Should New Orleans tear down a highway?

To rebuild or not?

Jon Boyd, Sep 15, 10.

Interstate 10 through downtown New Orleans, aka the Claiborne Expressway, is a elevated freeway driving a barrier through the fabled Tremé neighborhood. About two-thirds of Tremé lies west of the Expressway, and the Louis Armstrong Park is located within the other third, adjacent to the French Quarter. Le Vieux Carre, the old French name for the French Quarter, is the oldest part of the city and retains most of its grid from the old walking city.

Some New Orleans community leaders are advocating elimination of the Claiborne Expressway in favor of a boulevard, according to Yonah Freemark writing in the Next American City (via Planetizen):

“If this happens, it could be game-changing,” Jeffrey Schwartz told me recently. Schwartz is the founder of a transportation advocacy group called Transport for NOLA and the head of the Broad Community Connections organization, which works to improve a community district in the city. I met with him and Stephen Crim, a planner at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi and also involved in New Orleans transportation issues, at a coffee shop to discuss the issues.

To both of them, demolishing the Claiborne Expressway, which runs just north of the French Quarter, could have a real effect in encouraging redevelopment of some of the city’s less-wealthy and sometimes forgotten areas.

Schwartz emphasized to me the context in which the highway had been built. It replaced a wide boulevard lined with big, beautiful trees. The areas nearby “used to be some of the most affluent African-American communities in the country,” he said. Along Claiborne, “there used to be 160 businesses; now I don’t think there are thirty.” Keeping the road in place seems unlikely to help matters much, since the elevated highway literally cuts a scar through the neighborhood and fills the air with the smell of gas and the noise of automobiles.

New Orleans has proposed this highway take-down in the past: After Katrina, the 2007 Unified New Orleans Plan suggested doing as much, but its recommendations have not been supported with funds or much politician supports. Nonetheless, the publication earlier this summer of a report detailing the possible elimination of the road brought the issue back into public discussion.

Removing the highway and replacing it with a boulevard would increase travel times for those now using the highway by between three to six minutes, but little else would change for the average driver.

For the pedestrian, however, taking the highway out would mean a whole new way of thinking about the urban environment in New Orleans. Said Crim, “the basic structures of the neighborhoods are still around,” but connections are really lacking. Both he and Schwartz noted that Claiborne connects four major public housing projects, two sports franchises, two hospitals, and several historic neighborhoods. It has the potential to be the city’s most important main street, especially if the boulevard redevelopment incorporated some sort of transit investment as well.

The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), currently headed by former Milwaukee Mayor, John Norquist, created its own list of Freeway without Futures, which included the Claiborne Expressway. When Norquist talks about dismantling urban freeways, he speaks from experience. He led a successful fight to tear down the Park East Freeway in his hometown.

CNU teamed up with some local groups to create a report on the Claiborne Expressway, and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu seems open to considering the boulevard approach, says Bruce Eggler of the Times-Picayune (online at nola.com).

Houston Tomorrow published an article about a plan to tear down the Bronx’s Sheridan Expressway, another project on the CNU Freeways without Futures list.