The Phantom Freeway That Won’t Stop Haunting Alabama
Have you heard of Alabama’s Phantom Freeway? It’s been haunting the state for over 50 years, with some calling it a “zombie project” and a “bad idea that refuses to die.”
The Northern Beltline, as it’s known, would be a 52-mile-long highway just north of Birmingham, connecting Interstates 59 and 459, state Routes 79 and 75, and other arterials. Visions for this route date as far back as the 1960s, when the city was being ravaged by the construction of Interstates 59 and 65. Some claim its construction was stalled because of widespread opposition, others say it was simply never a priority — just an idea that would resurface time and time again, never claiming center stage but never fully disappearing from sight.
Regardless, the plans for the Beltline were never formally scrapped, and for the next four decades, different political actors would attempt to revive the “zombie project” and devise ways to fund it. One such figure was former Senator Richard Shelby. His name adorns many Birmingham institutions, in large part because he was skilled at routing federal dollars to the state.
Shelby was committed to seeing the Beltline through, convinced that the highway would bring the region prosperity and shorter commute times. Not to mention, there was a sense of pride in finally finishing what was already started, as he saw it. By 2001, the now-retired senator secured tens of millions of dollars to purchase the necessary right-of-way. Two years later, he convinced lawmakers that the Beltline should belong to the broader Appalachian Development Highway System, a network of access roads and highways that would “contribute to economic development opportunities in the Appalachian regions of 13 States,” as the Federal Highway Administration put it. Doing so opened up a new cash stream, and with it, the Beltline was officially back on the table. In some ways, this was the first time it was actually on the table as more than a pipe dream.
In the next decade, a trickle of project documents began painting a fuller picture of the destruction necessary to complete the highway. Several environmental groups even took the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) to court in 2011, alleging that the latter failed to accurately account for the deleterious impact the construction and completion of the Beltline would have on the state’s natural resources. The highway would cross 125 streams and require construction teams to level more than 4,000 acres of forest, contaminating drinking water and endangering species of flora and fauna found nowhere else in the world.
Those unmoved by the environmental damage were disturbed by the price tag. At $5.4 billion, it would be by far the most expensive road in Alabama’s history, and among the priciest per mile in the country, according to the Federal Highway Administration. All this for a road that ranked 36th out of 50 in priorities for the region’s planners. Worse yet, when it finally broke ground in 2014, state officials calculated that construction would last nearly four decades, not taking into account delays caused by fluctuating labor costs, interest rates and the decline of political will. By these estimates, many of the project’s proponents wouldn’t even be alive to see the Beltline’s completion.
Construction of the Beltline. (Image source: Joe Songer | jsonger@al.com.)
Two years and $163 million later, just over a single mile of roadway had been built. And that’s how it remained for the next eight years because ALDOT abandoned the project, stating it ran out of money. Specifically, federal money.
When Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan visited the 1.3-mile-long segment in 2022, he described its condition:
On a recent weekday afternoon, signs of decay were evident at the construction site near Palmerdale, a hamlet of 5,400 residents 17 miles (27 kilometers) northeast of Birmingham. Rainstorms had etched gullies into the gravel roadbed, and a 20-foot-tall (6 meters) chinaberry tree sprouted from a concrete retaining wall at the top of a ridge. Tire tracks, trash and a bullet-riddled tin can littered the site.
For decades, Alabamians were haunted by an idea, forced to embrace the alleged benefits of a road they might not live to see. Now, a several-hundred-million-dollar, 1.3-mile-long monument to the tenacity of Shelby and a handful of political actors rots where forests once dominated.
The Beltline Today
The Beltline didn’t die in 2016, though. On June 28, 2024, ALDOT announced plans to resume construction. The agency’s wallet thickened by several hundreds of millions of dollars thanks, once again, to Shelby’s advocacy and the bipartisan infrastructure package. This victory for the zombie project is tinged by the irony that, as Sullivan noted for Reuters, Shelby voted “no” on the infrastructure law. “The Beltline will get its funding all the same.”
At the very least, Alabama taxpayers still won’t be on the hook. That’s what they were promised, anyway. Continuous injections of federal money would cover most of the Beltine’s costs and its champions would figure out the rest. However, the last decade’s hiccup has many worried this time around. Indeed, Birmingham-area officials are devising ways for state and local governments to chip in, claiming that surrounding municipalities will benefit from the paradoxical combination of shorter commute times and an influx of new industries and talent the road would attract. It is yet unknown how the road is expected to alleviate traffic by attracting more of it.
No matter how the Beltline is afforded and how long it takes to build — some segments aren’t expected to begin until 2070 — the project remains a case study in obstinance.
For nearly five decades, the urge to construct the highway has absorbed the time and talents of Alabama’s legislators. Shelby, who is undoubtedly skilled at securing large sums of cash for the state’s benefit, has spent much of his career advocating for and funding a project that will destroy more than it ever promised to provide. Whatever commutes it would speed up would likely be subject to the congestion ALDOT anticipates from the roads it would connect and the car-oriented facilities it would attract. In 2023, the governor even announced plans to widen I-59, I-459 and I-65 to accommodate the projected rise in traffic the construction of the Beltline will generate.
In the time that this “middling priority,” as some officials put it, remained (however faintly) on the table, the greater Birmingham area has changed. And with it, new priorities and concerns have emerged. A report authored by Alabama Arise and the Institute for Policy Studies showed that two-thirds of survey respondents “identified transportation — especially lack of public transit — as the top challenge facing Greater Birmingham." About 48,000 people do not own a car in the region, a figure that doesn’t even account for the growing number of car-lite households.
Furthermore, 50 years of the Beltline’s nonexistence has afforded its champions ample opportunity to learn from the cities and states around them. Two states west, the 26-lane Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas, has proven that more lanes won’t resolve congestion. Crumbling overpasses across Louisiana serve as a reminder of the consequences of prioritizing new construction over maintenance. And within Alabama's own borders, I-59 remains an open wound. The culturally and economically impotent land around and underneath it reminds Birmingham’s majority-Black population of what was lost to a couple of lanes of asphalt.
Interstate 59 through Birmingham. (Image source: Joe Songer | jsonger@al.com.)
At this point, the momentum of the project is little more than following through on a promise made by an earlier generation. That’s exactly how Ron Kitchens of the Birmingham Business Alliance put it. His perspective is understandable — living in the shadow of a project for your whole life engenders a sort of fatigue.
As for those who fought hard for “free” federal dollars, they don’t want to let the money go to waste, even if the well will run dry just as it did before. "Everything free ain't always good for you," Anna Brown, who sits on an advisory board for the planning commission, told Reuters. "Just because it's free doesn't mean it's going to be beneficial."
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Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.