Final Report
Putting Back
the Pleasure In The Drive:
Reclaiming
Urban Parkways for the 21st Century
funded by a uctc year 14 research grant
Principal
Investigator:
Anastasia
Loukaitou-Sideris
Department of Urban Planning
School of Public Policy and Social Research
3250 Public Policy Building, Box 951467
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1467
tel. 310-206-9679
Fax 310-206-5566
Other Key Participant:
Robert Gottlieb
Urban and Environmental Policy Institute
Occidental College
1882 Campus Road
Los Angeles, CA 90041
323-259-2712
I've just made a run out to Pasadena on the completed Arroyo Seco
Parkway … No brazen pedestrians nor kids riding bikes with their arms folded.
No cross streets with too-bold or too-timid drivers jutting their radiators
into your path. And no wonder I made it from Elysian Park to Broadway and
Glenarm Street in Pasadena in 10 minutes without edging over a conservative 45
miles an hour (John Cornwell, in Westways,
January 1941).
If the engineers wish to rhapsodize over the quaint historic qualities
of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, they should scrape up the whole miserable concrete
mess and put it in the freeway museum. That highway has been obsolete for 25
years; it's dangerous and inadequate. The transition from the 110 north to the
I-5 north is one of the worst freeway bottlenecks in the state
(William Leidenthal, in Los Angeles
Times, July 31, 1999).
These
two assessments of Arroyo Seco Parkway (now known as the Pasadena Freeway) are
separated by half a century in time and a sea of difference in perception. They
encapsulate the rise and fall of urban parkways. Predecessor of the modern freeway
and celebrated transportation model of the early 20th century, the
urban parkway has fallen on hard times. Designed for uninterrupted, pleasurable
driving in park-like settings with views of surrounding communities, parkways
were once hailed as marvels of transportation innovation and design—and as safe
and efficient alternatives to arterials and boulevards.
By the
1950s, however, the goals of pleasurable driving and visual interest had faded
in favor of engineering efficiency and higher capacity. Meantime, parkways like
Arroyo Seco, which were originally designed to carry few cars at relatively low
speeds, now had to accommodate many more drivers trying to go much faster. The
result is that the ten-minute trip of 1941 might take as long as forty minutes
today as bottlenecks, traffic accidents, and congestion conspire to delay.
The
Arroyo Seco Parkway represents the dilemma of urban parkways today: still in
use, it is fraught with problems due to the disjuncture between its original
conception as a bucolic roadway for recreational driving and its current
incarnation as a major corridor in a freeway-centered transportation system.
Given the challenges of modern traffic engineering, it is important to ask
whether there is a new vision for urban parkways and whether they can be
reclaimed as successful models of transportation infrastructure.
Early Days: Genesis and Evolution of Urban Parkways
The term
parkway connoted a strip of land of varying width containing a roadway within
park-like or landscaped surroundings. Roads curved gently, requiring slower
speeds than today’s highways, and abutting property owners had no direct access
rights.
The
first use of the name parkway in the US preceded the automobile. Frederick Law
Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, in an 1866 report to the Board of Commissioners of
Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, recommended a “parkway” in the park plans.
Inspired by the celebrated boulevards of Paris and Berlin, Olmsted and Vaux
viewed parkways as pleasant tree-lined roads for horse-drawn carriages.
Parkways
designed by Olmsted and Vaux were built in Boston and in New York’s Central
Park. Other landscaped boulevards were built in eastern cities; then the
growing number of automobiles revived the need for specialized roadways. The
first parkway for automobiles was the Bronx River Parkway in Westchester
County, New York, completed in 1923. Its great success led to developing more
roads like it, most notably in New York City under the watch of Robert Moses.
In the 1930s, the modern parkway movement expanded out of New York with
construction of several federal parkways including Skyline Drive in Virginia,
Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Tennessee, and Merritt Parkway in
Connecticut. During the same decade Los Angeles planners envisioned “greenbelts
across the city”—parkways responsive to the region’s increasing traffic that
also encouraged highway recreation and sightseeing. These ideas were elaborated
in Frederick Olmsted Jr. and Harlan Bartholomew’s 1930 report for the Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce linking parkway development with opportunities to
create open spaces and parklands. Following a series of debates regarding
feasibility, finances, and transportation and land use goals, the “first
freeway of the west,” the celebrated Arroyo Seco Parkway, broke ground in 1938.
Parkway Goals
Parkway
concepts incorporated the goals of pleasure driving and efficiency (moving
large numbers of cars at continuous speed). A serpentine roadway adjusted to
topography and offering views and vistas of both immediate and more distant
landscape created a pleasurable driving experience. In urban areas,
considerable grading and planting achieved a park-like effect. Landscaping
framed views and provided a reminder of nature along a carefully selected route.
