PennDOT’s Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts

A highway in Philadelphia.

In late 2023, news of an impending Interstate 95 expansion briefly seized the attention of Philadelphia’s advocates. At the time, the project’s website was in its infancy, mainstream publications hadn’t yet taken interest, and it appeared the neighborhoods directly impacted either didn’t know anything or didn’t care. Some feared that South Philadelphians would be supportive of an expansion, even if it were to their detriment.

Eight months later, it became apparent that those in the expansion's periphery were far from enthused by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT)’s plans. South Philadelphians would lose beloved sports fields. Their homes, already subject to the noise and grime of the I-95, would be inches closer to the highway. Worse yet, they felt deceived by the agency, which they claim underrepresented their frustrations and overplayed their participation in public surveys about the project.

It’s hardly the most destructive highway project currently underway in the U.S. — that dishonor is split between Texas’ largest city, Houston, and its capital, Austin — but the project’s quiet encroachment exemplifies so much of what is insidious and manipulative about highway expansion projects. Worse yet, it’s a testament to the fact that “by the time you hear of it, it’s too late.”

Deception

Each of PennDOT’s proposals routes access roads for a new interchange through South Philadelphia’s sports fields, home to hundreds of games and thousands of kids a year. Locals were offered a choice between three options, each destructive in its own way, with the promise that the agency could still adjust the most popular one. Nevertheless, residents and field users felt blindsided. What about an option that didn’t sacrifice any of the fields? Did giving I-95 a facelift require expanding its footprint?

The low-impact design option.

The medium-impact design option.

The high-impact design option. (Images courtesy of PennDOT. More information is available at the 95 Revive project website.)

These concerns and more made it into PennDOT’s online survey. Yet, when the agency shared survey findings in a presentation, it appeared that local frustrations were downplayed. Even weirder, it appeared the agency inflated survey participation. That’s what lawyer and government transparency blogger Megan Shannon learned after she acquired the raw survey data from PennDOT.

In its presentation, the agency claimed it had recorded 1,025 responses to its survey — the highest participation in any phase of the project so far. Shannon found that 1,025 visited the site, but only 129 people, or 8% of visitors, actually took the survey.

Furthermore, PennDOT claimed that the most popular option was the “high impact design concept” that, per the agency’s words, is the most complex, most costly and would entail the most “impacts to the existing condition.” In reality, this option occupied second place, at 15.5% of the vote. 79.8% of respondents expressed that they’d prefer no changes. In project speak, this is known as the “no build” option.

“While some selected the high concept, finding it the best worst option since it least affected the fields, the overwhelming majority of respondents were against any proposals endangering the fields,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

On the project website, the agency makes it apparent that the “no build” option, which remains just as available as the more costly, complex and destructive alternatives, is its least preferred option. From safety to traffic projections, PennDOT offers several justifications for the necessity of widening the I-95. Yet, skeptical Philadelphians are noticing that, much like the survey results, PennDOT’s justifications aren’t totally truthful. 

“The primary reason for modernizing the I-95 mainline through the city is to improve safety and bring the roadway up to current design standards,” the agency states. Current roadway standards mandate wider lane widths, larger shoulders, and longer on- and off-ramps. The engineering playbook asserts that these changes are categorically safer, yet as Twitter/X user Civic Grit asks, “Can PennDOT explain how wider shoulders wouldn't give more room for reckless driving?”

Civic Grit, like Shannon, has been debunking PennDOT’s assertions with the agency’s own data. Several other city roads under the state’s jurisdiction witness far more crashes despite a far lower average daily traffic count. In a 10-year period, Broad Street, a PennDOT road in the heart of the city, has witnessed 53 fatal crashes — six times the amount recorded on the segment of the I-95 that's up for expansion. Yet, the agency doesn’t feel the same urgency in reconstructing Broad Street. Maybe that’s for the best, as PennDOT’s ideas of what’s safe are questionable.

Another interesting fact Civic Grit spotlighted is that “PennDOT's data records 0 fatal crashes during routine or event-driven congestion on I-95 in Philly over the 10 years analyzed.”

