An Interstate Highway Program — but for Sidewalks?

Last week I was in Wheeling, West Virginia: a beautiful old river city. Central Wheeling was full of gorgeous Italianate architecture dating from its glory days as a major shipping center in the mid-1800s. This was a period when houses, at least the ones that have stood the test of time, were elegant and located in walkable neighborhoods. Parts of the city look almost like brownstone Brooklyn.

You could see, however, that here and there, residents were struggling with basic maintenance. Grand display windows in some areas had been broken or boarded up. Custom glass paneling is expensive. 

Almost no cargo is shipped on rivers anymore. As a result, Wheeling has had to adjust to losing its positional advantage.

It’s funny: we’re three or four stages removed from that by now. 

River cargo shipping was replaced by railroads in the industrial era (the late 1800s and early 1900s), when that industry was minting new multimillionaires, the Jeff Bezoses of their time. (The HBO show "The Gilded Age" takes an interesting close look at this era.)

Overwhelmingly, highways are how we move goods and people right now. Railroad shipping, like river shipping, lost its place as the dominant mode of transportation a long time ago, leaving little “one-stop” towns behind.

About 150 miles west of Wheeling is the city I grew up in: Columbus, Ohio. In fact, the two places are connected by Route 40, which is called “the National Road.” When the National Road opened, the bridge in downtown Wheeling was known as the “gateway to the west.” The bridge (pictured above), a beautiful suspension and stone structure, remains, and I got a chance to walk on it and stare down at the Ohio River when I was there. But it’s no longer strong enough to support vehicles. Somewhere, someone deemed it wasn’t worth the investment to fully rehab it. 

In the 1960s (true story), my great-grandfather on my dad’s side had a construction company that helped build a portion of the National Road (or Broad Street, as it is called in Columbus). It’s just a coincidence, but my dad lives next to Route 40 now, just due west of Wheeling outside Columbus. I stopped to visit on the way home from Wheeling. 

The “National Road” is somewhat obsolete now. It was an early model of a highway, not the full “limited-access” interstate system that dominates today. The National Road was replaced a few decades after it was completed by I-70.

Many little towns along Route 40 — like the town of Alton in western Franklin County, which I passed on the way — have lost their importance on the trade route. Alton was built along a transportation asset that faded into obscurity. 

Metro Columbus, on the other hand, because of its position at the nexus of I-70 going east-west and I-71 going north-south, enjoys an advantage in the interstate freight-trucking-based economy. Out by where my dad lives on the far west side, new industrial parks have emerged that employ 10,000 people in light manufacturing and logistics. The city is booming, at least relative to places like Wheeling. In fact, the job growth Columbus is experiencing has created housing pressures.

The Ohio Department of Transportation takes its role supporting this very seriously. The agency spent $1.4 billion redoing the I-70/I-71 interchange (citing safety reasons as an impetus). Driving through downtown Columbus from the west and seeing this project take shape, as a native of the region, feels a bit surreal. New flyover bridges practically encircle downtown. The project began in 2010 and won’t be complete until “well into the 2030s,” ODOT reports.

The construction of the interstate highway system began in 1954 and has never really stopped. That’s even though, by most measures, the project is complete. 

By the early 1970s, roughly three-quarters (about 30,000 miles) of the planned 41,000-mile interstate network was already open to traffic. In 1992, the final gaps were filled, stretching the system from coast to coast, incorporating all the nation’s major population centers. 

Coincidentally — or not — the federal gas tax has not been raised since the following year (nor indexed to inflation). So the principle of the “user-pays” system Eisenhower envisioned has been abandoned.

The federal highway system now relies on bailouts rather than the gas tax. Projects like I-70 and I-71 are being built with deficit spending or “creative accounting.” But the expansion projects, often staggeringly expensive upgrades like this one in Columbus, continue almost on autopilot, thanks to the formula-based system that is known as the Interstate Highway Program. 

