Archinect - News

Civil construction, energy sectors expected to show positive growth in 2023 despite recession concerns

2023-01-13T13:58:00-05:00

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will boost activity in the civil construction space in 2023, according to Dodge Construction Network. Dodge expects civil construction starts, such as public transit, roads, bridges, EV charging stations, water-related projects and power plants, to total $281 billion in 2023, a 16% jump from last year. Dodge’s forecast assumes that 85% of infrastructure money will be spent by 2027.

Highway and bridge constructions are expected to jump by 20% each to $94.4 and $26.6 billion, respectively. Starts on water management projects are also expected to jump by 14% to $68.8 billion, according to the DCN. The network’s Chief Economist, Richard Branch, pointed to federal infrastructure spending authored by the Biden administration as the main source for continued improvements. Spending on EV charging stations also provided a boost in the transportation sector.

“A recession would lower the demand for construction workers and put more downward pressure on prices,” Branch said. “So, if we were to go into recession in 2023, it could mean here for infrastructure that more real work actually gets done for the dollars allocated.”

All EV charging state plans approved by the Federal Highway Administration

2022-09-28T17:19:00-04:00

The Federal Highway Administration just approved all 50 state plans, in addition to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, to build EV charging stations along America’s approximately 53,000-mile interstate highway network as part of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) formula program, which will release a total of $1.5 billion of funding over the next two fiscal years.

NEVI is a portion of the larger $5 billion EV provision in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and will establish much-needed charging stations per every 50-mile stretch of the system, making them (almost) as easy to find as gas stations for the first time since debuting on the American market, according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

“Thanks to the commitment of state leaders who worked hard to develop EV charging networks that work for their residents, we were able to approve these state charging plans quickly and ahead of schedule,” Acting Federal Highway Administrator Stephanie Pollack...

Segregation by Design: Using visual data and spatial analysis to highlight the racist legacy of urban renewal

2022-08-29T15:12:00-04:00

What started as a self-funded project from New York-based architect Adam Paul Susaneck is gaining attention over its unique ability to paint a picture of the effects of racial segregation in the 180 American cities included in the controversial Federal Highway Act of 1956.

Inspired by Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Susaneck launched his Segregation by Design project in early 2021 to "reveal the extent to which the American city was methodically hollowed out based on race."

Susaneck is in league with others who have been calling on the Biden Administration to dismantle the legacy of race-based discrimination laden in America’s aging highway network and says the trifold goal of the project is to: 1. Create an "Atlas of Urban Renewal" in book form; 2. Create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion; and 3. Continue to grow the followership of Segregation by Design’s social media channels (which to date number some 132,000).

Related on Archinect: St....

NY Governor Hochul announces investments to reconnect communities divided by disruptive urban renewal projects

2022-01-31T14:47:00-05:00

In her recent Executive Budget address, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the state will inject nearly $3 billion towards infrastructure projects that “promote equity, connectivity, and multi-modal transportation opportunities for communities all across New York State.” This move aims to right the wrongs of post-World War II urban renewal projects that saw highway expansions disproportionately divide and disrupt communities of color across the country.

As stated in the State’s press release, the investments aim to “reunite neighborhoods, promote economic growth, and revitalize many of New York’s most important urban centers.” The money will be spread over the next five years on projects to demolish, cover, or repurpose these longstanding expressways.

Hochul gave this announcement in Buffalo, New York at an event near the Kensington Expressway, the construction of which removed the historic Olmsted-designed Humboldt Parkway and severed the connection between surrounding...

Researchers call for dismantling of 'racist infrastructure' to improve U.S. neighborhoods

2021-09-07T17:54:00-04:00

A group of researchers from Northeastern University and Tufts University has called for funds from President Biden’s infrastructure bill to be diverted to dismantling “racist infrastructure” which is currently disproportionally impacting minority neighborhoods in the United States. The stance is set out in a new thought piece on The Conversation written by Joan Fitzgerald, a Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, and Julian Agyeman, a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

The researchers focus on the network of urban highways built across the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, which the team posits was deliberately run through neighborhoods occupied by Black families, and other people of color, thus physically distancing the communities from jobs, opportunities, and urban connectivity. Scholars identify the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act as the beginning of a trend whereby transportation planners used highways to form...

A judge has blocked impending highway construction around Stonehenge…for now

2021-08-02T17:05:00-04:00

The proposed highway tunnel near Stonehenge that loomed over a recent UNESCO ruling has been called off thanks to a court order preservationists across the UK are referring to as a “wake up call” for Conservative politicians behind the controversial £1.7 billion ($2.4 billion) development project.

Activists are celebrating after a legal challenge against an approval granted last year by British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps was upheld by a High Court judge in London on Friday. The ruling cited the government’s own guidelines regarding the consideration of alternative schemes in a process that deliberately excluded impact assessments, something Justice David Holgate deemed irrational.

