Why We Should Remove and Reimagine Highways: The Cross Bronx Case Study
We should remove urban highways, not expand them.
Doing the latter is continuing to double down on the worst city planning mistakes of the 20th century.
Yet right now, New York State, through the Cross Bridges Project, is trying to spend $900 million in taxpayer money, which includes adding a lane to the Cross Bronx while it repairs various bridges along the highway.
This Fight is a Model For Urban Highways Across the Country
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, author Robert Caro describes the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which barreled through neighborhoods, displacing 60,000 people, and instilled generations of pollution and disconnection.
The Cross Bronx Expressway is the symbol of the wrongs of the 20th century highway boom.
By fighting for a different future for the Cross Bronx, one that prioritizes clean air, alternatives to driving, and green space, we see a model for what cities across the country can do.
After all, this is not the only fight, and by and large, the Cross Bridges project’s extra lane that stretches one mile is small compared the projects like the planned expansion of I-35 through Austin, Texas.
The Disaster of Urban Highways
Barreling wide highways through cities was one of the biggest mistakes of the post-war United States.
Highways Move People Inefficiently in Cities
When President Eisenhower approved the Interstate highway system, he never intended it to go through cities.
Eisenhower’s team said, “We do not believe that interstate highways should be directed towards the center of congestion. We do not believe that the interstate system is the vehicle for solving rush hour traffic problems. Practically all the experts on the transportation problem of cities agree that rapid transit and mass transit are the solution.”
Why this is the case is simple geometry: cars take up too much space and move too few people for cities. A city is where lots of people live close together. That’s the definition. A city that relies on cars becomes sprawled and traffic-ridden.
Yes, as Eisenhower intended, highways move goods from region to region. But they do a terrible job of moving people into and out of a city, and from one part of a city to another.
They Separate Neighborhoods, Making Them Harder to Get Around
When Moses built the Cross Bronx, it displaced 60,000 people. Today, 300,000 people live within half a mile of the Cross Bronx. These people are mostly low-income, as living near a highway is never desirable in a city.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs has a chapter on “The curse of border vacuums.”
She writes how physical borders, like a highway, not only ruin the land it’s on, but the adjacent streets. “Because few people use the immediate border street, the side streets adjoining it are also less used as a result.”
These 300,000 people are disconnected from parks, from nearby neighborhoods, with little priority given to pedestrian and cycling safety.
Deterioration of Public Health
Then there are the disastrous effects of the air pollution caused by the highway.
According to the Reimagine the Cross Bronx study, those who live within half a mile of the Cross Bronx are…
- Three times more likely to have asthma-related emergency visits
- More likely to be hospitalized for heat stress
- More likely to have diabetes and hypertension
- More likely to be obese
This is compared to the New York City averages.
Particulate matter 2.5 (tiny particulate matter given off by cars and trucks), is linked to cognitive impairment, ADHD, heart disease, lung disease, and higher rates of asthma.
The number of cars going high speeds in this area is also linked to increased traffic violence.
The study writes, “Many sections of the highway experience injury crashes at more than twice the rate of state averages.”
Environmental Destruction, Locally and Globally
It’s no secret that cars are terrible for the environment. That’s on both a local scale and a global scale. Transportation accounts for 29% of U.S. carbon emissions. Most of that comes from cars and trucks.
As I’ve written about, the amount of land cars require also means we surrender of lot of green space.
Too much city space surrendered to cars means less space for parks, gardens, and habitates for other species.
Because of all the concrete, the area within half a mile of the Cross Bronx “is hotter than the rest of NYC, with some locations two to seven degrees hotter than the citywide average.”
Why New York State and the Federal Government Want to Expand The Cross Bronx Expressway
Well, if urban highways are so evil and bad, why do people still want to expand them?
In June, New York State and the Federal Highway Administration announced the Cross Bronx Bridges Project. Here’s their rationale.
U.S. Highways Are Nearing The End of Their Useful Life
Constructed in the middle of the 20th century, many U.S. highways need repair. That’s the case with 5 bridges along the Cross Bronx.
