Eisenhower never wanted freeways to go through cities

But Eisenhower never intended that the Interstates be built through densely populated cities. A memorandum of a 1960 meeting in the Oval Office, available in the archives of Eisenhower’s presidency, makes this crystal-clear:

[The President] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way . . . and that he was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored. He added that those who had not advised him that such was being done, and those who steered the program in such a direction, had not followed his wishes.

 

The irony of all this is the interstate system ended up destroying the urban landscape in a similar fashion that the WWII bombers did to the German cities.

 

During the first decade of Interstate highway construction, 335,000 homes were razed, forcing families to look elsewhere for housing ...

In many cases, the ‘urban blight’ targeted by the new road construction simply meant African-American communities—often thriving ones. A great body of work shows that urban freeways destroyed the hearts of African-American communities in the South Bronx, Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, Durham, and nearly every medium to large American city.

In Tennessee, plans for the construction of Interstate 40 were in fact redrawn to route the highway through the flourishing Jefferson Street corridor, home to roughly 80 percent of Nashville’s African-American-owned businesses. Not only did the construction of I-40 destroy this commercial district; it also demolished 650 homes and 27 apartment buildings while erecting physical barriers separating the city’s largest African-American universities: Fisk University, Tennessee A & I University, and Meharry Medical College.

the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans bifurcated that city’s culturally rich Tremé district. Among the casualties were a popular Mardi Gras parade route lined with majestic oak trees and a thriving corridor of African-American businesses some called "the black people’s Canal Street."

 

Writing on his blog Original Green, my friend Steve Mouzon examined property values along an eleven-block stretch of a street that runs perpendicular to and underneath I-65/70 in Indianapolis. Property values per acre drop off precipitously as one gets closer to the freeway, and then rise again on the other side (though not to the same level).

Steve suggests that, although the neighborhood on the east side does not match that on the far west for per-acre value, the increments of change as one moves from west to east likely would have been more gradual, rather than dramatic, without the freeway.
My guess is that freeways have probably created value in the suburbs but frequently diminished value in city centers. I’m sure there are more sophisticated studies on the subject, but I haven’t had time to research them.

freeway corridors are associated with higher crime, reduced walkability, the absence of outdoor seating, high traffic fatalities, and increased vacant property acreage.

 

This is the point I try to convey to people, particularly this board. American highways were never intended to carry “urban commuters”. They were intended as long-distance cross-country travel like European highways.

Political pressure has forced highway alignments to cut through the city. We don’t like it, highway engineers don’t like it, but to politicians, it’s a good way of saying “we got something accomplished”.

Unfortunately, we as a country are making our cars do what it’s not designed to do: Urban commuting

That’s very standard in Europe as well. Highways don’t simply stop right at a city. It goes around. If it does go “to” a city, it transitions into a limited-access large arterial before it reaches the city. This reduces the amount of traffic being dumped at the city center.

Again, the problem with the U.S. is that we’ve turned highways into short-distance express arterials, which was not its original intent.

 

Some cities have elected not to rebuild freeways when they reach the age where costly repairs are required but, instead, to replace them with surface boulevards. The best known of these is in San Francisco, where a 1989 earthquake famously knocked out the Embarcadero Freeway. It has now been replaced with “a tree-lined boulevard that blends alternative modes of transportation, including a perfect pedestrian promenade, a bicycle corridor and a popular streetcar line.”
The change has increased property values, attracted investment, and restored scenic views previously blocked by freeway infrastructure, all without harmful effects on traffic. Back in Dallas, Kennedy "conservatively" estimates that replacing a segment of I-345 in the city with a surface-level boulevard could attract $750 million worth of new investment and increase tax revenues from adjacent properties six-fold.

 

Mostly from here

http://m.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/03/can-urban-highways-be-fixed/1399/

 

These use to be thriving neighborhoods before freeways came