States of repair: The role(s) of state government in shaping urban highway removal in New York state

Abstract

Cities across the U.S. are now reconfiguring and/or removing urban highways to enhance quality of life, promote economic development, and address the severe racial and economic disparities and environmental injustices that they have imposed. However, despite attention to the federal government’s role in shaping these efforts, the role of states has not been adequately explored. In this article, we examine several highway removal projects in New York state, particularly Rochester and Syracuse, drawing on interviews, participant observation, document analysis, and GIS mapping. We demonstrate the often-contradictory role that state governments play in shaping the highway removal process. First, state departments of transportation (DOTs) control highway planning and maintenance, and typically prioritize maintaining system capacity to avoid congestion. Second, and conversely, state governments also increasingly perform more properly “urban” functions related to redevelopment, particularly affordable housing construction and environmental improvement, which conflict with preserving smooth traffic flow. Finally, from a wider perspective, state governments often have fundamentally different priorities from cities, which can materialize in scalar conflicts over highway redevelopment. In this respect, this paper contributes to understanding state government as a complex site of, rather than simply an obstacle to, highway removal planning and urban sustainability more broadly.

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