| abstract
| - As a resident of Braddock, I’m writing to condemn the Mon-Fayette Expressway, the Bob Dole ’96 of urban-planning ideas: a post-war relic, relevance wicked away by the passing decades. Like Mr. Dole, the MFX patiently lingered forever and is now “entitled” to its turn -- no matter how sad and costly a spectacle will assuredly unfurl. Sad and costly indeed. An excerpt from a 2004 Post-Gazette article that profiled several of the recent highway construction projects, including a completed leg of the MFX: “Sixty-five miles of toll roads have opened in Western Pennsylvania since 1990, costing more than $1.4 billion. They carry about 10,000 fewer cars and trucks a day, combined, than Pittsburgh’s Fort Pitt Bridge does in one direction. The roads also are not generating the new jobs foreseen by supporters. Yet the Turnpike Commission is planning and building 70 more miles in the region, one of the largest active highway construction programs in the United States, at a cost estimated to exceed $3.5 billion.” For $1.4 billion, we get a few cars, even fewer jobs and effectively none of what these roads’ supporters claimed. So, how did the MFX get approval to spend another $2 billion? With Kafkaesque virtuosity, the Federal Highway Administration’s “Record of Decision” cited multiple reasons for approving the MFX extension. Among them: “It does not disproportionately adversely affect low income and/or minority populations.” Historically, African Americans have often been racially profiled on our highways. In a exciting new twist, local African Americans have now been racially profiled by a highway; only a poor, black community (where many residents can’t afford a car) gets a freeway built through the middle of it, in part, because this highway doesn’t “disproportionately affect” impoverished African Americans. “Reduces travel times to medical facilities in the Oakland area by up to 53 percent.” Sweet. Because it’s not like we already have a freestanding UPMC hospital on Braddock Avenue, a Family Health Services building across the street from UPMC, and multiple, established bus routes to Oakland. “Accommodates all riverfront trail projects currently proposed within the study area.” Technically, that’s true. The MFX will effectively and forever sever the community’s physical access and emotional connection to the river. Hence, our citizenry no longer require riverfront trails -- because we won’t have any more riverfront. Nationally, Boston moved an entire highway underground and tore down I-93, in part, to rebuild and reconnect a neighborhood blighted decades ago from previous “enlightened” urban planners. Hartford, a city not exactly known as a hothouse for progressive, urbanist thinking, literally moved its major access artery, I-91, in an effort tagged “Riverfront Recapture” to restore access to the Connecticut River and spark economic and civic revitalization. I’m struck by the symbolism of the new MFX propaganda depot located in an abandoned Pizza Hut: A withered restaurant franchise, stuck in the late ’70s, whose product is now a hopelessly myopic economic development concept staffed with its bureaucratic chaperones tasked with building Allegheny County’s very own “Matlock Expressway.” Braddock was labeled as “a zone of sacrifice” by MFX planners, and historically it has been. From massacred British troops, to generations of immigrant steel works suffering in the Edgar Thomson Works, Braddock and her citizenry have never shied away from self-sacrifice. Sacrifice: Braddock is a community without a safe, clean, functional playground for its children. It does not have any outdoor recreational opportunities (basketball courts, walking trails) for its youth and adult populations. Because of funding cutbacks, the Braddock Carnegie Library is now only open 20 hours a week. Now, they want to give us our very own highway. I have not come across research citing a town where building a four-lane, 30-foot-dirt-berm freeway through its core has sparked a civic and economic renaissance, and I can’t possibly support tearing Braddock in two with a superhighway for patently discredited notions of prosperity being only an expressway away And this is not only a Mon Valley issue. Think about what $2 billion could do in your own neighborhood: Garfield, East Liberty, South Side, Lawrenceville. Chances are, improving your community doesn’t involve building a new interstate through it. It shouldn’t in mine, either.
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