Meanwhile in Columbus, Dean Jehorek was interviewed by the Columbus Dispatch. His daughter Anastasia Jehorek was killed riding an e-scooter to her job at Chipotle in a far-north section of the city. Jehorek said his family had recently moved to Columbus from Las Vegas — not a famously walkable place. Still, he compared Columbus’ bike and pedestrian infrastructure disfavorably. 

“The sidewalk is there one minute and the next minute it’s not there,” he said.  

According to the Dispatch, only 45% of Columbus’ streets have sidewalks. Jehorek said that makes deaths like his daughter’s inevitable. About three in four pedestrian deaths happen on roads without sidewalks nationally. 

“Every single day I wake up,” Jehorek told the Dispatch, “it's the first thing that pops in my head: she's gone.”

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio Department of Transportation officials all decried the number of pedestrian deaths in Ohio: about 140 a year, a marked increase over the prior decade. But urban leaders say progress toward Vision Zero has been slow. 

There is no federal government largesse coming every year providing sidewalk funds the same way there is for big interchange projects. 

Public concerns like street safety on local roads have been seen as “outside the scope,” generally speaking, of the federal highway program. Nobody surveyed Columbus-area residents and asked them, “How would you like to see $1.4 billion in transportation funds be spent?” before I-71/I-70 kicked off. The obscure formulas that are negotiated as part of federal transportation spending make these kinds of decisions almost automatic. Little more than a series of forecasts may be all state transportation departments need to justify a highway megaproject like I-71/I-70.

Too often, these kinds of megaprojects crowd out other important public concerns, like bridge maintenance. It's like the tail wagging the dog, determining infrastructure priorities based on a decades-old and in some ways obsolete framework. 

In his new book "Sidewalk Nation," Michael Pollack highlights how important sidewalks can be for people’s physical health as well as the social health of our communities. Still, they are typically haphazardly funded and maintained, with many of the maintenance and construction costs offloaded to private property owners. He is urging government leaders to rethink this dysfunctional system.

The kind of big thinking he’s engaging in reminds me a little of the original vision behind the interstate highway program, which, for all the mistakes urban planners like myself point out, is almost certainly the best of its kind in the world.

Still, according to a very rough estimate, $1.4 billion could fund 5,000 miles of sidewalks. But that type of investment would never fit within the way the current highway spending program is defined and packaged. That’s true even though pedestrians make up an increasingly large share of traffic fatalities and walking trips remain an important transportation mode for Americans. 

Even though the Interstate Highway System has been more or less complete for decades, major gaps exist in other areas of our transportation system.

In Wheeling, I was working on a project looking at the local transit system. Wheeling, like the rest of the country, is aging fast. I spoke with older women who told me they were able to remain independent thanks to the region’s transit system, which operates on a shoestring budget. 

But retail growth was sprawling farther and farther from downtown Wheeling. Increasingly, the places older people, people who couldn’t afford cars, and disabled people needed to access were beyond the reach of the bus, out on highway exits not connected by sidewalks.

One thing I learned was that social service agencies are having a really hard time getting sick and elderly people to jobs and stores and medical appointments. Wheeling, but really the entire country, is aging fast. Nobody is well-prepared for the coming wave of octogenarians with complicated mobility needs. 

There is a concentration of social service agencies on the Ohio side of the border just outside the current bus routes. But they are not connected by sidewalk. Without that kind of access, these social service agencies have to do expensive transportation themselves. They’re on the front lines of delivering essential services, health care and food to vulnerable members of their communities. And the missing transportation and planning elements are making it harder. 

These are the kinds of concerns that communities are increasingly grappling with. But because they don’t fit neatly into the program and funding formulas, they are forced to piece together solutions using complicated grant programs or philanthropic contributions. 

There is a need for new visionary programs that match the ambition of previous generations. What if we had an “interstate highway program”-scale investment in sidewalks? How would the benefits — more physical activity like walking, for example — compare to the benefits of speeding freight through an interchange? 

“Federal and state grants have long been major sources of funding for local sidewalk work, but the pies have been too small and municipalities have had to compete fiercely for the slices,” says Pollack. “If we took sidewalks seriously and funded them on par with their importance, communities would be able to actually execute their visions and make long-delayed improvements.”