Outdated State and Federal Road Design Rules Hinder Freeway Removal

As the movement to remove urban freeways and reconnect neighborhoods gains strength, writes Scott Beyer, Northern Virginia's National Landing provides a sample of the conflict between freeway removal advocates and the state and federal programs that perpetuate freeway building and expansion. "The local business improvement district (BID) wants to convert U.S. Route 1, an elevated highway that divides National Landing’s downtown, into a walkable boulevard with narrower lanes and slower car speeds." But state officials want to keep the road at its current width, citing concerns "that narrowing Route 1 would divert too much traffic to local roads."

In Boston, mobility advocates are calling for "an at-grade reconstruction that is less disruptive than the elevated highway" of the city's Interstate 90 viaduct, but are facing similar opposition from the state's department of transportation, which, according to reports, "may even make the elevated viaduct taller and wider."

The conflict stems in part from the seldom-updated, federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), whose guidelines "dictate lane widths, shoulder widths and curve radii, and are written with automobile speed in mind." Because "[h]ighway engineers tend to use a 'level of service' (LOS) metric to determine whether a road has adequate capacity," typical designs focus on prioritizing vehicle speed with little regard to pedestrian or cyclist safety or convenience.

With local residents and businesses on board with less car-centric retrofits of urban freeways, it's time that state and federal DOTs understand "it may be unwise for them to force this 'throughput at all costs' vision onto the urban parts of state and federal routes" when cities are realizing the "tremendous economic and cultural value that is diminished" by reducing roads to simply corridors for moving traffic as efficiently as possible.