Blog: Freeways

Driving from New York City to Massachusetts this weekend, I was struck, as I always am, by the crazy tangle of expressways and parkways in the Bronx. There are five major north-south roads (the Henry Hudson, the Thruway which becomes the Major Deegan, the Bronx River Parkway, the Hutchinson, and 95), all parallel, most slicing right through the heart of residential neighborhoods, plus a plethora of small connecting roads (how many people know which 2 roads are connected by the Mosholu Parkway)?

Every time I drive through there I think we really shouldn't have so many damn parkways. Besides, parks are for people, not cars. Sustainable South Bronx, a great organization with a pretty yet extremely hard to use Web site, and several other organizations advocate removing the least-used of the Moses roads, the Sheridan Expressway, elevating the Bruckner so that it ceases to be the enormous barrier between neighborhoods that it is today, and building a ramp at Leggett Avenue which is surely a good idea though I don't know the traffic patterns there very well personally.

I can't find much detail on this plan beyond this testimony at a public hearing, but I'll post some if I can find it.

Update: here's the DOT's plan for the Bruckner/Sheridan area, which involves keeping the Sheridan. I just realized that I've never actually seen a DOT plan outside the context of a community group pushing an alternative. But this might be because I only go to their site when I'm reading about a community fighting them. I supposed I should read their site more.

It's almost impossible to get into New York City from the north without traveling on a road built by Robert Moses. In addition every expressway and parkway criss-crossing the Bronx and Westchester, he built the Henry Hudson, Triborough, Whitestone, and Throgs Neck bridges - all the major crossings from the north.

Driving home from Boston with Justin and Meredith, the subject came up of whether it was possible to avoid Moses' roads. In a stroke of supreme irony, not too long thereafter, just north of New Haven, the van we were driving developed transmission problems forcing us to do just that.

The trouble manifsted itself as a loud grinding noise and strong vibration which continued anytime we accelerated beyond about 35 miles per hour. After conferencing with the owner of the van, we decided to drive - very slowly - back to New York. By New Rochelle the problem had worsened such that accelerating past 20 caused the grinding, so we exited at Route 1 and proceeded to travel all the way from the city line to the Third Avenue Bridge to the West Side without utilizing a single Moses creation.

Driving down Boston Road (so named, I'd surmise, because that's actually how people used to get to Boston), it was abundantly clear what a destructive effect the indiscriminate blasting of neighborhoods to build the parkways had. When traveling through the Van Nest and West Farms neighborhoods, we passed the Bronx River Parkway, running beside streets which had old residential buildings and stores on one side, and chain link fences with scrub growth (the embankment for the Parkway) on the other. We could easily imagine the populated side of the street continued on the other side and through to the blocks on the other side, once a single community, riven in two in the late forties by the Master Builder.