The default for states is to repair them, to hang on to the status quo.
Yet, if populations have increased and car traffic is bad, some states are tempted to make them wider (even though this never reduces traffic long-term). Or they’re tempted to create temporary lanes while they fix the current ones.
That’s the case with this project. They propose adding a mile-long road while they repair the existing route. They’re afraid of closing one lane at a time. Their logic is that they need somewhere for the traffic to go.
But this extra lane will leave a permanent scar on even more blocks next to the highway.
Instead, as U.S. highways begin to end their useful life, we should imagine what we can replace them with, rather than continuing the status quo.
Right Now, The Bronx Lacks East-West Alternatives to Driving
New York State argues they can’t close down a lane, because the highway is a crucial transportation corridor for residents.
You can’t get from the East Bronx to the West Bronx on the subway without going south first.
The solution to this is to expand mass transit, not double down on mistakes.
This project costs $900 million. If there are hundreds of millions for a new road, we should spend it on transit improvements instead. This doesn’t need to take a long time. As I’ll discuss, many short-term projects can improve bus service, pedestrian access, and cycling infrastructure within a few months. Then the demand for the highway lowers, making the new lane unnecessary.
The Cross Bronx is Key for Freight
Once people concede that, the next question is “what about freight?” It’s a good point.
By providing alternatives to driving, you reduce traffic, and the freight can move more efficiently.
Right now, many politicians like Comptroller Brad Lander and former Comptroller Scott Stringer have suggested turning the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway into a freight-only road. I see no reason that the future of the Cross Bronx can’t be similar.
Long-term, we can talk about how cities can source more food locally, how we can transform our society. Short-term, if highways are only for freight, that’s better for everyone and a step in the right direction.
The Alternative: “Reimagine The Cross Bronx”
Independent of the Cross Bronx Bridges project, thanks to a $2 million grant from the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) program, New York City has been able to study what a reimagined Cross Bronx would be.
It includes more mass transit, better pedestrian and cycle access, new parks on capped highways, and better freight management.
Let’s go through some of the highlights of this to get a feel for the options available to us, instead of expanding highways.
For more, I recommend checking out the full Reimagine the Cross Bronx study.
Improved Transit, Cycling, and Pedestrian Access
Anybody who’s spent time in the Bronx knows how hard it is to move east-west without a car.
Reimagine observed that there isn’t enough pedestrian, cycling, or transit access to meet current demand. That is, more people would choose a non-car mode of transit to get around the study area of the Cross Bronx (within half a mile), but don’t because the options suck.
Right now, these cross Bronx buses “experience ridership up to three times higher and speeds 25% slower than city-wide averages.”
The Reimagine study suggests improvements to all of this, short and long-term.
- A new bus-only route on Tremont Avenue for the Bx36 bus, opening this year.
- 5 potential new bus stop improvements at key connections.
- 10 bus routes that the MTA and NYC Department of Transportation have already made faster and more reliable with transit signal priority (TSP) and automated camera enforcement for cars parked in bus lanes.
- Short, medium, and long-term plans to improve the bike infrastructure
Even with these short-term improvements, it will attract people away from driving on the Cross Bronx.
In the long term, they looked at the viability of covering the highway to create more green spaces, while restoring the pedestrian access that Robert Moses cut off.
More Open + Green Spaces By Capping The Cross Bronx
The most ambitious part of the Reimagine the Cross Bronx proposal is to cap sections of the highway.
This means looking at the parts of the highway that are underground, and figure out where it’s possible to cover them and put a park over them.
Of the 23 below-ground sections on the Cross Bronx, the study identifies 13 where capping is feasible.
Only half of residents within half a mile of the highway live within a half mile of a park that six acres or more.
In other words, these residents currently live closer to a polluting highway than a big park. Capping the highway in exchange for a park immediately changes this.
Highway capping, the study writes in its long-term plans, “presents a high level of engineering complexity. Design, engineering, and construction costs for a potential a highway cap may cost billions of dollars.”
