A multitude of well funded & crafted front groups continuing repeat the same simple talking points:
We are always being told that adding any lanes to existing expressways adds vehicle miles traveled. But how is that absolutely bad, particularly as we could use the extra capacity for serving a broader segment of a growing population?! This is especially so within existing urbanized areas, to accommodate more activity within an existing urbanized footprint.
Adding any such capacity increases emissions. Which emissions? Automobiles are getting cleaner and cleaner. Pollution standards are tightening. More cars are going electric, which is quite bad with the carbon front loading from the mining of the materials for, and the production of the enormous battery packs for the pure EVs (non hybrid, meaning lacking an on board small internal combustion engine to waste existing liquid fuel infrastructure while severely increasing demand upon the grid), which Biden's EPA pushes. But asides from any emf emissions, which gets ZERO mention in the media, the EVs are quite clean in their use.
Expressways certainly DO add auto emissions to a given corridor, especially when there was no expressway there previously. Just look for instance at N.Y.C.'s Cross Bronx Expressway. So why is that apparently the sole urban expressway now being consideration for retrofit with a new tunnel shell to enclose traffic emissions, equipped with various technologies to filter such exhaust? After all, should not such technologies be made mandatory upon such high capacity roads within the more densely built urban environments?
Expressways of course require space, and we would want to reduce the displacement of existing dwellings while preserving space for local relocation of existing businesses that would be displaced from the most logical and feasible existing main corridor to construct new urban expressway tunnels.
To better understand the planning dynamics, with what occurs within the U.S. and elsewhere, examine what occurred within the capital city, Washington, D.C. in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. To wit, the stymieing of the inside the Capital Beltway segments of I-95, as well as the spur to I-270, following 1962-63, of the B&O Metropolitan Branch RR/above ground WMATA Red line/MARC/CSX corridor, agreed upon and endorsed by the November 1962 White House transportation report.
"Significance of Using B&O Route. Use of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad corridor to bring Routes 70-S and 95 into the city is the key to meeting the need for additional highway capacity in northern Washington, Montgomery County and northwestern Prince Georges Counties and at the same time avoiding the substantial relocation of persons, loss of taxable property and disruption of neighborhoods that would result from construction of the Northeast, North Central and Northwest Freeway proposed in the 1959 plan. Further savings are realized by placing the rapid transit line to Silver Spring and Queen’s Chapel in the same railroad corridor."
So why was a promised for summer 1963 further detailed report not released?
And, why would the report that would be released, October 1964, 11 months after 11-22-63, and mere days before the 1964 U.S.Presidential election, so deviate from the Kennedy Administration plan?
“ During the preliminary line studies it became evident that in pin pointing the general corridor of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the District of Columbia should only be accomplished only after more detailed investigation of a band of alignments in that area”,
Why would it instead, scrap the tightly aligned B&O Route North Central Freeway. Instead it examined 37 routes all over the map, with a recommended route primarily along the B&O. But that variant had outright ridiculous deviations. In the D.C. neighborhood of Brookland, it was pushed needlessly through the Turkey Thicket neighborhood so as to move it a bit further away from Catholic University of America). And even worse, in Takoma Park, Maryland, deviating about 1/3 mile from the B&O insanely slashing through charming late 1800s neighborhoods, for a longer more out of the way route!
Rightfully so, the public broadly opposed such nonsense. But strangely, indeed weirdly, the press failed to ask why the plans were so botched from what was proposed under the Kennedy Administration, with zero public mention by the Johnson Administration asking why.
By November 1966, a "supplementary" North Central Freeway report was released, that was on the right path, with a tightly aligned B&O route. It could have used further refinement, such as making the portion just inside the District into a full cut and cover tunnel, rather then simply a widening of the existing elevated corridor at Takoma Station. Public opposition was nonetheless considerably less than the evil 1964 plan. However, instead of further design refinements, the feds went backwards. See 1967 Duncan Wall letter to Spiro Agnew. By mid 1967, officials from the then recently crafted Federal Highway Authority publicly announced they were still favoring that evil 1964 plan. Public opposition was again heightened, and the previous approvals of the U.S. National Capital Planning Commission.were reversed by late 1968, and formally "de-mapped" by the early to mid 1970s. And quite tellingly, the federal documents concerning these "de-mappings" show, NOT the alignments of 1962 or 196, but instead that from 1964!