The agency also cites growth as a motivator, forecasting that traffic on this segment of the I-95 will reach “problematic volumes” by 2045. This projection is at odds with the traffic counts they’ve published elsewhere, which demonstrate a steady decrease in traffic. Even between 2023 and 2024, daily traffic dropped nearly 23%.

Traffic predictions are also a self-fulfilling prophecy. The logic follows that if engineers and elected officials pioneer an environment that favors the car and renders other modes of mobility unpleasant or impossible, then most people will travel by car. This is less a function of successful prediction and more an outcome of building for the future you want. For example, if PennDOT were to entirely eliminate the I-95, then the I-95 would have no traffic, irrespective of today’s expert predictions.

Between falsely claiming that the most expensive and complex design concept was the preferred option amongst Philadelphians and providing dubious traffic data, PennDOT’s motivations for the project are spurious. Whatever openness South Philadelphians displayed when the agency initially knocked on their door has since eroded.

“Now is that a lie, too?” Joann McAfee, who has run a local youth athletics league for over 25 years, asked the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Are they going to take everything into consideration, or is something already done that they don’t want to tell us about?”

“They have derailed this process from the inception,” added Patrick Fitzmaurice, the president of a local civic association.

And now, with the loss of greenspace and cultural cornerstones on the horizon, many are revisiting what the construction of the original I-95 cost the city of brotherly love.

The Original I-95

The original construction of the I-95 in the 1960s obliterated access to the Delaware River waterfront, taking with it hundreds of homes and businesses, piers and trolleys, and architecture that rivaled the most photographed streets of Amsterdam. 

The historic Delaware River waterfront. (Image source: Reddit.)

On the right is the home of Stephen Girard. It was demolished for commercial buildings that later gave way to the I-95, shown on the left. (Images courtesy of Stephengirard.org and Harry Kyriakodis.)

“It's obvious, but it separated us from our waterfront,” Matt Ruben, chair of the Central Delaware Advocacy Group said of the original I-95 in a piece for Curbed. “All of the neighborhoods along the Delaware River were waterfront neighborhoods. They were integrally connected to their ports and their waterfront. And it cut them off from that. It caused or accelerated the loss of population, it destroyed social cohesiveness, it wreaked havoc on the built environment. It created a giant gash in our city.”

Map of the Delaware River waterfront before I-95 was built.

Map of the Delaware River waterfront after I-95 was built.

A stroll along today’s Delaware River is largely marked by big box stores, parking lots, deteriorating buildings and the roar of cars overhead. Accessing the river involves either interfacing with Christopher Columbus Boulevard — on which an average of twenty-something Philadelphians die every year — or snaking through one of the highway’s few underpasses, each one dark and dank in its own way. 

To be sure, a few markers of life before the I-95 remain. Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continually inhabited residential street in the United States, is one of them. In fact, this slice of the past narrowly survived the bulldozers itself and now stands as a testament to the city’s heritage, bordered on one side by the behemoth I-95 sound wall.

The construction of the sound wall in Elfreth's Alley.

It’s hard to imagine why the city and state leaders were willing to sacrifice so much of Philadelphia’s legacy and what is now considered prime real estate for a few lanes of asphalt. At the time, though, the waterfront wasn’t postcard perfect. It was largely used for industry and trade, not recreation and sunset chasing, and by the 1950s, many of the Delaware River’s piers and ports had fallen into disrepair. “So if it's the 1950s and 60s and you're looking to put in a big highway,[...] the Delaware River waterfront is the place where you have tons of cheap, underutilized land,” Ruben noted. “So why not put it there?”

Perhaps, what the city should’ve been asking instead is "Why put it here at all?" Unfortunately, its leaders felt like they had no choice. The interstate system aimed to connect far-flung cities and suburbs by car, and to deny this vision was to deny the United States a competitive advantage. For President Eisenhower, who signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 into law, connecting the country through “ribbons” of asphalt was a matter of patriotism. General Lucius Clay, whom Eisenhower appointed to oversee the construction of the interstate system, summed up the motivations:

It was evident we needed better highways. We needed them for safety, to accommodate more automobiles. We needed them for defense purposes, if that should ever be necessary. And we needed them for the economy. Not just as a public works measure, but for future growth.