It would be new to New York, but not to the U.S. As the study points out, Dallas and Seattle, not cities known for great urban planning, have done it.
Improve Freight Truck Efficiency
The Cross Bronx has the highest percentage of freight traffic among all of New York’s highways.
Reimagine examined an array of strategies to minimize freight travel and freight emissions. Less car traffic means the trucks move more efficiently, spending less time sitting in traffic and polluting the borough.
(I’m also interested in examining why we rely on so much freight to begin with in our cities. For example, I’m fascinated by urban agriculture and local food. But this is out of the scope of this study.)
From incentives for off-hour delivery, to truck electrification, to the creation of local delivery “microhubs,” they offer many ideas to limit the damage trucks cause.
Check out the study for more on that.
All of This is Realistic. It Has Already Been Done in New York.
As I read through the study, I realized that New York has done most of what they’re proposing. They’re actively doing it in other parts of New York.
New York knows how to improve streets for pedestrians, how to build protected bike lanes, how to speed up buses, how to take back space from cars and make green spaces.
The Manhattan Highway That Was Never Built
If you think this sounds radical, that without a highway cutting through it, the Bronx and New York City would somehow be worse off, I’d like you to take a look downtown.
Jane Jacobs, now famously, stopped Robert Moses’s proposed “Lower Manhattan Expressway,” which would have gone across town, through Washington Square Park, leveling what are now some of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods, the Lower East Side, East Village, and Greenwich Village.
We can look to lower Manhattan, with its bus-only and bike lanes, its reliable and abundant transportation, and its walkable streets, and few problems delivering goods as an example of what cities can be without highways splitting them in half.
Nobody, in 2025, would suggest that Lower Manhattan would be better off with a highway. Why do we suggest that this status quo for the Bronx is okay?
This is not unrealistic wishy-washy stuff. It’s a matter of political will. From Madrid to San Francisco, to Rochester in upstate New York, removing urban highways has already happened.
What Could Our Highway Money Be Spent on Instead?
Yes, reimagining highways costs money. Bus service and bike lanes cost money.
But why is this logic rarely applied to highway projects? The state of New York wants to spend $900 million in taxpayer dollars on this project.
A mile of protected bike lane in New York costs about $500,000. That’s peanuts compared to highways. Meanwhile, the entire MTA budget for buses is $977 million per year.
This project will cost almost as much as running all of New York’s buses for an entire year. Why can’t more of the $900 million for this project go to massive improvements in Bronx bus service instead of a highway expansion?
It’s Time to Stop Spending Taxpayer Money on Highway Expansion, and Instead Provide Better Alternatives to Driving
The argument for highway expansion is a cyclical one. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When traffic gets bad, we widen highways to “solve” congestion. But widening a road simply makes driving more convenient, so more people drive. Before long, congestion returns, and we’re told again that we need to widen the road.
Instead of spending $900 million to expand a highway that most Bronx residents don’t even want, we could make transformative investments.
Highways are not inevitable. They are a choice.
Freeway Fighting is What Translocal Activism Looks Like
I’m using the Cross Bronx Expressway as a case study, but this is far from a local issue.
Across the country, communities are rising up against the destructive legacy and ongoing reality of urban freeways.
- In Brooklyn and Queens, residents are trying to reimagine the crumbling BQE, once again pushing back against the Moses-era assumption that cars should dominate city life.
- In Austin and Houston, residents and local transportation officials are fighting tooth and nail against massive state-led highway expansions that would displace thousands of people and lock in car-dependency for generations.
- In Minneapolis, Syracuse, and Milwaukee, cities are studying or actively removing urban highways and replacing them with housing, parks, and transit.
- In Hartford, Connecticut, people are fighting back.
This is a translocal movement.
We are not just fighting for cleaner air or better transportation. We’re fighting for the right to shape our cities, to undo the concrete mistakes of the past, and to build healthier, more just, more connected places for everyone.
And it’s a fight worth winning.
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