rather than elevate them, to build
on Route 202 in the eastern part of the state what looks less like a freeway
and more like an old parkway.
It's nothing short of a revolutionary change in thinking in about what in a
nation where the average number of people in a household (1.8) was recently
passed by the average number of cars (1.9) can still seem so mundane.
New Hampshire has been retraining state transportation engineers and
inviting community members to the training courses. In Meredith, N.H., the
state recently threw out plans for a $1 million engineer-driven widening of
Route 25, which clogs up each summer with tourists headed to Lake
Winnipesaukee and the White Mountains. "Are we going to design a road that
stops traffic from backing up on the Fourth of July?" asks Carol Murray, the
New Hampshire commissioner of transportation. "No, but if you're stuck in
traffic, you're going to have something to look at besides pavement." Lewis
Feldstein, president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, says, "I
think what we're seeing is transportation is too important to be left to the
transportation planners." Feldstein is chairman of the panel that wrote the
state's next 10-year transportation plan alongside representatives from the
health care industry, children's-services providers, environmentalists and
business promoters.
Some road engineers remain territorial, but many of them are suddenly
showing up at meetings not so much geared to fight but to listen to issues
besides congestion. "They are realizing," says Andy Wiley-Schwartz, vice
president for transportation for the Project for Public Places, a group
facilitating the planner-community dialogue, "that they are in the community-
development business and not just in the facilities-development business."
Call it the Slow Road movement, but not the No Road movement, because
another thing that a 50-year-old crumbling Interstate System brings is
opportunity, a chance for a giant retrofit. The entire system might be
regeared
for rapid-transit buses (see Bogotá, Colombia) or for regional trains (see
China) or for light rail (see Los Angeles, where they're not quite sure
what to
do with the system just yet, as well as Denver and Phoenix). In Indianapolis,
where the old Lincoln Highway, an Interstate prototype, crosses the White
River, the road is now a park, alongside a proposed walking trail that
will be
partly supported by state money devoted to fighting obesity.
Roads are even being promoted by environmentalists as opportunities to fix
the American landscape, for while the Interstate unites human population
centers, it divides everything else. "What we've done is cut the land into
these
little pieces it's almost like a megazoo," says Richard Forman, author of
"Road Ecology" and a landscape ecologist at Harvard University. Smaller and
smaller communities of road-bound plant and animal life are reconnecting via
wildlife over- and underpasses in Canada, Holland and are you ready?
Florida and New Jersey. In Maryland, storm-water runoff has been tied to road
reconstruction in the Anacostia watershed. "I think we're on the verge of
understanding not only the impact of roads but how to eventually restore the
watersheds," says Neil Weinstein, director of the Low Impact Development
Center, a nonprofit engineering and sustainable-planning organization.
It's a historic summer all right, because soon after the Aashto convoy
finishes
its trip, the recreators of Lewis and Clark's 1804 to 1806 Corps of Discovery
convoy pulls into St. Louis. The Lewis and Clark trip laid the groundwork for
the Interstate. Now we have to decide whether our roads will continue to
strangle us, to drive us crazy, to pollute and poison our air and water or
maybe slow us down in a good way and give us a chance to enjoy everything
we still have left and have worked so hard to build.
Robert Sullivan is the author, most recently, of "Cross Country," a book
about
traveling along the roads and highways of America.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
