[StBernard] Claiborne Avenue expressway demolition gets support in report

[Westley Annis]

Claiborne Avenue expressway demolition gets support in report
Published: Thursday, July 22, 2010, 5:00 AM 
 Bruce Eggler, The Times-Picayune 
 
Hoping to give further momentum to an idea that has picked up a growing
number of adherents in recent years, a group of local civic activists and
planners today will release a detailed report advocating the removal of the
elevated expressway over Claiborne Avenue.

The report suggests turning the 2.2-mile stretch of expressway between
Elysian Fields Avenue and the Pontchartrain Expressway near the Superdome
into a surface-level boulevard tied into the city's regular street grid,
although it says even that might not have to be built in the section of the
route between St. Bernard Avenue and Elysian Fields.

The document says eliminating the expressway would have numerous benefits,
such as removing an eyesore, reducing noise and air pollution, increasing
opportunities for public transit, and promoting investment that would
eliminate blight and create economic development in the Treme and 7th Ward
neighborhoods.

Although travel times for motorists who now use the expressway would be
longer, the increases would be only a few minutes, the report says, and
accessibility to the French Quarter and other destinations along the
expressway route would "improve substantially with a better-connected street
network."

The 60-page document, titled "Restoring Claiborne Avenue," was created for
the Claiborne Corridor Improvement Coalition, a local group, and the
Congress for the New Urbanism, a national organization that advocates
"walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods" as an alternative to urban sprawl.

The Claiborne expressway is No. 5 on the national group's list of "Freeways
Without Futures," the top 10 highways it sees as ripe for replacing with
boulevards. 

The new report was prepared by Waggonner & Ball, a local architectural firm,
and Smart Mobility Inc., a Vermont consulting firm.

The elevated Claiborne expressway, built in the 1960s, has long been the
object of criticism, especially since the construction of I-610 reduced the
need for an inner-city freeway. In the past five years, both the Unified New
Orleans Plan, created to guide the city's post-Katrina recovery, and the
city's proposed new master plan have called for studying the possibility of
removing it. 

Mayor Mitch Landrieu said last week he's open to the idea. "It could be a
game-changer. It could reconnect two of the city's most historic
neighborhoods," he told an Urban Land Institute meeting. "I'm not saying I'm
for it," he said. "I'm just saying it's worth thinking about."

The new report sums up the criticisms of the Claiborne expressway this way: 

"Once a thriving commercial corridor, the area defined by Claiborne Avenue
suffered serious decline following the construction of the I-10 expressway
in the 1960s. Pushed through over the wishes of the area's largely
disenfranchised African-American population, it was intimately tied to the
overall decline of the neighborhood, replacing a lively strolling street,
oak-covered neutral ground and business corridor with an eyesore that made
Claiborne Avenue both a physical and symbolic barrier between the area's
neighborhoods."

To those dubious that state and federal highway officials would agree to
tear down the expressway, the report notes that Central Freeway in San
Francisco, Park East Freeway in Milwaukee and part of the elevated West Side
Highway in New York City all were demolished in recent years.

Moreover, the report says, the choice is not between spending millions on
demolition and doing nothing. 

"The Claiborne expressway is an aging interstate that ... is nearing the end
of its useful life and beginning to deteriorate," it says. It "will require
more frequent maintenance, and possibly reconstruction, to carry traffic
safely." In fact, the Federal Highway Administration's national bridge
inventory has reported that several interchange ramps are deteriorating and
need more than $50 million in repairs or replacement. 

John Norquist, who was mayor of Milwaukee when it dismantled its inner-city
highway and is now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, said it
would have cost about $80 million to rebuild the Milwaukee freeway. "It cost
about $30 million to tear it down and put a surface street in its place," he
said. 

At the time the Claiborne elevated expressway was built, the report says, it
was widely thought that extending interstate highways directly into cities
would help "maintain a vibrant central city" by providing easy auto access.
In reality, it says, such highways encouraged more city dwellers to migrate
to the suburbs and caused "disinvestment in urban public transit and urban
businesses."

Today, it says, planners think that "high-speed freeway travel through urban
downtowns is not necessary for urban mobility, due to the close proximity of
destinations. A highly connected urban street grid provides a better way to
move traffic to the complex array of destinations in a city."

In 2008, the elevated Claiborne expressway carried between 57,000 and 69,000
vehicles a day, with the surface-level Claiborne Avenue carrying probably 10
percent of that volume. If the elevated portion is demolished, between
one-third and one-half of that combined volume would switch to other major
arteries, such as Broad and Galvez streets, and Claiborne would be able to
handle the resulting load of 50,000 or fewer vehicles a day, the report
says.


To facilitate the switch to other streets, the report recommends making
Galvez a through street across the Pontchartrain Expressway, as Broad is
now, and constructing a new interchange between Broad and the expressway. It
also suggests removing the high-speed ramps on the Pontchartrain Expressway
west of its current interchange with the Claiborne expressway. It proposes
replacing that "extremely complex" interchange with a "more traditional
urban diamond interchange." 

The section of the elevated expressway between the Pontchartrain Expressway
and St. Bernard Avenue could be replaced with a six-lane surface boulevard
featuring a wide landscaped neutral ground that could accommodate a bicycle
path and perhaps a stormwater-retention canal and light-rail transit.
Traffic would be expected to move between 20 and 30 mph, depending on the
time of day and allowing for delays at frequent traffic lights. 

A longtime neighborhood landmark, the traffic circle at St. Bernard Avenue,
could be restored.

Between the circle and Elysian Fields, where the elevated expressway was
built diagonally across residential blocks of the 7th Ward rather than over
an existing right-of-way, there are two possibilities, the report notes.
Either the surface-level boulevard could be continued, or the traditional
street network could be restored, with the area that now is underneath the
expressway available for redevelopment in various ways. The report's authors
appear to favor the second option. Traffic that now uses the expressway in
that area presumably would shift to Elysian Fields and other major streets.

The result, the report says, is that travel times for motorists who now use
the full 2.2-mile expressway would increase by 3 to 6 minutes in peak travel
times and by 2 to 4 minutes at other times of day. 

The biggest effect would be on large trucks that now use the Claiborne
expressway to travel between eastern New Orleans and the city's east bank
wharves or the West Bank. It is expected that they would instead use I-610
and the Pontchartrain Expressway, adding at least 2 miles to their trips. A
new flyover ramp could be built at what is now the I-10/I-610 connection
near the Jefferson Parish line for trucks traveling away from the port. 

Traffic that is passing through New Orleans would simply use I-610, which
would probably be redesignated as I-10.