The Beauty and Tragedy of Urban Freeways

Urban freeways are in many ways the pinnacle of the interstate highway system, threading high volumes of traffic into dense cities smoothly, efficiently, and gracefully. However, this regimented order masks the inherent inequity involved in the construction of many urban freeways. In this, the first installment in a 3-part series on road transportation in urban areas, Peter discusses the contradictory nature of the Southeast/Southwest Freeway in Washington, DC.

I was out on a site visit for work today, and as I traveled south from L’Enfant Plaza to Southwest Waterfront (now called “The Wharf” thanks to a branding effort by PN Hoffman) I had to cross the Southeast/Southwest Freeway. As a transit nerd, I have an unnatural fascination with traffic, so whenever I happen to be around highways while traveling on foot I’ll often stop and watch the traffic if I have some spare time. There’s just something that I find thrilling about watching cars rocket out from under your feet and speed off towards the horizon.

In this location, 9 lanes serve 152,000 vehicles per day.

I stood there on the 7th Street bridge over I-395 and watched the rush hour traffic go through its daily grind for a good 8 or 10 minutes. In many ways, there’s an underlying order and elegance to traffic flow. Even though it’s a complicated system with hundreds of thousands of individual drivers making independent, almost selfish decisions, the overall traffic stream works remarkably efficiently because everybody is following more or less the same set of rules.

It’s all very ordered, but at the same time very fragile. Anybody who has ever been stuck in a traffic jam knows just how quickly a small incident can turn a flowing expressway into a parking lot. It doesn’t even take an accident to cause tremendous delays, as you’ll see one of these days when I and some of my grad school buddies get around to writing an article for our new blog, PeopleMovers, explaining the causes behind so-called “phantom traffic jams”.

Between the wonderful weather above, the soothing hum of the freeway below, and the faint scent of blooming flowers being swept uphill from the Potomac on a light spring breeze, it was almost enough to make me forget what I was actually seeing. Almost.

The truth is that the Southeast/Southwest Freeway is 9-lane-wide scar right across the chin of the District of Columbia and a permanent reminder of a terrible and painful time in Washington’s history.

Back in 1956, when the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways was being planned, the Federal Highway Administration drew in a system of 3 circumferential beltways around the Greater Washington area. The outer beltway is known today as I-495, the Capital Beltway, and serves as a crucial yet congested link connecting the suburbs of Washington. In many ways, it is a victim of its own success as by its very nature it has enabled people to have excessively long commutes, thereby adding to the distance traveled by regional commuters and inducing further travel demand – but that’s a story for Part 2 of this series when I explain Wardrop Equilibrium.

DC’s proposed freeway system - click to enlarge. Built roads are shown as black lines and dashed gray lines are proposed roads, including the middle (yellow) and inner loop (red) freeways and the proposed path of Interstate 95 (blue).

Continuing inwards, the middle loop freeway was set to cut through a region that was already well-populated by the time the interstate system was proposed. You have to remember that in the 1950s, over 800,000 people lived within the District compared to the 600,000 that live here today. While large swaths of the middle loop were set to be constructed above existing rail lines or along unpopulated river banks (we’ll ignore the environmental implications of this second choice for simplicity), about 75% of the route was set to replace or be built on top of existing roads: north along Mt. Olivet Road through Trinidad; west across Military Rd through Petworth, Rock Creek Park, and Chevy Chase; south along Nebraska and New Mexico Avenues through Tenleytown and past American University; and finally south through the preserved greenery of Glover-Archbold Park to connect with the Whitehurst Freeway in Georgetown.

As you probably know if you’ve ever looked at a map of DC, there is no middle loop freeway; just the Beltway. Strong protests and legal challenges – led by environmental advocates and residents of the wealthier western neighborhoods of DC – caused the project to be repeatedly delayed and eventually deleted from plans completely in 1977, the year after the opening of Washington’s Metrorail system.

This brings us to the fate of the proposed inner loop freeway. The Southeast/Southwest Freeway – that road that I waxed so romantically about at the beginning of this post – today represents about half of what was to become the innermost beltway, with the remaining sections to be tunneled beneath what is currently K Street NW and Ohio Drive. Just like the middle loop freeway, the inner loop was to cut through well-established neighborhoods along the southern edge. Its K Street section would have even split the central business district in two. Concerns of construction impacts from big business impacts killed the K Street section and the National Park Service nixed the Ohio Drive tunnel, but the Southeast/Southwest Freeway was still constructed because of one important difference: blight.

Living conditions in Southwest DC had been declining for decades, finally reaching a point around 1950 where the area was dominated by shantytowns and poorer neighborhoods that can only be described as slums. The story goes that the Russians used photos of Southwest DC with the Capitol Building in the background as propaganda to illustrate the income inequality in America and by extension the failings of capitalism.

Photo by Dmitri Kessel for Life Magazine.

So early in the 1950s planners from DC and the federal government decided to start a massive urban renewal campaign, effectively wiping Southwest from the map through eminent domain and starting over from scratch. The residents of Southwest, who were generally poor and lacking in education, simply lacked the social standing and clout to have their complaints taken seriously and could do nothing but watch when their vibrant – albeit economically depressed – neighborhood was razed.

Southwest in 1955 - Vic Casamento for the Washington Post.
(You can see the freeway construction just right of center
between the railroad tracks and the vast expanse of empty lots).

Today, Southwest DC is cut in half by the Southeast/Southwest Freeway. North of I-395, the Southwest Federal Center is a depressing mass of brutalist concrete architecture that completely empties out after business hours, becoming a void lacking in economic activity or foot traffic of any type. South of the freeway is block after block of public housing that’s only recently started to see new developments like The Wharf on Maine Avenue or Waterfront Station on 4th Street SW. The region is still considered to be a sketchy enough place that they sent me to do the site visit in place of one of the company’s female staff engineers just in case.

This part of Southwest definitely has some foot traffic and a few commercial activities, but what exists today is a far cry from what there used to be in the 40s and 50s with the old Maine Avenue Fish Market and the nearby commercial activities. Slum or not, the neighborhood had an identity back then; a distinct feel and attitude that set it apart from the rest of the District. Instead of trying to help the population improve themselves, a bunch of planners who thought they knew better cleared the whole thing out and created a contrived neighborhood in its place that might have all the makings of a community but is somehow lacking in soul.

To me, the Southeast/Southwest Freeway is a reminder of why planners and engineers must make sure that all parties, no matter how disadvantaged, have a say in urban development. Far too much of the original interstate system was built like this in urban areas; bisecting the poorest neighborhoods in a town without considering the impact to those communities in the coming decades. A freeway isn’t something that you can “undo”, and so we all must live with the consequences of our own poor decisions since it was we as a society who let this happen time and time again.

Still, whenever I see the Southeast/Southwest Freeway, I can’t help but think of the tragedy of the situation. Here, we took a neighborhood that tens of thousands of people called home and turned it into a place full of people who would love nothing more than to be someplace else.