![]() Transforming the former freeway alignment into a landscaped boulevard also increases urban green space. Projects often involve building street-level boulevards in the former corridor. A quantitative analysis of the air quality benefits of freeway removal is needed. For communities near freeways, this practice has significant implications for addressing traffic-related air pollution and associated adverse health effects, including asthma exacerbation, lung impairment, impacts on fertility and birth outcomes, and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality. ![]() ![]() Teardown advocates seek to reroute freeways through alternative corridors or bury them in tunnels or trenches. įreeway removal or rerouting is viewed as an opportunity to redress the health and environmental impacts of freeway construction. The adverse effects of freeway construction are environmental justice issues. Racial borders achieved through discriminatory race-based planning processes, such as redlining, restrictive covenants, and zoning, were concretized into the built environment with freeway construction. Freeways facilitated white flight and accelerated white suburbanization, reinforced racial residential segregation, and increased air and noise pollution, mostly in communities of color. Freeway construction resulted in the demolition, division, and forced removal of poor communities of color, particularly African-Americans. Planners and engineers decided where freeways would be built, with little to no citizen oversight. Urban planners saw the urban freeway as a solution to growing traffic congestion in cities, as well as a tool to achieve the urban renewal goal of “slum” clearance. From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, the Interstate Highway System transformed US urban landscapes. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 called for the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highway by 1970 and created the Highway Trust Fund to finance it. There are some attributes along the Mandela Parkway that enable low-income residents to live in proximity to the street-level boulevard, such as affordable housing. However, there is evidence of environmentally driven neighborhood change, given that there are larger decreases in the long-time Black population (−28%) and increases in property values (184%) along Mandela Parkway, compared to West Oakland as a whole. ![]() Our research indicates that freeway rerouting reduced annual average concentrations of both NO x (−38% ± 4%) and BC (−25% ± 2%) along the Mandela Parkway alignment. We also assess changes in demographics and land use in West Oakland, between the time when the Cypress Freeway was damaged by a major earthquake and after completion of Mandela Parkway. The impacts of two rebuild scenarios, freeway rebuild-in-place and reroute, on near-roadway NO x and BC concentrations are compared. ![]() We focus on the effects of rerouting the Cypress Freeway in West Oakland, along with the construction of a street-level boulevard (Mandela Parkway), on the original freeway alignment. In this paper, we investigate the effects of freeway routing decisions on exposure to traffic-related air pollution and neighborhood socioeconomic and demographic change. However, environmental justice activism for freeway rerouting and urban green space creation may have the unintended consequence of environmental gentrification. Freeway rerouting and replacement with a street-level boulevard are urban transportation policies, that may help redress disproportionate air pollution burdens resulting from freeway construction that took place during the mid-20th century. ![]()
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