Emily Lieb's "Road to Nowhere"

Emily Lieb’s new book, “Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore,” provides another sad chapter in the long saga of the destruction of urban neighborhoods caused by U. S. freeway planning.  This time, though, there’s a twist:  the freeway never got built!

Lieb tells the story of Rosemont, once a stable, middle-class Black neighborhood on the west side of Baltimore which had the misfortune of lying on one of the  likeliest  alignments for laying out an east-west freeway through the city.  Through many ups and downs and changes in alignment, ultimately nothing got built in Rosemont and the whole concept of an east-west freeway was dropped.  To the east of Rosemont, however, one strip of buildings got bulldozed and a poorly connected segment of highway (now signed as U. S. 40) was built, known locally as “the road to nowhere.”  Although Rosemont won a reprieve from the bulldozer and the freeway, there was still plenty of damage caused by property taken by eminent domain and by the generally chilling effect of a dashed line bisecting a map of the neighborhood.  The long dance with freeway death put Rosemont into a social and economic decline from which it never recovered.

This long and dismal story could have a redeeming epilogue, although that hangs in the balance.  

Baltimore’s planned Red Line light rail line would follow more or less the alignment of the old East-West Freeway, with a Rosemont Station.  Unfortunately the Red Line project was shut down by former Governor Larry Hogan after it had already gotten to the approved Environmental Impact Statement stage.  Governor Wes Moore has restarted the project, but it is still unfunded, with an uncertain future.  Sadly, the transit project – which would be enormously beneficial to the city by providing a high-quality east-west transit service as well as by tying together a disjointed transit system – seems to be having as many twists and turns and dead ends as the earlier highway project.

Only a few years ago transportation professionals were beginning to face up to the legacy of neighborhood destruction caused by urban freeways and were engaging in formulating visions of “reparative transportation” projects, exemplified by the Biden Administration’s Reconnecting Communities program.  All of these policies and projects are now under the dark shadow of the Trump Administration.Thank you to Emily Lieb for telling the story of Rosemont.  It is a compelling narrative, filled with stories of human suffering (and persistence), political intrigue, and engineering hard-headedness.  

It’s up to us to write the epilogue.