It was as predictable as the next traffic light turning red as soon as you get to it.
A plan years in the making to restore part of the Humboldt Parkway community by decking nearly a mile of the Kensington Expressway and improving surrounding streetscapes risks getting sidetracked just as it’s about to hit the starting line.
Naysayers express skepticism about everything from the type of trees that could be grown on the deck to engineers’ ability to mitigate pollution – criticisms all designed to support their favored alternative: filling in the expressway to restore the parkway.
But why create one problem to solve another?
The phased plan to deck the Kensington and reunite Black neighborhoods on the East Side torn apart decades ago promises to right a historic wrong while not creating another mistake in a city that does not need to lose another freeway. (Crawl along the Scajaquada at 30 mph, look to both sides, and tell me again why we destroyed that expressway?)
Besides, the neighborhood group most responsible for researching and propelling this plan – the Restore Our Community Coalition – said it looked at the option of filling in the Kensington and converting it to a parkway and concluded it just wasn’t feasible.
At times when the Kensington has been temporarily closed due to emergencies, the impact of the diverted cars flooding surrounding neighborhoods was dramatic, said Stephanie Barber Geter, ROCC chairwoman.
“Why would we pull the emissions out of the ‘ditch’ and put it in our front yards?” she said of plans to fill in the sunken expressway and put that traffic on surface streets.
A state Department of Transportation analysis of pollution levels concludes that decking the Kensington between Best and Sidney streets would result in “slightly decreased concentrations along the tunnel cap and slightly increased concentrations near the tunnel portals.” But all of the emissions would be below Environmental…
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