Fighting Westway

The latest Environmental History has a review by Sarah Elkind of William Buzbee's Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That Transformed New York City (Cornell UP, 2014). Elkind writes:

In 1973 portions of an elevated highway on Manhattan’s West Side collapsed. A powerful coalition of local business, real estate, and government leaders proposed Westway, a four-mile long, six-lane, underground highway, built entirely on landfill. The project included parks and new space for real estate development; federal highway funds would pay 90 percent of construction costs. But Westway was never built. The Army Corps of Engineers approved landfill for Westway but only after ignoring evidence that Westway would devastate Hudson River striped bass. In 1985 after a federal court excoriated the Army Corps and enjoined the landfill, New York City officials “traded in” the proposed highway for a modest surface road, riverside bike path, and over a billion dollars for mass transit. In New York, Westway remains a symbol of antidemocratic overreach (for opponents) or excessive regulation (for proponents). As environmental history, the “regulatory war” over Westway reveals how the Clean Water Act (CWA), Clean Air Act (CAA) and National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) transformed regulatory and environmental politics in the late twentieth century.

*****

When the New York State Urban Development Corporation proposed Westway, most New Yorkers assumed that the shallow waters slated for landfill were a biological wasteland. The Army Corps of Engineers’ first draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on Westway landfill concluded that the area was so polluted that filling it would have no negative ecological consequences. The Environmental Protection Agency and other natural resource offices contested this, but the 1977 final EIS asserted the biological wasteland theory even more strongly. When a storm of protest forced the Army Corps to reexamine the ecology of the areas slated for landfill, preliminary results showed that these areas were vitally important habitat for young striped bass. The Army Corps cut the fish survey short and granted the permit for Westway landfill in violation of the CWA. Opponents sued. Court testimony revealed that the Army Corps manipulated and ignored the results of fish studies, and made no effort to explain why their final EIS insisted that Westway would have no adverse effects when the evidence clearly showed it would.

Buzbee provides an excellent explanation of regulatory processes and the limitations of both the CAA and NEPA. He explains “regulatory war,” court procedures, legal standing, the requirements and strengths of specific environmental regulations, and other critical features of environmental policymaking. His biographies of key players demonstrate how expertise and political connections contributed to the Westway controversy. But the real heart of the book is Buzbee’s able and compelling explanation of the legal strategy, evidence, and reasoning behind the Westway verdicts. So the Westway story is a sound case study of the impact of local priorities on federal policies, and environmental regulations on federal agencies like the Army Corps. Buzbee does engage opponents’ arguments and strategy with more nuance and detail than he does Westway’s supporters. His insistence that the outcome was not inevitable does not seem all that important in the face of this careful legal and regulatory history. These are small faults in a very interesting book that is exceptionally well suited to undergraduate courses on environmental law and politics. Fighting Westway may not do precisely what Buzbee says it does, but it will give readers a clear understanding of how regulations work, how government institutions interact, and why it can be so difficult to stop a big project once it is underway. 

Cars

The January issue of Environmental History had a review by Rudi Volti of Christopher Wells's Car Country: An Environmental History (U Washington Press, 2013). Volti summarizes:

Covering a wide range of relevant topics, Car Country begins with efforts to improve roads and streets that antedated the automobile. This is followed by a chapter on the first phase of automotive evolution, culminating with the transformative Ford Model T. The narrative then returns to roads; efforts to design and build roads for the accommodation of the rapidly expanding automobile fleet are well-covered, along with largely successful efforts to re-define roads as conduits for automotive traffic rather than serving as sites for shopping, socializing, and play in addition to the movement of goods and people. Changing approaches to land use are then taken up in the next chapter, which emphasizes the development, application, and consequences of zoning. The chapter also describes the different perspectives of city planners and traffic engineers, and how the visions of the latter eventually triumphed. Next up is a chapter on the development of the petroleum industry and the significance of gasoline taxes for financing an expanding road network. The succeeding chapter looks into two diametrically opposed aspects of the automobile's domination: the construction of massive manufacturing facilities as exemplified by Ford's River Rouge plant juxtaposed with efforts to make “nature” accessible to motorists through the development of the national parks system and automotive parkways. The final chapter brings the story to recent times and the post-World War II efflorescence of suburbia. Singled out are the rules promulgated by the Federal Housing Administration for low-cost mortgages that favored car-dependent suburban growth. Also spotlighted is the movement of shops, offices, and factories to the suburbs. Greatly aiding these massive relocations was the greatest public-works program of all time, the building of the Interstate Highway System.

Bicycles and taxes

Environmental History's "New Scholarship" section alerted me to James Longhurst's "The Sidepath Not Taken: Bicycles, Taxes, and the Rhetoric of the Public Good in the 1890s", from the October, 2013 issue of the Journal of Policy History. Longhurst writes (citations omitted):

For a brief moment at the end of the 1890s, an alternative vision of the future of American transportation flickered to life, and then faded. Bicyclists dissatisfied with the haphazardly maintained, locally financed, and unpaved roads of the nineteenth century first proposed to build their own recreational paths through private, voluntary efforts. But by the end of the decade, supporters of the sidepath movement imagined cities and towns connected not only by roads but also by a separate, bicycle-specific network of improved paths. These paths were to be protected by state law and funded by innovative public/private cooperation on the county and local level, combining earlier voluntary efforts with an institutionalized user-fee model. In a now-forgotten national magazine, some sidepath promoters concentrated on the recreational aspects of interurban paths, while others emphasized the possibilities for personal transportation and practical commuting within cities before the existence of an affordable and reliable automobile. Sidepath networks were built first by taxing cyclists at the county level in northwestern New York, but the passage of user-fee legislation in 1899 provided a template adopted by states across the nation. Sidepath building briefly flourished in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and elsewhere, leading excited cyclists to imagine a network of paths allowing them to “go from New York to any point in Maine, Florida or California on smooth roads made especially for them.” While these dreams were expansive, the movement was severely limited by the persistent problem of convincing politicians and the populace that the construction of infrastructure for a small number of individuals was a “public good.” Development floundered by 1905, as fewer cyclists made voluntary contributions to the project. Most sidepath advocates then threw their lot with farmers and other powerful stakeholders in a combined-use Good Roads movement, abandoning their separate system. When the automobile later came to dominate those combined-use roads, cities slowly became increasingly auto-centric throughout the twentieth century. Had it been successful, a separate sidepath system would have changed American history. But it was a sidepath not taken.