This was clearly and blatantly a crafted scuttling, assisted by a complacent and undeniable centrally controlled press, in the wake of the J.F.K assassination, for the sake of keeping the I-95 North Central Freeway from being constructed along the sole agreeable route - the B&O - with its single most important real estate holding being Catholic University of America, owned of course by the Catholic Church.
The propaganda behind this had two main thrusts: completely ignore this post 11-22-63 planning perversion; and pretend to this very day, that the U.S. was somehow too poor to afford constructing such urban expressways (which in this case would obviously MUST be enclosed within tunnel box with exhaust filtration, and best covered with new linear parkland), with the insistence that such facilities MUST be cancelled "for all time".
They would mean that literally.
No discussion of long term planning, to say build an expanded railroad with the WMATA line and at least a extra set of tracks to separate MARC and CSX freight, nor a segmented expressway construction of initial box tunnels with space for a supplementary set to be opened when auto emission standards had resulted in a population of cleaner automobiles.
And therefore, NO program at a minimum to leave space for any such corridor improvements.
By the early 1980s, the authorities permitted development encroachment. Just north of the Turkey Thicket neighborhood, the westernmost properties of Catholic Sisters College, previously suggested as a new industrial area for relocating businesses from directly alongside the B&O, was filled with new houses.(despite the District's shortage of industrial spaces). And horrifically, the lightly developed, virtually building free industrial strips on BOTH sides of B&O just outside the District in downtown Silver Spring went under assault by developers insistent upon erecting large office towers, under the notion that people using the passenger rail must not have to walk perhaps a quarter or half a block to work. No, they had to jam such buildings directly abutting the railroad with no more than 20 or so feet, the first being the office tower placed along the T.W. Perry property just north of the Silver Spring Metro, DIRECTLY on the B&O Route North central Freeway's long agreed path. And if anyone had the idea of placing it to the B&O's west side, that area was subsequently filled with office towers, opened by 1993 and used by the National Oceanic Administration.
With the corridor in Silver Spring so blocked (and therefore requiring substantial removal by the righteous use of eminent domain for public use at perhaps well over $100 million), the corridor remained clear to the south well into the 1990s. The Takoma Station area remained essentially flanked by parking lots, as did the stations further south at Fort Totten, and in Brookland, with a clearing next to the Pizza Hut just south of Catholic University of America. That is, until following the publication of an article by yours truly in the July 1997 Takoma Voice, featuring the idea of a revived B&O N.C.F, as an underground, encased, set of cut and cover tunnels, including such for actually removing the elevated railroad, with the WMATA Red line and the MARC/CSX tracks relocated underground. Include a replica of the historic 1880s Takoma station building within the new park space atop, which would be a part of a new grand northern D.C. linear park/what could be called the North Mall, in what would be called the Grand Arc project.
So what happens?
Did the feds even bother considering the idea?
Seemingly not.
But get this, suddenly there is this heighten effort to constrict the corridor with new "transit oriented" development.
A Yale University School of Architecture graduate starts a project to place a new residential building "Elevation 314" about 15 feet or so from the railroad's eastern side, in a blissful disregard of blatantly violating safety, next to heavy freight trains, a derailment of which would send freight cars directly into people's apartments/condos! As if on cue, projects spout up on the corridor's west side, likewise within a freight rail derailment zone, and at a lower elevation with like safety concerns, for new residential buildings using wood frame construction touted as cheaper!
Further south, particularly in Brookland, new real estate development springs up like mushrooms, on both sides of the corridor.
And likewise further south. Both around the mouth of the downtown interceptor, the underground Center Leg/better known as the 3rd Street Tunnel, and with that facility itself with the 2014+ "air rights" project which steal more than half the facility's built capacity, (not even leaving sufficient shoulders!). Yours truly writes a series of articles at my D.C Expressway planning blog "A Trip Within The Beltway". But not anyone else! The media, press, television and internet ALL completely ignore the right of way surrender! Yes, you read that right. The media is so obviously controlled, that they abjectly fail to even dare mention this dirty deal, upon this "air rights" project, upon that downtown open trench expressway alongside Georgetown Law Center (the law school of Jesuit run, (Catholic Church owned) Georgetown University.
Just connect the dots. The expressways are scuttled by obviously perversion of planning and manipulation of popular opinion by an orchestrated mass media, further propagated by likewise controlled activist organizations spouting the doctrinaire anti urban expressway agenda of the counter reformation.
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