Bringing Style to the Road
By Peter Samuel

Despite today’s horrible traffic congestion, it is tough gaining support for expanded road capacity. Many people don’t like the look or feel of many of our big highways. They have gotten so large and so bleak that they are offensive, like some kind of alien implant in our urban areas. A dislike of highways predisposes people to dislike all proposed new road projects, even those that are designed with more concern for aesthetics and better mitigation of impacts.

Others insist that “there’s no space left” for adding lanes to existing expressways. If space for roads is important enough it can be manufactured by one of three methods. First, real estate can be bought, and converted to space for roadway. Or, second, space can be constructed by going up in the air—elevating the new roadway within an existing right of way. Or, third, you can make space by going underground, leaving other uses for the surface. The choice will depend on relative costs and the local context, including, importantly, community acceptance.

Here we examine elevated expressways, which represent just one way to address concerns about aesthetics and the perceived lack of space to build roads.

Elevateds don’t have to be ugly like the first generation, which were generally built trestle-like of many steel plates or prefab concrete I-beam girders laid atop the caps on rows of closely spaced utilitarian piers—a cluttered and messy look. Concrete segmental box girder construction atop single, flared concrete piers allows longer spans with a clean, sculpted look. Best of all, the new good-looking elevated can be cheaper to build—at least on longer projects where set-up costs can be spread over a large project.

The outstanding example of a modern elevated is known as the Reversible Lanes Bridge in Tampa, Florida. The elevated structure extends five miles down the median of the Lee Roy Selman Crosstown Expressway from Brandon to downtown Tampa. It will have 218 central piers, each being six feet square and positioned about every 140 feet. The three-lane roadway atop the piers is built out of about 3,000 match cast segments, each 80 tons in weight, about nine feet long, and 60 feet wide.

Such elegant new designs meet much of the aesthetic criticism of older generation elevated roadways. But another major objection to elevated roadways has always been noise. Fortunately, there have been advances in noise mitigation for elevated highways. Most of these are custom designed to contain traffic noise where the roadway runs close to buildings. Some are quite imaginative architecturally. Melbourne CityLink, a downtown urban toll road that opened in August 1999, has 1,000 feet of “sound tube” where an elevated portion gets within some 500 feet of high-rise apartment buildings in North Melbourne. The tube is a striking architectural feature.

Land uses in the corridor will often determine whether an elevated highway is acceptable. In commercial and light industrial areas an elevated will often be found compatible with surrounding land uses. The elevated I-110 Harbor Transitway on the south side of Los Angeles was accepted because of the industrial character of that area.

Adding capacity with innovative design concepts is generally more expensive than adding lanes to mammoth freeways. But congestion and loss of mobility from not providing needed highway capacity are also hugely costly. Our productivity and quality of life depend heavily on being able to move ourselves and freight swiftly and predictably around our metropolitan areas. That way people have a wide range of opportunities for jobs, shopping, education and recreation, and employers have the widest choices to hire labor and services and get supplies and shipments handled efficiently. Areas that provide good internal mobility will thrive and prosper while others will languish. Innovative design will be essential to gaining acceptance of needed additions to highway capacity.

Peter Samuel is founder and editor of Toll Roads Newsletter (www.tollroadsnews) and has been a contributing editor to World Highways and Intelligent Transportation Systems International. The following was adapted from the Reason study, Innovative Roadway Design: Making Highways More Likable, which is available online: reason.org/ps348.pdf.

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