For Philadelphia to stand in the way of a route that would connect Maine to Florida was unthinkable. During World War II, Americans were expected to ration meat, dairy and gasoline. They were also, despite their reduced spending power, expected to still invest in war bonds. During the construction of the interstate system, localities were similarly expected to make sacrifices for the greater good of the nation. “Unobstructed motion was the dream; locality was the impediment,” as Jared Brey wrote for Curbed. “The interstate would only work if it put the uniformity of the highway system itself ahead of the integrity of any individual stop along the way.”

The I-95 today

To put it charitably, yesterday’s champions of the interstate system could not have foreseen the consequences of its construction on today’s Americans. The transcontinental Lincoln Highway that inspired Eisenhower looked nothing like today’s roads. Roads are wider, cars are larger and speeds are higher. The most heavily trafficked segments of the interstate conjure images of gridlock and anxiety more than they do freedom and connection. The more cars on the road, the more apparent the limitations of geometry become, and adding lanes hasn’t provided long-lasting relief. Instead, as evidenced by Houston’s 26-lane, traffic-choked Katy Freeway, it’s induced more demand on our roads than our states and municipalities can afford to maintain.

The Katy Freeway.

In 2024, there’s no debating the consequences. Many of the same federal bodies that steamrolled the interstate into existence have since voiced their regrets. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is full of reconciliatory language admonishing the decisions of the past. In a memo accompanying the law, the White House stated this:

The creation of the Interstate Highway System, funded and constructed by the Federal Government and State governments in the 20th century, disproportionately burdened many historically Black and low-income neighborhoods in many American cities.  Many urban interstate highways were deliberately built to pass through Black neighborhoods, often requiring the destruction of housing and other local institutions.  To this day, many Black neighborhoods are disconnected from access to high-quality housing, jobs, public transit, and other resources.

The Federal Government must recognize and acknowledge its role in systematically declining to invest in communities of color and preventing residents of those communities from accessing the same services and resources as their white counterparts.  The effects of these policy decisions continue to be felt today, as racial inequality still permeates land-use patterns in most U.S. cities and virtually all aspects of housing markets.

(It’s worth noting, however, that the same law has effectively funded new highway construction.)

Even Philadelphia seems to recognize the harm, which is why it’s pursuing two highway caps. One would reunite the two halves of Chinatown currently bisected by Interstate 76. The other would reconnect more of the city’s urban fabric with its waterfront by capping a portion of the I-95.

As Ruben noted in his interview with Curbed, the interstate system is relatively young. In Strong Towns terms, it’s an experiment. An experiment gone wrong, even. One that destroyed more wealth than it ever provided and whose maintenance is literally unmanageable. Today’s Americans are without a doubt shaped by yesterday’s choices, but we don’t need to be beholden to them for the rest of our lives.

After an earthquake damaged San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway beyond repair, the city had a choice between rebuilding it or taking it apart. The double-decker freeway hugged the waterfront, much like the I-95 in Philadelphia, and carried up to 100,000 vehicles a day. Dismantling it, many feared, would bring the city to its knees. Yet, reducing the Embarcadero to a street-level, tree-lined boulevard ended up being one of the best decisions San Francisco ever made.

With the freeway, the city’s waterfront was a maze of musty underpasses, boarded-up buildings and abandoned car lots. Now, the former wasteland is home to one of the city’s hottest tourist destinations. On an average weekday, it’s packed with “tourists, joggers and lunching businesspeople sipping fancy coffee and gazing out at the hills across the water,” a Toronto Star columnist describes. “The highway is long gone, and I cannot find anyone who misses it.”

San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway before the earthquake.

San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway after being turned into a boulevard.

Decommissioning a highway isn’t the only way to undo the harms of the past. In Philadelphia’s case, not doubling down on the damage already done would be a good start. Residents have made their qualms known. Perhaps the city’s elected officials can begin by amplifying the voices of their frustrated constituents, instead of cowering before PennDOT’s plans.

A screencap of Megan Shannon’s blog post.

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Asia Mieleszko
Asia Mieleszko

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.

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