A plan that would revitalize an eight-mile-long section of the A303 road was first brought forth in 2017 and called for the installation of a tunnel near the 5,000-year-old ruins that opponents claim would significantly harm Stonehenge’s integrity and authenticity as a cultural site. Highways England...

New research reveals the possibility for wireless vehicle charging while driving

2021-05-13T19:20:00-04:00

Researchers at Cornell University are developing technology that would allow an electric car to charge while it’s in motion. Like a high occupancy lane, highways would have a charging lane that would charge vehicles’ batteries as they drive over its surface. This would be a monumental solution to some of the biggest obstacles of owning an electric vehicle, including dealing with battery range and charging availability.

Khurram Afridi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell and lead researcher, has been behind the project for the past seven years. According to Afridi, the technology is still at least five to ten years away, however, he sees wireless charging as having an immense impact on an industry that is so dependent on the presence of charging stations and battery capacity. It would save time for electric car owners, alleviate the anxiety of locating charging stations and running out of battery and pave the way for more sustainable transportati...

What happens if we view President Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan through a social lens?

2021-04-02T00:49:00-04:00

On March 31st, President Biden unveiled his $2 trillion economic plan to "reimagine and rebuild a new economy." The American Jobs Plan aims to "invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race."

During Wednesday's speech, Biden expressed the need to fix and repair the nation's crumbling roads, bridges, and water systems. While infrastructure covers a wide range, the plan also maps out an emphasis to "build a world-class transportation infrastructure." However, as news outlets quickly report and react to Biden's economic agenda, The Boston Globe's Ian Duncan brings a much-needed perspective that cuts through the repetitive news coverage.

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel from Pexels

At the forefront, Duncan's coverage brings attention to neighborhoods and roadways with racially historical pasts. He highlights Amy Stelly, an architectural designer and New Orleans resident who raised awareness of the Claiborne Expressway and t...

Highways: Another enduring monument to American racism?

2020-06-24T17:58:00-04:00

The aftermath of George Floyd’s death while in police custody has created a moment for radical truth-telling. So here’s some ugly truth about the city of Los Angeles: Our freeway system is one of the most noxious monuments to racism and segregation in the country.

Mattew Fleischer, Senior Digital Editor of The Los Angeles Times pens an editorial for the newspaper highlighting the indefensible, racist legacy of highway construction in American cities.

Citing historical research regarding the ways in which highway construction and urban renewal practices helped to institute and literally cement racial and income segregation, Fleischer writes, "Local officials rerouted the elaborate designs of freeway engineers — often at considerable expense — to destroy thousands of homes in racially diverse communities."

These highways, Fleischer explains, continue to fuel environmental racism and other negative impacts for communities of color. Should they be torn down too?

Is Texas ready to stop building highways?

2020-01-20T16:08:00-05:00

“The bottom line is this: The way people get around, the way people live is going to change,” [Texas Governor Greg] Abbott said, according to the Rivard Report. “As a result, this generation of roads that [Texas Transportation Commission Chairman] Bruce Bugg is in charge of building is probably the last major buildout of roads we’ll have in the state of Texas, even considering the fact that Texas is the fastest-growing state in America.”

Might Texas finally end its long-running love affair with highway infrastructure? According to the state's Governor, Greg Abbot, it's a possibility.

In a recent speech, Abbot, who is a Republican, expressed doubt that the state's current transportation regime can last much longer as the desire for urban living, housing affordability, and other factors counterbalance the practicality of the seemingly limitless highway networks currently in operation there.

But don't mistake the prediction as an intention to support the development of mass transit infrastructure. Instead of busways and rail lines, which the governor thinks should be funded locally, Abbot envisions flying cars as a potential transportation solution for the state's future growth.

How New Orleans dodged Robert Moses's "Riverfront Expressway"

2019-08-13T19:45:00-04:00

Fifty years ago this summer, word reached New Orleans that John Volpe, secretary of the Department of Transportation under President Richard Nixon, had canceled the Riverfront Expressway—the high-speed, elevated interstate highway slated for the edge of the French Quarter.

Tulane University urban geographer Richard Campanella pens a lengthy remembrance for the failed Riverfront Expressway, a Robert Moses-designed highway that would have cut New Orleans off from its historic waterfront and the Mississippi River.

The epic struggle to turn back the highway was dubbed “the Second Battle of New Orleans,” and brought together preservationists, community members, and business interests against the infamous Power Broker.

Car accidents have become commonplace in America

2019-08-13T19:30:00-04:00

Since January 2000, more Americans have died in car crashes than did in both World Wars, and the overwhelming majority of the wrecks were caused by speeding, drunk or distracted drivers, according to government data.

