NYC must tear down its highways
With the climate crisis worsening and the war in Ukraine highlighting — yet again — the folly of our dependence on fossil fuels; we face a moment of reckoning with our past and an opportunity for our future.
Two centuries of industrial waste and raw human sewage discharge — from the late 1700s through the late 1900s — turned the Hudson and East Rivers toxic. Factories and industrial areas were located along the water’s edge, while residential development turned inward, away from the sludge and toward our city’s growing parks, like Central Park (mid-1800s) and Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
In the mid-1900s, Robert Moses, who simultaneously held positions as NYC Parks Commissioner and NYC Planning Commissioner, had an outsized role in hard-coding this orientation for future generations. He blanketed NYC’s then-undesirable waterfront with polluting, dangerous highways, tearing through poor neighborhoods, and offering concessions (like the triple cantilever and Brooklyn Heights Promenade) to the wealthier, more politically-connected, areas. He proposed using virtually every NYC stretch of waterfront for vehicles, and built highways into the wilds to encourage low-density suburban sprawl.
Our health and our planet have paid the price. In 2019, more than 15m tonnes CO2, or 27% of NYC greenhouse gas emissions, were released into our air from motor vehicles — the vast majority of which was from passenger cars. That number has not budged in over a decade. In NYS, the proportion of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation is closer to 50%. In addition, the deleterious health effects of living near busy roadways with noise and air pollution have been well documented. NYC Health Department estimates show that air pollution in New York City causes more than 3,000 deaths, 2,000 hospital admissions for lung and heart conditions, and 6,000 emergency department visits for asthma in children and adults.
In order to align with the Paris Climate Accords, NYC has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% before 2030. This massive reduction will not simply come from switching to (heavier, energy-hungry) electric vehicles, and we shouldn’t rely on them as panacea. True energy reduction and health improvement will come only from changing the face of our city, reconsidering how we move goods and people around, and doubling down on housing density, public transit, and bikeable, walkable communities.
The opportunity. Thanks to decades of environmental activism and regulation, the beautiful, historically-abundant rivers around NYC are coming back to life. Simultaneously, Robert Moses-era highways are reaching the end of their useful lives, new public transit for freight and people is in process, and our DOTs are stepping down delivery vehicles from large trucks to e-cargo bikes, hand trucks, and other sustainable modes of delivery. Together, these trends give us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine a cleaner, greener, safer urban landscape for the 21st century, radically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and meaningfully improve our health and our quality of life.
With no time to spare, NYC and NYS officials need to act boldly and collaborate to dismantle the FDR, the BQE, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Gowanus Expressway, and our other urban highways. These valuable mostly-waterfront public spaces can be turned into parks, much-needed housing, community facilities, light industrial, greenways, and more; and enable the 15-minute city our planet and our health deserve.
