SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The state Department of Transportation for three years has been collecting public opinions on what should be done to replace the aging, elevated Interstate 81 that divides Syracuse.

The state has narrowed 16 options under consideration down to two: replace and widen the current elevated highway, or demolish it and send the traffic onto the city's street grid and around the city

A decision won't be made until 2017, but there are a number reasons to think the state will tear down the 1.4-mile elevated section that each day carries 90,000 vehicles.

Consider:

In Rochester, Niagara Falls and the Bronx, the state's tearing down similar aging urban highways, sending traffic to city streets or other roads.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo in August called the I-81 elevated highway in Syracuse a "classic planning blunder."

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx - who oversees the agency that will pay up to 90 percent of the cost of the project - has made removing highways to reopen divided neighborhoods a theme of his department.

Other indicators Syracuse's elevated I-81 is doomed? It's about $400 million cheaper to move the traffic down to the city streets ($1.3 billion) than build another elevated highway ($1.7 billion). The ground option also would destroy only five building compared to 24 buildings with the new elevated highway option.

State DOT officials, who are still holding meetings and collecting public opinion, say no decision has been made yet. They also won't say that state decision makers are leaning toward a plan to tear down I-81 in Syracuse.

See our complete coverage on the replacement of I-81.

Urban planners and other experts, however, interviewed by syracuse.com | The Post-Standard this month said the writing is on the wall. They believe I-81 will be coming down.

Why? Just look around the United States and the world, they say. It's not a radical idea to tear down an urban, elevated highway, experts say.

Highways have already come down in Boston, Milwaukee, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco and Seoul, South Korea. It's under consideration in Cleveland, Dallas, Texas, Detroit, New Orleans, Montreal, Tokyo and Paris.

New York state is already going in this direction:

Rochester: The Inner Loop East Transformation Project is converting a sunken section of expressway to the east of downtown to a street that will include bike and walking paths. Construction is expected to be completed soon.

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Niagara Falls: In March, the governor announced a state plan to spend more than $40 million to remove two miles of the elevated Robert Moses Parkway transforming it into a park.

Bronx: In April, the state's budget included $97 million to transform the elevated Sheridan Expressway into a surface boulevard.

New York was one of the first states to build expressways through cities, so those roads have reached the end of their life span, said Alex McKeag, a program manager with the Congress for New Urbanism,a non-profit organization that promotes walkable, neighborhood-based development. That's why the state is on the forefront of taking them down, he said.

"New York State's Department of Transportation, in specific regions, has shown to be more progressive and open to taking down elevated highways," he said.

Tear downs work

Urban planners say tearing down elevated highways reunites urban areas split for decades and often is an economic boost. They say opponents concerns that additional traffic will snarl city streets are unfounded.

"There isn't a single highway tear down where they've gone back and thought it was a mistake to take it down," said Michael Kodransky, global research manager for the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, a non-profit group that focuses on developing mass transit and promotes biking and walking

"In all of the cases where they've taken down highways there have been massive successes," he said. "The neighborhoods that remained thrived and the traffic did not become Carmageddon."

When elevated highways are removed it frees up swaths of land for development, experts said. It also makes cities pedestrian and bike friendly. The result drives up land values, they said.

Why it is happening

Syracuse's section of I-81 was built in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, vehicles ruled. If trucks needed a wider area to make a turn at the corner, engineers made it wider regardless of whether grandma couldn't make it across the street before the light changed, urban designers said.

Urban planners say designers now look more at how the roads affect the people who use them, cross them and live by them.

Interstate highways were never meant to be put through cities. Archives show that President Dwight Eisenhower, the father of the interstate system, had never wanted highways to cut through cities.

Putting up another elevated highway in Syracuse "would quite literally be stepping back in time," said Thomas Campanella, an associate professor of urban planning at Cornell University.

"It's almost universally understood now that those massive expressways overlaid on the historical urban fabric, are all wrong. It did enormous damage to cities," he said. "Syracuse really underwent the most egregious self-mutilation. It was an apocalyptic-level of urban renewal."

Campanella spent his undergraduate days on University Hill at Syracuse University and SUNY-ESF.

"I-81 very much divides the city," he said. "The perception we had as undergrads there was you didn't cross that wall. It appeared to be a formidable barrier. When that disappears, I think you're going to see a great healing of the urban fabric."

Still some I-81 opposition

Some powerful people don't like either option that the state is now considering such as Sen. John DeFrancisco. He still favors a nearly $3 billion plan, twice the cost of the two alternatives still under consideration, to build a tunnel that would carry traffic under the city before surfacing at the Destiny USA mall.

But even some opponents in Central New York admit they think the state is leaning toward tearing down the elevated highway.

"It seems like they already have a preference. They certainly exhibited a preference," said Skaneateles Town Supervisor James Lanning, who vehemently opposes the option to take down the highway. If that happens he said he believes more truckers will take a shortcut through his town to avoid Syracuse.

"I'm very concerned about the comments that the governor made during the State Fair criticizing the viaduct structure as being one of the dumbest things ever built," he said.

Who makes the decision?

After completing a series of meetings, the state will consider the all the comments from the meeting, emails and letters.

Urban planners and others, however, say they believe the state will not go with a new elevated highway.

"You had the governor come out and admit that this highway (I-81) was a mistake," said McKeag, the program manager with the Congress of New Urbanism. "That's really powerful statement from a governor."

If the call to remove the highway is coming from the governor, it's an indication that the time is ripe to move in the direction of putting traffic back on city streets, Kodransky said.

The state and the Federal Highway Administration work jointly on the project, with the feds having the final say in the option chosen, said Mark Frechette, the I-81 project director at the state DOT.

It is pretty clear what Foxx, the federal transportation secretary and boss of the highway administration, thinks.

He has spoken more than once about the damage done by highways dividing America's cities, particularly how they destroyed low-income neighborhoods.

This spring, Foxx's department announced a design challenge called "Every Place Counts" to identify areas where roads divided communities and ways that transportation can help reunite them.

This is personal for Foxx because the Charlotte, N.C. neighborhood where he grew up was one of those ripped apart by the highways in the early 1960s.

"Federal money and state decision-making led to two highways surrounding the neighborhood, destroying the connective tissue," Foxx said in a speech at the Center for American Progress Washington, D.C. in late March. "Neighbors were separated from neighbors. The corner store was gone because the corner was gone."

At the nation's infrastructure is aging, he said, the decision's on how to replace it must connect people, not separate people.

"We can't change everything about the past, but we can certainly work as hard as we can today to repair our infrastructure to make it the connective tissues it ought to be," he said.



Comments sought

There's still plenty of time to comment on the DOT's recommendations. Public comments may be made by emailing I81Opportunities@dot.ny.gov, by letter at NYSDOT Region 3, I-81 Viaduct Project, 333 E. Washington St., Syracuse, NY 13202, or by calling the hotline at 855-481-8255.

Contact Charley Hannagan anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-2161.