LinksUnlikely as that sounds, it has happened in Duluth, Minn., Mercer Island, Wash., and many other places. Transportation officials in Anchorage hope to reproduce the experience here.
They propose a crosstown freeway that would cut right through Fairview, the neighborhood just east of downtown. It would connect the Glenn and Seward highways. By taking tens of thousands of vehicles a day off city streets, it would fix many traffic problems and prevent others in the future, traffic experts say.
Why would any self-respecting Fairview residents welcome the freeway through their neighborhood?
Maybe because, for the first time, road planners suggest sinking the freeway below city streets, decking over broad sections and placing parks, housing or other buildings on top of it. Major city streets would also cross over the freeway.
One way to picture this is to imagine a broad, flat-bottomed ditch crossed
bank to bank by wide, flat bridges. The freeway would run along the bottom of the ditch, practically invisible from either side. Cross streets, paths and parks would connect one side to the other on the bridges, which could be a quarter-mile wide.
UNITING NEIGHBORHOODS
Such freeway covers, called decks, lids or cut-and-cover tunnels, are being used in cities around the country to tie together neighborhoods, open up waterfronts or add green space. Putting a lid on I-90 made it easier to get from one side of Mercer Island, in Lake Washington, to the other. Covering parts of I-35 in Duluth opened the Lake Superior shoreline to downtown and kept a historic district alive.
Fairview is already split by a pair of high-traffic roads -- Gambell and Ingra streets. A covered freeway could unite the neighborhood, planners say.
Done right, the crosstown freeway could meet traffic demand, give pedestrians a better place to walk and remove barriers between east and west Fairview, said Mayor Mark Begich, who is helping to guide the city's long-range transportation plan.
"Let's use this as a stimulus to improve the neighborhood," he said.
Fairview, from C Street to Orca Street and from Fireweed Lane to Third Avenue, is one of the city's older neighborhoods. People began building log homes there shortly after it was subdivided in 1946.
In the 1970s, houses gave way to apartments, and the neighborhood developed a reputation more for crime than for quality of life. Now that has turned around, thanks to community activism, a new school, dressed-up streets and a shift toward homeownership.
The idea of a covered freeway appeared last month in a preview of a new city transportation plan.
Some consultants at the engineering firm HDR first thought of sinking and covering the freeway, said David Post, a state transportation planner. They realized that the hills and valleys where they proposed to build the connection lend themselves to a freeway sunk below the level of surrounding ground, Post said.
The state's drawings show a new section of freeway attaching to the Glenn west of Bragaw Street. Planners are considering depressing the freeway under Airport Heights Road and below the bluff north of Third Avenue. As the freeway curves into Fairview, it would be covered for at least two stretches, perhaps two blocks long each.
REDUCED TRAFFIC
The freeway would run between Gambell and Ingra, where Hyder Street is now. Traffic would fall dramatically on Gambell and Ingra, so those streets could be remodeled with landscaping and pathways to serve cyclists, walkers and a lower number of cars and trucks.
City streets such as Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth and 15th avenues would pass over the top of the freeway on bridges.
The full proposal includes taking out all the stoplights at other Glenn and Seward Highway intersections where signals now back up traffic, including Bragaw on the Glenn and Fireweed Lane, Northern Lights and Benson boulevards and 36th Avenue on the Seward Highway.
It's still just a concept and needs a lot more research, said Post, the state planner.
But studies done so far show that building the crosstown freeway would remove about 65,000 vehicles per day from Gambell and Ingra, 65,000 from Fifth Avenue, 8,500 each from Northern Lights and Lake Otis Parkway, and 7,400 from Tudor Road by 2025.
Freeways are safer and carry more cars and trucks per lane each hour than city streets, said Jim Schmidt of San Francisco, a traffic engineer who is helping craft Anchorage's transportation plan.
"Think about it: If you didn't have all that traffic on Fifth and Sixth and Ingra-Gambell, you could actually walk on city streets and have relatively free access. You would open up vistas to downtown," Schmidt said.
The traffic on Ingra and Gambell now "just destroys the neighborhood and makes it impossible to attract investment to revitalize the area," Schmidt said. "That's a really big gain for it."