To
ensure an efficient flow of traffic, parkways introduced the concept of
controlled access. Access from abutting properties was denied, traffic lights
were eliminated, and crossings and left turns were prohibited. Grades were
separated where parkways crossed other roads. Roadways were divided by wide
median strips, and lanes were wide compared to other roads of the day. They
were designed for passenger cars traveling at speeds ranging from 25 to 45
miles per hour. Higher speeds were not a goal; rather, uninterrupted traffic
flow would bring efficiency and time savings.
Parkway
design in the early 20th century was described as bioengineering—a
marriage of architecture, landscaping, and civil engineering in
three-dimensional design. But times were changing fast. The goal of efficiency
came to overshadow that of aesthetic delight as multi-lane freeway systems
moving people and goods at high speeds were superimposed over the land with
little or no attention to aesthetics, scenic pleasure, community values, or environmental
effects. Parkways became products of a bygone era and lost favor among traffic
engineers. Adjusting existing parkways to the freeway era has been a bumpy road
at best, as they are now called upon to carry more vehicles moving at higher
speeds for purposes like commuting and transporting goods rather than pleasure
driving.
Arroyo Seco Parkway
Arroyo Seco Parkway was the first
grade-separated, limited-access divided road in the west. Built in three major
stages from 1938 to 1953, the 8.2-mile parkway connected downtown Los Angeles
to Pasadena. The first segment of Arroyo Seco Parkway, completed in 1939, cost
less than $1,000,000 per mile, which, according to then District Engineer S.V.
Cortelyou, was "exceptionally low for a freeway of its character."
This amount paid for building the Arroyo Seco flood-control channel as well as
all the bridge structures, railroad relocations, utility reconstruction, and
landscaping. For the parkway embankments, engineers saved money by using
hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of material excavated from the Arroyo Seco
Channel by the WPA and from the Los Angeles River by federal district
engineers.
To reduce the possibility of
head-on collisions, engineers designed a six-foot median strip and planted it with
shrubbery to shield drivers from the headlight glare of oncoming traffic.
Fences lined the road to separate traffic from nearby properties and to keep
children and animals away. The parkway’s traffic lanes were eleven feet wide,
which by today’s standards are narrow, but were wider than the lanes of
contemporary arterials. To encourage drivers to stay in their lane, engineers
used different colors of concrete for adjacent lanes. Other safety features
included special lighting at all on-ramps and off-ramps, warning and
directional signals, and red reflectors installed in curbs. A 1945 study
pointed to these safety features to explain the remarkably low ratio of traffic
accidents on the parkway compared to other major highways with comparable
traffic volumes.
Consistent with the dictums of
parkway planning, Arroyo Seco Parkway offered driving pleasure to motorists by
providing views of the surroundings. Existing parklands were enhanced by
approximately 4,000 plants of various species, selected and placed so that,
according to the District Engineer, "a brilliant showing of color would be
maintained throughout the year." A program of roadside beautification
eliminated billboards, advertisements, and other objects of commercial blight.
To enhance the ride’s aesthetic pleasure, engineers adjusted the road's
contours to fit the landscape and installed rustic rails on rubble parapet
walls and decorative wooden railings along on- and off-ramps.
Contemporary Issues and Problems
In the 1940s, Arroyo Seco Parkway
was viewed as a model for roadway design. Sixty years later it is plagued by
problems. Originally built to accommodate 27,000 automobiles per day at 45 mph,
the parkway today carries daily traffic of over 130,000 cars (at its southern end)
often at speeds exceeding the official limit of 55 mph. Average daily traffic
has increased consistently since it opened. Congestion clogs the road during
many times of the day and evening, not just peak hours. Traffic builds
continuously heading south, with a peak of 8,000 cars per hour in the middle of
the parkway and about 14,000 cars per hour where it intersects with Interstate
5. The parkway has only three lanes on each side. Given high vehicle volumes,
high speeds, and high accident rates, bottlenecks are a daily occurrence on
this main thoroughfare connecting Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles.
Today the parkway is probably the
most unsafe route in the region, according to reported accident rates. Fast
driving along its tight curves often results in collisions. A serious safety
issue concerns short on- and off-ramps, where motorists must accelerate or
brake quickly due to the lack of merge lanes. The percentage of total accidents
on the parkway is greatest near ramps.
Visual delight is certainly greater
along this parkway than on other freeways in the region, yet some original
intentions have been compromised or abandoned. Concrete median barriers have
replaced the older guardrail. Overgrown and untrimmed plants and misplaced
bushes and trees have hidden some of the best views of the hillsides.
Chain-link fences, barbed wire, and metal guardrails have replaced much of the
rustic wooden fencing. On certain segments, sound walls hinder views.
Sixty years after its creation,
the parkway is filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic and has become an unsafe
and unpleasant place to drive. Is it possible to find a remedy?
