photo/Zack Barowitz
The Past, Present & Future of I-295
Desire lines is perhaps the most poetically evocative term in the lexicon of transportation planning. Technically, it refers to an eroded footpath over an unpaved area, created by people seeking a shorter or more pleasant route than what pavement provides. You see desire lines everywhere: on college campuses, as cattle paths, down the Western Prom and across the Franklin Street median in Portland. They are the tangible manifestation of our collective will, a record of our desires as we move through space.
Considered more broadly, desire lines exist in the public imagination of people who want a safer route to work or school, or to not have to walk two blocks to get to a crosswalk, or five blocks to pass over (or under) a highway.
For the past 20 years, advocates in Portland have been asking if it was really such a great idea to destroy hundreds of homes and businesses along Franklin Street so container trucks could have the fastest route possible out of the city (and suburban commuters the fastest route in). The same goes for the paired one-way thoroughfares in town — State and High, Elm and Preble, Outer Congress and Park Ave. — created to move traffic efficiently from Interstate 295 to other parts of Portland and South Portland. Do they really get people where they want to go faster?
Here in the real world, it often seems our urban highway network actually makes traffic worse once it gets to the peninsula, because it divides so many neighborhoods, creates choke points and makes intersections too complicated. For example, the old interchange ramps at Exit 5 (Fore River Parkway and Congress Street) are not designed to modern safety standards, creating high crash rates at that location. The intersection of York and Park streets (just off the Casco Bay Bridge) is the highest crash point in the city.
The knee-jerk solution to traffic congestion is often to create one-way streets that, in practice, contribute to traffic problems by funneling motorists onto byways that lead them the wrong way, obliging drivers to take multiple turns to maintain their direction of travel.
There is a tendency to think of highways as being where they are almost by divine right. But the movement to challenge that assumption and to rethink or remove urban highways is worldwide — from the Cheonggye Freeway in Seoul to the Big Dig in Boston. Apart from cleaning the air, building safer streets, undoing past injustices and making room for parks and housing, the economic potential is persuasive. According to Next City, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, spent $25 million to remove 1.3 miles of highway, which sounds expensive until you consider that repairs and maintenance of that multi-lane stretch of asphalt had cost three times that sum. The so-called high line effect that followed led to over a billion dollars in economic development.
With so much potential, why not consider all options for the future of I-295? Perhaps because we’ve destroyed the past.
From Rail Lines to Redlines
In the 1930s, the federal government created redlining maps that led to discrimination against individuals and entire neighborhoods — those typically home to immigrants and people of color — deemed to be “declining.” Whether it was by causation, correlation or coincidence, I-295 follows the old Union Branch rail line as it traces its way through the “declining” areas, while avoiding the “desirable” ones. And when it came time to expand the system, it was the Italian, Armenian, Black and Jewish neighborhoods that got the wrecking ball.
The interstate’s impact on Portland’s African-American families may have been worse than the loss of the passenger rail line, which cost them their jobs but left their neighborhoods intact. Many Black Portlanders also lived close to their jobs at Union Station, likewise destroyed by I-295 — a double whammy with lasting implications.
To this day, communities of color still concentrate along the I-295 corridor. It often overlaps with the sites of public housing projects, because people don’t want to live near dirty, noisy, asthma-inducing highways if they have a choice.
Construction of one of the earliest phases of I-295, the Falmouth Spur that runs through four miles of countryside, demolished zero homes. But when the interstate opened in the 1970s, it facilitated the decimation of downtown Portland for a generation.
The novelty of easy interstate travel has already worn thin. Today, the highway-dependent Maine Mall area is struggling with vacancies, crumbling parking lots, long traffic delays and low land values, while Portland’s more human-scaled downtown and Old Port districts thrive. The economy has moved on from the car-centric visions dominant from the 1950s through the ’80s. Replacing automobile infrastructure with a revived urban fabric will expand the tax base, lower property taxes, and make more land available for homes.
Transportation is Land Use
Highways don’t just take up land, they transform the surrounding landscape into automobile infrastructure: on- and off-ramps that create dead spaces inside, extra lanes, parking lots and garages, motels and gas stations and drive-thru joints catering to travelers, etc. This makes housing more expensive by taking up land and attracting more commuters to the city who, in turn, require more land for parking lots and garages.
But because we have overbuilt and misallocated car storage so badly, the vast majority of parking spaces are vacant the vast majority of the time. CNN recently reported that there are roughly two billion parking spaces in the U.S., which works out to almost six spots per person (whether they drive or not). While most people in Portland, as well as those pushed out of the city, agree our top problem is housing affordability, parking and transportation infrastructure are rarely discussed as being part of the problem — or part of the solution.
When you look at a parking space, think of it as a bedroom in a future apartment. Garages that empty every evening could be homes for hundreds. Where will the cars go if those spaces are converted? Well, if they are converted to homes, then more people will live closer to their jobs, and they’ll walk, cycle or take the bus to work. Those still commuting can share the spaces that remain and those freed up by this conversion.
There are signs of progress. The Portland City Council recently approved funds for a study to redesign Franklin Street not just as a safer road, but to plan for housing and other productive land uses in that corridor. At Exit 5 in Libbytown, the Maine Department of Transportation (DOT) received a $22 million federal grant to restore two-way traffic to Congress Street and Park Avenue. And the City Council will soon be considering the opportunity to do the same with State and High streets.
There also signs of backsliding. Almost two decades ago, towns like Westbrook and Gorham were complaining of traffic through their downtowns. The Legislature tasked the Maine Turnpike Authority to figure out what to do about it. Sadly, they overlooked cheaper, faster and simpler (public transit) solutions, and recommended expanding the turnpike. The so-called Gorham Connector would bring more traffic onto I-295, and ultimately into downtown Portland, which will create more demand on our infrastructure.
Then there’s Exit 8 on 295 (Washington Ave.). The DOT has applied for funding for more road spaghetti there in the form of a new highway ramp dedicated to the Roux Institute’s development of the old B&M Baked Beans property. While there is public support for the plan, it makes the pedestrian routes far longer and more complicated than they should be and, as we have seen time and time again, pavement begets more pavement. Given the pace of major transportation projects in Maine, this one should be done around the same time sea-level rise erases the spit of land in question.
Whether it be removing, capping or repurposing highways, Portland has Boston’s Big Dig as a ready model for turning highway into hundreds of acres of land for living, working and enjoying life. There is no single answer to our transportation problems, and any solution will come out of a long, and likely fraught, public process. We might not be able to go back to the relative tranquility of the 1890s, but that doesn’t mean we need to be stuck in the 1970s. When it comes to imagining our urban future, let’s not forget that the world is shaped by our desires.
This article is published in conjunction with a free community planning event titled, “Portland Leviathan: The Past, Present & Future of I-295,” on June 20 from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Jewish Community Alliance (1342 Congress St., Portland).