As the rise of deaths and injuries from automobile crashes continues unabated, the public's fascination and obsession with driving cannot be swayed. The Washington Post highlights data that points to a major cause for nearly all crashes: human error.

"In automotive circles, it's common to hear that 94-percent of car crashes are caused by human error, a fact provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and often used as a preamble when people discuss the coming era of driverless vehicles."

Cities across the U.S. have adopted initiatives to promote the use of public transportation and to regulate traffic speeds. However, despite these approaches, the number of deadly car crashes continues to grow.

According to Maureen Vogel of the National Safety Council, "Unfortunately, our public opinion research has repeatedly shown that people still believe it will happen to someone else, but not to them."

Is it time to embrace the “slow city”?

2019-08-13T09:42:00-04:00

Imposing tighter limits on leadfoots is a key part of the Vision Zero campaign for reducing traffic deaths and injuries, because of the dramatic safety benefits associated with reducing vehicle velocity. Does this add up to evidence that fast-paced Americans are ready to embrace the virtues of city life in the slow lane?

How fast is too fast? Cities like New York, Portland, Boston, and Washington, D.C. are initiating ways to regulate traffic speeds and install better signage to aid in pedestrian and bicycle safety. With the high number of reported traffic-related deaths and injuries only rising, cities are starting to realize that lowering urban speed limits doesn’t only benefit non-drivers.

In a recent CityLab article, writer Andrew Small provides detailed information communicating the benefits that reducing speed limits can have for non-drivers, drivers, and the built environment, alike. One detail Small points out is how "perhaps urbanists shouldn't demand slow lanes or slow neighborhoods: They should ask for a slow city."

With the rise of fast-paced micro-mobility on our streets and sidewalks, and the promise of zippy autonomous vehicles transporting products and people supposedly in our the future, it can be hard to imagine how a slow city might be a possibly come to be. However, Small points...

America's obsession with highway "boondoggles" continues

2019-07-02T16:44:00-04:00

The United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has unveiled its annual list of "highway boondoggles," a list of "budget-eating highway projects" that will "harm communities and the environment, while likely failing to achieve meaningful transportation goals."

The proposed North Houston Improvement Project would wipe out thousands of homes. Image courtesy of Texas Department of Transportation.

The organization reports that the projects contained within the 2019 list will cost more than $25 billion to build, "sucking money away from road repair, transit, and other local needs."

Studies have shown that rather than alleviating traffic congestion, highway widening projects actually incentivize people to drive and ultimately cause an increase in traffic congestion.

Another view of Miami's proposed Interstate-295 expansion. Image courtesy of Florida Department of Transportation.

The top highway boondoggles for 2019 include:

The "Complete 540" project in North Carolina that aims to ...

Where does Philadelphia's I-95 cap park stand?

2019-06-26T10:16:00-04:00

The opening of I-95 in Philadelphia 40 years ago cut the city’s waterfront neighborhoods off from their source. For more than a decade, the city has been planning a fix: a new park at Penn’s Landing that would cap a stretch of the highway and again connect Old City with the Delaware River.

A recent report from The Philadelphia Inquirer recaps the city's long-running effort to build a pedestrian plaza over Interstate-95 linking downtown Philadelphia with an existing waterfront park at Penn's Landing and the Delaware River.

Designed by Hargreaves Associates, the proposed 4-acre park has been in the planning stages for nearly a decade and is moving slowly but surely toward construction.

Carlo Ratti proposes 2050 vision for Boulevard Périphérique in Paris

2019-06-17T15:13:00-04:00

As part of a recently-opened exhibition envisioning the future of Paris's urban highway system, a team led by Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a dramatic, two-pronged vision for what the city's Boulevard Périphérique might look like in 2050.

Ratti, working with research carried out by the MIT Senseable City Lab he directs, proposes a vision that maintains the boulevard's status as a ring road, albeit one ruled by autonomous public and private transit.

One aspect of the plan, dubbed "Living Laterality” by the designers, envisions removing half of the traffic lanes for the 22-mile ring road in order to provide space for a series of reconfigurable playgrounds and other urban amenities. Renderings for the proposal showcase autonomous bus pods running side-by-side with autonomous vehicle traffic, as well as generous, dedicated shared mobility spaces for urban scooting, bicycling, and walking.

View of the "Living Above" proposal, image courtesy of Carlo Ratti Associati.

“Living...

Los Angeles is building an urban wildlife crossing

2019-06-13T17:45:00-04:00

A proposed bridge over the 101 would allow mountain lions and other wildlife to cross safely over the freeway and improve their access to food and mates.

