by Jonathan Hiskes.
It’s one thing to talk
about designing cities and towns for people instead of cars, as Transportation
Secretary Ray LaHood has
done.
It’s another thing to make
good on that pledge by tearing down elevated highways that prevent foot
traffic and isolate neighborhoods from each other. LaHood’s Transportation
Department announced support for three such projects in a major funding announcement Wednesday. The department made $600 million in TIGER II grants, funding 42
construction projects and 33 planning projects around the country.
Perhaps the most
eye-catching winner is the New Haven, Conn., Downtown Crossing, which gets $16
million to remove the limited-access Route 34. Residents and planners hate how
it blocks foot-traffic and streetfront retail and separates the city’s Union
Station and the Yale-New Haven hospital complex from the rest of downtown. Now it’ll
be replaced with two walk-bike-transit-friendly boulevards
“We think this is a big
f—-ing deal,” New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said.
Highway tear-down
projects for the Claiborne Corridor in New Orleans and the Sheridan Expressway
Corridor New York also received funding for
planning, although they aren’t yet a certainty.
Announcing new projects
is politically easier than getting rid of harmful ones, so the tear-downs
signal a commitment to ending the federal government’s history of auto-only
transportation funding. It doesn’t hurt that aging elevated highways are uniquely
expensive to maintain.
The rest of the TIGER
II projects reveal the administration’s priorities too. There’s a focus on
small-scale projects in small and mid-size cities, as Transport Politic notes—things like transit centers, street improvements, and rehabbing freight rail
lines. (The previous
round of TIGER grants focused on larger cities). But there is also funding
for a light-rail line in Los Angeles, a streetcar line in Atlanta, and a
streetcar line in Salt Lake City. $140 million goes to rural projects.
Broken down by mode, roughly
29 percent of the money goes for road projects, 26 percent for transit, 20
percent for rail projects, 16 percent for ports, 4 percent for bicycle and
pedestrian projects and 5 percent for planning projects, according to the DOT.
(So roads aren’t really getting the shaft.)
In case you’re wondering,
the funding comes from the 2010 general appropriation bill, not the stimulus
act. The DOT said it gave priority to projects that can quickly create jobs.
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