Strategies for Change
By the early 1990s, community
concerns about congestion, high accident rates, and deteriorating aesthetics
were bubbling over. A community task force joined officials from the California
Department of Transportation to study strategies for reducing accident rates
and enhancing visual quality. Caltrans officials had previously explored
re-engineering the roadway and its on- and off-ramps to make the original
parkway function more like a high-speed freeway, but they found those
approaches blocked by several factors, including legislation that protected
adjacent parklands. The community task force sought to focus attention on two
core strategies:
1)
achieving official historic status and making the landscape consistent with the
original parkway concept; and 2) calming traffic by reducing the speed limit to
its original 45 mph, thus helping decrease accidents and ultimately relieve
congestion.
The efforts of the task force led
to designation of the Arroyo Seco Parkway as an American Civil Engineering
Landmark and as a National Scenic Byway. At the same time community advocates
and residents refocused attention on congestion, accidents, speed limits, and
other operational issues. An Arroyo Seco Collaborative was formed in 2000;
plans for an unprecedented event called ArroyoFest, involving a walk and bike
ride on the Pasadena Freeway
scheduled for June 2003, could bring renewed attention to those matters. The
ArroyoFest collaborators are working towards a broad approach to transportation
in the Arroyo Seco corridor that includes light rail, expanded bus service,
commuter bikeways, and pedestrian walkways. At the same time, ArroyoFest
promises to bring attention to the original parkway concept and its potential
role in 21st century transportation and land-use planning.
Prospects for Urban Parkways
Rising
community interest in Arroyo Seco Parkway prompts us to reconsider the relevance
of other parkways today. In the mid-20th century the emphasis on
aesthetics and pleasure driving was sacrificed for the promise of efficiency
and speed that freeways seemed to offer. But fifty years later the freeway
system is congested. Communities want to keep new freeways out of their
neighborhoods and in many places have effectively stopped their expansion. At
the same time, debates over parkways and freeways have come full circle. The emphasis on efficiency, volume, speed,
and the predominance of single-driver automobiles is giving way to an
increasing interest in multi-modal transportation, traffic calming, and a
broader set of community, aesthetic, historical, and environmental objectives.
Existing urban parkways such as
Arroyo Seco in Los Angeles or State Route 163 in San Diego can be seen as
assets rather than liabilities if considered as one piece of an integrated
transportation network. Parallel roads, light rail, busways, and bikeways can
all help ease traffic along the parkways. To reduce accidents, speed limits
should be reduced to their original 45 miles per hour—a change that will add
only two extra minutes to the ride from Pasadena to the I-5 intersection. The
lower speed limit is more appropriate for the narrow, curved parkway lanes and
allows entering cars to merge more easily into parkway traffic.
Motorists would consider parkways
as assets if their compromised aesthetics were restored and if emphasis were
again placed on making the drive pleasurable. Restoration of design and landscaping
features, bridges and overpasses, guardrails, signs, light fixtures, and trees
would give back the roadway’s human scale.
Community activism and interest in
re-envisioning Arroyo Seco Parkway suggest that parkways are valued by adjacent
communities if they can be connectors rather than separators of neighborhoods.
Modern freeways typically exclude neighboring urban areas, arrogantly soaring
over the city or diving below it. In the process they hide and separate
neighborhoods with miles of concrete walls. In contrast, the border between
parkway and city is soft, consisting of trees, vegetation, and parkland,
allowing the motorist wide vistas and an appreciation of the surroundings. This
more sympathetic approach to urban context makes today’s parkways more
palatable to communities than freeways and encourages integration of new
neighborhood parks and playgrounds into the landscape plans.
Ultimately, we see a future for
urban parkways if transportation planners would stop treating them as if they were
freeways. Parkways were built for specific traffic capacities and speeds, and
planners should consider this an asset. The
lessons from Arroyo Seco can ultimately help turn a “dangerous and inadequate”
relic into a more supple and appealing transportation facility. They can indeed
put pleasure back in the drive and connect rather than separate communities
they pass through.
References
Loukaitou-Sideris,
A. and Gottlieb, R. (2003) “Take a Freeway Stroll for a New Look at the 110,” Los Angeles Times, Part B: California,
B23, June 7, 2003.
Loukaitou-Sideris,
A. and Gottlieb, R. “A Road as a Route and Place: Evolution and Transformation
of the Arroyo Seco Parkway,” submitted to California History.
Other Accomplishments
Findings from
this report were quoted in:
NBC 4, “Pasadena Freeway Closed for Arroyo Fest,”
June 15, 2003.
DiMassa, C. M. “Note to Drivers: Slow Down—Enjoy
the Arroyo,” Los Angeles Times,
3/25/03, California, B section, p. 2.
This research was a major contributing factor for
the organization and celebration of the ArroyoFest on Sunday, June 15, 2003-- a
major community event that sponsored a walk and a bike ride on the Arroyo Seco
Parkway. During ArroyoFest, the parkway was closed to automobile traffic from
7:00-11:00 p.m. Thousands of people participated in the event and were given
the opportunity to learn more about the history and significance of the
parkway.