I-95 reconstruction is really a widening project that will hurt Philly neighborhoods

No one has to tell residents of Chinatown or Fishtown or South Philadelphia’s river wards about the damage that the interstates of the 1950s and ‘60s inflicted on their neighborhoods. They live with the aftereffects every day: the asthma-inducing miasma of exhaust, the unrelenting roar of traffic, the concrete walls that make it harder to access jobs and riverfront parks.

So, it’s been refreshing to hear President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speak forthrightly about the injustices created by decades of highway construction.

Actually, Biden has done more than talk. His administration has dedicated a big pot of federal money to mitigating, and occasionally removing, the worst of these interstates in cities across the country. Philadelphia’s Penn’s Landing cap and the proposed Chinatown Stitch, which will cover existing highway trenches and reconnect long-separated neighborhoods, wouldn’t be happening without federal support.

Biden’s approach holds enormous promise for American cities. Even if we can’t make the urban interstates go away, the thinking goes, we can at least make them less intrusive.

Unfortunately, Washington’s new philosophy doesn’t seem to have reached Harrisburg. While the federal government spends vast sums to fix past mistakes, PennDot seems intent on making new ones.

The state agency is in the midst of a decades-long effort to reconstruct the Philadelphia portion of I-95, which it says has reached the end of its useful life and needs to be rebuilt. Yet PennDot isn’t content merely to repair what’s already there.

If you scroll through a preliminary study for the southern portion of I-95 — from the Ben Franklin Bridge to the Walt Whitman — it soon becomes clear that reconstruction is really code for widening. The study bubbles with ideas for new ramps, additional travel lanes, wider shoulders, and a major expansion of the Walt Whitman toll plaza. It’s hard to see how PennDot could realize these proposals without demolishing houses, businesses, and park land.

You only have to look at a recently completed segment through Port Richmond and Fishtown to appreciate how the reconstruction project has already metastasized. In some sections, the rebuilt structure ended up being 20 feet wider than the original. The highway now comes so close to rowhouses that residents can almost reach out the window and touch it. The new ramps at Girard and Aramingo extend their long, grasping tentacles across multiple city streets. Sure, there are now walking paths and rain gardens below the elevated structure, but those amenities do little to mitigate the highway’s overbearing presence in the neighborhood.

PennDot is now moving on to the next segment: the stretch south of the Ben Franklin Bridge. Before the agency can start design work, it is required to seek public input. To guide the discussion, it recently set up a website that describes its preliminary ideas for the project. The website features spreadsheets with menus of options. Each option includes an “if-this-then-that” scenario. Trying to make sense of all the variables will leave your head spinning, complained Mark Kapczynski, president of the Whitman Council. “You need a degree from MIT to navigate it.”

As a lifelong Whitman resident, Kapczynski is especially worried about the proposals for his neighborhood, located just north of the Philadelphia Sports Complex. Along with the proposed widening, PennDot has been eyeing the athletic fields at Seventh and Bigler for a new ramp that would connect I-95 and I-76 to an enlarged Walt Whitman toll plaza.

While that land is owned by the Delaware River Port Authority, it has long been managed by the Southeast Youth Athletic Association. Thousands of young people converge on the fields each year for organized baseball, football and soccer, making it one of the busiest sports facilities in South Philadelphia. Kapczynski believes that PennDot didn’t bother to explore the conditions on the ground before identifying the site for a new interchange.

That mindset guides PennDot’s approach to the entire project. On its website, it talks about easing congestion, improving connectivity and satisfying “the growing demand from economic generators,” such as the sports complex and the port. There is never any mention of how these engineering goals would erode the quality of life for nearby residents. It’s as if the highway exists in isolation, rather than in a neighborhood context.

Mary Purcell, who is chairing the I-95 study committee for the Society Hill Neighborhood Association, told me she was particularly disturbed to learn that PennDot is looking to increase the total number of ramps between the two bridges. The existing distribution of access points was established in a 1979 consent decree after several riverfront neighborhoods successfully sued the state.

