Highway 131 Around Downtown Grand Rapids

     

Fig. 1) Highway 131 route around
downtown Grand Rapids. Photo retrieved
from: rom http://www.chrisbessert.org/portfolio

      Highway 131 is the major north-south freeway through the Grand Rapids metro area and the earliest segments were completed in 1962. Among residents of the area it's perhaps best known for the "S-curve", an abrupt turn just north of Wealthy Street where the freeway passes over the river and proceeds at an above-grade elevation parallel to the west-side neighborhoods and riverfront.

      In many ways it seems a shame to me that the west-side neighborhoods access to the Grand River is inhibited by the presence of the freeway. Although downtown Grand Rapids is extremely walkable, getting there from the west side involves walking underneath the massive beige overpasses of Highway 131 (Fig. 1). Any walk from one side to the other is a brief trip through a tunnel reeking of urine and pigeon poop.

      Unpleasant as it is, are there any solutions to this problem? The problem with above-grade freeways is they were built in an era of hasty highway construction, a time when post-war federal funding enabled planners such as Robert Moses to build freeways with little regard to how they would fit into the cityscape. Acting as dividing walls, freeways isolated neighborhoods and discouraged pedestrians.

Fig. 2) Plan for submerging Highway 131 west of 
Grand Rapids

      Above-grade freeways limit our ability to hide them, they act as massive billboards to past infrastructure planning gone wrong. One solution is to submerge the freeway (Fig. 2), but for a million-and-a-half reasons this will never be considered. First, the costs associated with a massive undertaking such as this are astronomical. The Big Dig in Boston involved changing an elevated portion of I-93 in downtown into a tunnel, and after almost 15 years of construction, total costs for the project were a whopping $22 billion dollars. Second, the Grand River commonly floods, and having a submerged tunnel within the flood zone of such a large river would be sure to keep civil engineers up at night.

      Grand Rapids in general has been fortunate to avoid major freeway development when compared to other mid-tiered cities such as Louisville or Milwaukee, but the presence of US-131 slicing through the western portion of downtown should be considered as an example when poor infrastructure planning let us down. All things considered however, at least the pigeons have a place to live near downtown.