High-speed concrete highways to the hearts of our cities once symbolised freedom and modernity. But in today's world the answer may be to rip them out or bury them underground

“This car only goes up to 40 miles an hour, is that enough?” nearly became my former flatmate’s last words one sombre April morning six years ago, as we swung on to the northern leg of the M60 motorway around Greater Manchester.

Where once this stretch of road had symbolised freedom and modernity when it opened in 1975, it meant only terror to us as we sat, millimetres off the ground, in a low-slung, British Leyland-built Triumph cabriolet, as old as the road but in far worse condition. The car had been fine as a city runabout; here, it was doomed. An articulated lorry blared angrily at us and we darted for the nearest exit.

Our 60-second ordeal by road underlined a basic truth: that the kind of slow-moving mixed traffic that has become the lifeblood of a city has no place on a high-speed motorway. Which is either a reason to drive motorways deep into the heart of cities, or to banish them altogether.

From the 1940s until the 1970s, the political consensus across developed economies was clear: dedicated highways equipped with grade-separated interchanges were the only way to keep city traffic moving. But urban motorways offered more than that: to many, they symbolised progress and dynamism in a world determined to bulldoze its past. Thus the 1945 City of Manchester Plan called for a concentric ring road system and the demolition of the now-listed Town Hall in the interests of increasing parking space.

Of those ring roads, only the M60 was ever built, leaving the Mancunian Way as Manchester’s one true urban motorway. But in Birmingham, Herbert Manzoni, another planner with no time for the past, prevailed and got his Inner Ring Road. If Manchester’s orbital grew hesitantly and in fits and starts around the city territory, Birmingham’s tore out bloody chunks of the core in one determined operation running from 1957 to 1971.

For its critics, the nadir of this project was Masshouse Circus, a roundabout that created a dense, depressed circle of concrete packed with parked cars and overlooked by tower blocks. Gloomy subways shunned by more timid pedestrians added to the road’s isolating effect.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The M6 passes through Birmingham, a city whose core was torn up to make way for more motorway in the 1950s and ’60s. Photograph: Pat Savage/Alamy

If the M60 feels bleak because of its grey, windswept setting, the Embarcadero Freeway felt bleak in spite of it. Soaring some 17 metres above the Port of San Francisco on squat concrete piers, this two-level highway appears to have done its best to blight both the natural and the urban environment. Built in 1959, it blocked views of both the bay area and the historic ferry terminal, cloaking the waterfront in a grimy wet blanket of neglect and underdevelopment. Again the highway formed a wall that was unpleasant if not impossible to cross: according to architectural writer William Thompson, it “shunted pedestrians through a dark, sooty gauntlet between downtown and the San Francisco Bay”.

The same mindset that gave Birmingham its ring road imposed the Embarcadero on San Francisco, Harbor Drive on Portland, Oregon and many more: an estimated total of nearly 6,500 kilometres of urban freeway had been built in the United States by 1976, just twenty years after President Eisenhower signed off funding for the interstate highway system.

By then, the tide of popular and political opinion had turned. In 1969, a book by engineer JJ Leeming explained that highway building was leading to induced demand, in which adding capacity simply encouraged more traffic and more miles of congested roads. When a junior transport minister called Michael Heseltine opened the Westway, a partly elevated motorway in London in July 1970, he was greeted by protesters mobbing his car and banners on houses lining the new route that read “Get us out of this hell.”

Three years later, with cost estimates and public hostility mounting, the Greater London Council abandoned plans to build further motorways. The following year, in 1974, Portland began to demolish Harbor Drive, replacing it with a boulevard and park dotted with cherry blossom.