“I never once heard anyone say, ‘I need more on- and off-ramps closer to where I live,’” Purcell added.

Many of PennDot’s other proposals are similarly disconnected from local conditions. Chuck Davies, the engineer in charge of design for PennDot’s District 6, which includes Philadelphia, insists that the reconstruction “is not a capacity-adding project.” He also noted that the number of motorists traveling on I-95 drops by 50% south of the Ben Franklin Bridge. Congestion is rarely a problem.

Yet the preliminary study calls for increasing the highway’s girth from three lanes to four in many places. The justification is a preliminary traffic study — prepared before the pandemic — that predicts traffic will increase by 2045 and says the extra lanes are necessary to manage future congestion.

“The language of these studies always talks about the need to reduce congestion, even though any reasonable planner knows that adding lanes won’t reduce congestion,” said Erick Guerra, a professor and head of a transportation think tank at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design. Even if the 2045 traffic estimates were correct, he argues that there are better, more climate-friendly ways to manage the growth — such as improving transit service.

The billions set aside for this highway project, while SEPTA goes begging for $240 million to plug an operating deficit, is yet another demonstration of misplaced priorities. And certainly, we should not be wrecking neighborhoods so that people can leave the Sports Complex five minutes quicker.

The tendency to build back bigger isn’t just a PennDot problem, Guerra said. Despite all the talk in Washington and beyond about mitigating the impact of highways, properly funding transit, and tackling climate change, his research shows that America’s roads are actually getting bigger — much like America’s houses and cars. A recent book by three transportation professors, The Drive for Dollars: How Fiscal Politics Shaped Urban Freeways and Transformed American Cities, found that travel lanes, shoulders, and ramp curves have all grown dramatically in size since 1955. That means highways occupy more and more urban real estate.

Two Philadelphia economists have come to the conclusion that devoting all that land in populated areas to moving cars actually makes cities poorer. In a fascinating paper that looked at the 4½-mile stretch of I-95 between Girard and Snyder Avenues, Jeffrey Lin, an economist who is vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and senior economist Jeffrey Brinkman produced a model showing the area now impacted by the highway would be more economically productive and generate more tax revenue if it were used for housing and businesses. Given the social benefits to the neighborhoods, they believe that the money could justify the costs of burying the road (as Boston did with the Big Dig).

The argument against burying urban highways has always been that the costs are too high. Lin’s paper challenges that assumption: “We found the economic benefits of covering highways are really significant — larger than most people think,” Lin told me. He also noted that there is no loss of capacity when highways are buried. And capping the highways can also help manage the polluting exhaust.

PennDot has long been averse to burying highways, and the subject doesn’t even come up as a possibility in its preliminary study. But the website does float one good idea: Eliminating the on-ramp at Front and Market. Because that ramp is shoehorned into the city’s narrow street grid, motorists have trouble making the sharp right turn, and it’s frequently the scene of jackknifed tractor trailers. The change would eliminate most of the automotive traffic between Front and Second — apart from SEPTA buses — allowing the city to turn the intersection into a plaza-like space. But that’s as far as PennDot seems willing to go.

As part of the research for this column, I interviewed several city planners about the PennDot study. I asked them what they thought of some of the PennDot’s more intrusive ideas, such as the proposal to build a new ramp on the Whitman playing fields. But it was clear they lacked the authority to criticize the state agency or offer alternative scenarios.

What we need is an elected official — Hello, Cherelle! Hello, Josh! — with the political clout to push back against the PennDot steamroller and advocate for a more balanced approach that prioritizes neighborhoods and transit. Otherwise, all the talk from Washington about redressing the injustices of the past is just a lot of hot exhaust.

Note: The description of the paper by Federal Reserve Bank economists Jeffrey Lin and Jeffrey Brinkman has been modified for clarity.