Caltrans authorities working in Los Angeles County are pushing toward creating a $60 million wildlife crossing that will allow urban animals to roam throughout the region's mountainous geographies. The 165-foot by 200-foot crossing would span over US Highway-101 and Liberty Canyon in the city of Agoura Hills.

“Freeways are unique in that they can kind of divide up habitat and territory in a way that other infrastructure cannot, and I think that Caltrans wants to play a role in rectifying that problem in the future,” Caltrans structural engineer Ulysses Smpardos told KCRW's DnA.

So far, $3.7 million has been raised for the privately-funded effort, which is being supported by the National Wildlife Federation and the Santa Monica Mountains Fund.

Los Angeles honors President Obama with renaming of two roads

2018-09-05T16:13:00-04:00

Rodeo Road will be renamed after President Barack Obama, city leaders decided this week. But it’s not the first roadway in LA that lawmakers agreed to name after the 44th president. In 2017, the state legislature approved a resolution to designate the stretch of the 134 freeway that runs between Pasadena and Eagle Rock as the President Barack H. Obama Highway. A year later, however, there’s little evidence of that decision.

A 3.7 mile stretch of road in Los Angeles, now called Rodeo Road, will be renamed Obama Boulevard honoring the country’s first African American president. Located in the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw neighborhood, the road was chosen for its significance in the black community and its relation to a 2007 rally site Obama held at the beginning of his campaign.

Obama Boulevard is not scheduled to be fully renamed until Presidents Day in 2019. Another Obama named stretch of road in Los Angeles is also awaiting new signage. A stretch of the 134 freeway running between Pasadena and Eagle Rock has been approved to be named the President Barack H. Obama Highway, however the money for new signage has yet to be raised.

Los Angeles keeps expanding its freeway "Autopia"

2018-02-23T17:42:00-05:00

If no one in 2018 would argue, as a young writer named David Brodsly did in 1981, that the "L.A. freeway is the cathedral of its time and place," or that it's the spot where Angelenos "spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives," as British architectural historian Reyner Banham put it with almost laughable enthusiasm a decade earlier, there's no doubt that both the practical and metaphorical meanings of the freeway continue to preoccupy Southern Californians.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne reflects on Southern California's ongoing love-hate relationship with its freeways.

Unbuilt highway schemes — and the traces they left behind

2018-01-08T15:00:00-05:00

The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been

Carrying a racist legacy, highways today play a central role in civil rights activism

2016-07-13T12:59:00-04:00

Block a highway, and you upend the economic life of a city, as well as the spatial logic that has long allowed people to pass through them without encountering their poverty or problems. Block a highway, and you command a lot more attention than would a rally outside a church or city hall — from traffic helicopters, immobile commuters, alarmed officials.

The article notes that, historically, highway construction decimated black communities, such as in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Oakland, and many other cities. In New York, Robert Moses explicitly used highways to clear "slums," in the process devastating parts of the Bronx and other black neighborhoods.

Highways were also used as weapons in the arsenal of segregation. For example in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley separated traditionally white Irish neighborhoods from black communities in the South Side with the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Today, highways carry additional symbolic weight for Black Lives Matter protestors. Many of the black men killed by police over the past few years – Philando Castile, for example – were stopped in routine traffic checks.

Infrastructure also has symbolic resonance in the larger history of the civil rights movement. The article mentions as examples the Selma March, the Freedom Rides, and Rosa Park's refusal to sit at the back of a public bus.

For more on th...

America has an infrastructure problem – and it's getting critical

2016-02-10T19:54:00-05:00

It would be helpful if there were another word for “infrastructure”: it’s such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not) and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers of information, in particular broadband... The word “crisis” is also overused, applied to the unimportant as well as the crucial. But this country has an infrastructure crisis.

Elizabeth Drew considers several recent books on American infrastructure, with an eye to both the material reality and the political system producing it. She concludes that fixing our infrastructural systems "may require even more widespread paralyzed traffic, the collapse of numerous bridges, and perhaps a revolt in parts of the country that have inadequate broadband."

"In other words, we may well need to incur more chaos and ruin and even deaths before we come to our senses," she writes.

Unfortunately, in the US, while infrastructure is falling apart everywhere, certain contingencies bear the brunt of this more heavily. The ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan brings into sharp focus the socioeconomic and racial undercurrents of infrastructural collapse.

Interested in related issues? Check out these links:

Driving in the US is coming to a standstill, and that's a good thing

2015-01-07T13:49:00-05:00

The Federal Highway Administration has very quietly acknowledged that the driving boom is over. [...] the agency’s more recent forecast finally recognizes that the protracted post-World War II era has given way to a different paradigm. The new vision of the future suggests that driving per capita will essentially remain flat in the future. The benchmark is important because excessively high estimates of future driving volume get used to justify wasteful spending on new and wider highways.