Where Portland led, others followed: San Francisco eventually demolished the Embarcadero Freeway in 1991. “People thought it would be Carmageddon,” says Peter Park, a city planner and evangelist for urban highway demolition. “If you go to the waterfront today, you’ll see beautiful development … It’s not that the cars disappeared, they found a different route.” Birmingham too has since got rid of most of its urban motorways.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Graffiti under the Westway; an urban motorway that has no time for pedestrians. Photograph: Andrea Heselton/Alamy

Like Birmingham’s Inner Ring Road, the Westway – that elevated stretch of dual carriageway rising from Paddington into central London – resists domestication. It is impossible to walk on, near or around: it was not meant for pedestrians, and it shows in the disconnected local road network and lack of pedestrian subways. The gritty feel is not unremittingly unpleasant in my view – it even complements the atmosphere in the skate park and Parkour centre that flourish underneath it – but it is a hardening influence. Small wonder that JG Ballard chose the newly built Westway as the setting of his 1974 novella Concrete Island, in which a well-off architect is transformed into a savage outlaw by the dehumanising effects of being stranded in a motorway knot.

When humans and concrete collide, the result is usually drama. For me, childhood overland road trips to Spain via France meant exciting dives into city tunnels, a briefly glimpsed exotic netherworld gloomily lit in those pre-LED lighting days by orange sodium lamps. One such tunnel, built underneath Madrid’s Azca financial district in the 1970s, jacks up the surrealism of Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown when it forms the backdrop to a chase scene involving a murderous jilted wife on a Harley-Davidson, a gazpacho-drenched mistress and a ludicrously coiffed taxi driver.

Yet despite being unfashionable and discredited, cities the world over continue to build urban motorways. Many such schemes, such as Santiago’s Vespucio Oriente, will be built in a tunnel (expensively) to avoid carving up neighbourhoods, but as recently as 2011, the Scottish government inaugurated the final stretch of the M74 in Glasgow, linking up with the M8 and M73 to create the inner ring that London planners once dreamed of. Like the interstates, it was partly built to revive traditionally depressed areas, and as it cuts through the city’s South Side it restores a touch of Brutalism to the redeveloped Gorbals, which painting the steel underside sky blue (as they have done) can scarcely soften.

Even the cycling nirvana of Amsterdam demands motorways. The Dutch government plans to expand the A10 motorway in the south of the city from eight lanes to 12, and to bury it under an expanded public transport interchange. Both Scottish and Dutch officials insist that their motorways are sustainable, though without a takedown of the arguments against (neither was willing to be interviewed on the subject) it’s not clear how. For now, Transport Scotland says that the new road has taken cars off the previously congested M8 and reduced journey times. In the long run, its own figures show that CO 2 emissions are forecast to increase as a result of the M74.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A motorway in Amsterdam. Although known as a cycling nirvana, the Dutch city plans to widen the A10 highway to 12 lanes. Photograph: Horizons WWP/Alamy

Is there anything to recommend urban motorways? Peter Park is adamant there is not: “There’s no city that hasn’t gotten better when a highway came out of it.” Anyway, he argues, it is not true to say that “congestion is always a bad thing”. But congestion certainly drives up fuel emissions, and London, which is relatively short on urban motorways, has noticeably worse air pollution than flyover-happy Glasgow.

The solution, if one exists, is surely to combine a limited highway system, preferably below ground if affordable, with some of the growing toolkit of technologies that penalise unnecessary journeys and promote free flowing traffic. Congestion charging is one; smart motorways with variable speed limits, currently being rolled out on the British highway network, are another.



Which may explain why London is coming round to the idea after all. Mayor Boris Johnson, who has decried the Westway in the past, is mulling a multibillion-pound new orbital tunnel to submerge the current inner ring road deep underground. Some kind of demand management measures, such as variable tolling linked to traffic levels, seem inevitable, and Boris’s office promises that road space on the surface would be reclaimed for the public good.

In his book On Roads, Joe Moran notes that the 1950s motorway builders weren’t stupid or reckless: they genuinely thought motorways would solve the congestion problem. Combining some of their engineering zeal with intelligent charging systems might just give us the economic benefit of fast travel with the cash flows to pay for it – and to bury it out of sight.

• ‘In a successful modern city, the car must no longer be king’