SOME RESIDENTS SKEPTICAL
Fairview residents in March got a couple of looks at what the planners are talking about.
Some reacted skeptically to the idea of a crosstown freeway.
After Post ran through his PowerPoint presentation, resident Theda Agnew told him:
"You showed us some really nice slides, but if anyone has been to California, there are places where it really divides the community."
"This could be a great thing for us," she said. But she doesn't think a sunken, covered freeway is the most likely prospect.
The government tends to pick the cheapest alternative, she said, which could leave the neighborhood with a conventional freeway dividing east and west Fairview.
"I do not want to see Anchorage become a jungle of asphalt, apartments and condominiums," said Sue Ann Hamilton Bailey, who has owned a Fairview house since 1998. She said she wants to keep as many single family houses in the neighborhood as possible. As long as that happens, a tunnel with a cover "sounds like a pretty good idea," she said in an interview.
But Lorne Bailey said, "I think it's just a total waste of funds. Consider that 20 years from now, there's more telecommuters."
The highway, including all the interchanges and overpasses, is estimated to cost as much as $575 million. It would be part of the National Highway System and would doubtless be built in phases.
Some special federal highway funds would be available for planning and for designs meant to protect and enhance the neighborhood, says a draft report on the project.
Post said it would take quite a long time to get a big project like this moving.
"I think you're looking towards the end of the 20-year time frame -- maybe 15 years."
Besides the normal federal highway funds for Anchorage and Alaska, the state could contribute bond or general fund money, and other agencies might provide housing, park or trails funding, says the report, done for AMATS, the state-city committee that makes federal transportation spending decisions in Anchorage.
Another report comparing freeway deck projects, done for the city of Sacramento, Calif., by Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, recommends: "Use the word 'mitigation' as often as possible when applying for grants and funding."
Begich said Anchorage's project could be eligible for economic development grants. "The zone it would be going through fits the criteria for economic revitalization," he said.
Gambell from Fifth to 15th is dominated by car sales and rental lots, with a pawn shop, a bar, an old Carrs grocery store and a couple of chicken and hamburger restaurants. Ingra is lined with a mix of old log and wooden homes, apartment houses, a church, a post office and a little shopping mall.
BRINGING LIFE TO A DEAD ZONE
Many people refer to Hyder as a dead zone or no-man's land, where the backs of the car lots and other stores facing Gambell and Ingra create a streetscape of blank walls. There's a concrete-block building with boarded up and broken windows, but a plant in the entry. There are apartments and duplexes. Two recently built homes stand out among the older and more worn housing.
The Gambell-Ingra-Hyder district isn't appealing, longtime Fairview resident Harry Deuber said.
"It is not a nice thoroughfare for the neighborhood or traffic. There's houses right on there. A lot of the businesses are kind of run-down. It's just a way to get out of town really quick."
If Gambell and Ingra could be redesigned as a boulevard, and if new development were drawn to the area, that would be good, Deuber said.
He could support the freeway if it was designed "in a neighborhood friendly manner. ... I'm just really leery of a typical freeway that would divide the neighborhood."
"If they could guarantee it would be covered the whole way (through Fairview), we would be happy," said Fairview Community Council president Darrel Hess after a daylong workshop on the neighborhood's future.
People at the workshop were concerned about noise and pollution but like the idea of new development on top of a covered freeway, Hess said.
The Rev. C.R. Hawkins of the True Vine Ministries says he wouldn't oppose a freeway, but he wants a quick decision.
His church and school at 13th Avenue and Hyder is one of the nicest-looking structures on Hyder, with a reddish-brown bricklike face and pillars setting off the front. The building is probably in the path of the proposed freeway. Hawkins is already worried. He's getting ready to expand.
"We don't want to be impeding progress," he said. "They're not telling the people what's going to happen."
Daily News reporter Rosemary Shinohara can be reached at rshinohara@adn.com or 257-4340.
COMING MONDAY: Transportation experts have made some other dramatic recommendations for what should happen with Anchorage's roads, pathways and public transit between now and 2025. Read about them Monday.
