Piotr wrote:
The opponents of a bypass prefer thru-town traffic with its noise,
congestion, barrier effects on pedestrians and bicyclists, safety hazards
and air pollution?
The key to a successful bypass is protection of access from developments
sprouting along it and between it and the town. Where this cannot be
secured, the bypass opponents are justifiably fearing land developoment
impacts.
On a bypass protected from feeding from adjacent developments, the town
businesses do not necessarily loose. First, those motorists interested in
the town will drive in to see it and perhaps to buy refreshments. If not,
they can still be captured at an aesthetically designed services complex
(restaurant, motel, gas stations, point of tourist interest) located on the
bypass and run by the town businesses.
Successful bypasses exist in many countries and much could be learned from
there. Simply opposing a bypass will lead to other social and environmental
problems as the traffic grows.
***
I certainly agree with Piotr in the abstract. Unfortunately, from the
experience we had in coastal Maine a few years ago, and which we are about
to face again, I think it is reasonable to draw the conclusion that a
bypass is not always a reasonable response to a problem of congestion.
The particulars: Wiscasset village is a small community that sits astride
Route 1 about 2 hours north of the New Hampshire border. It's downtown is
well preserved by the fortunate event of local business' being replaced by
a thriving antique shop accumulation as the businesses failed or fled to
strip development south of town. Route 1 is a two lane road from Bath, 10
miles to the south to the border with Canada at Calais. Ten months of the
year, and for all but a few hours a day during the summer traffic flows
smoothly through town. In the summer, especially on Fridays (north bound)
and Sundays (southbound) traffic can back up so that passage through town
can take 1/2 hour or more, undoubtedly an unfortunate occurrence. The
back-ups occur because traffic is constantly interrupted by cars entering
and leaving the strip malls south of town, and by a traffic cop stationed
in town to allow pedestrians to cross the street and cars to cross or turn
into the traffic stream.
The solution proposed was a bypass around the town which could have taken
either of two routes. The cost of the bypass was estimated to be upwards of
$150,000,000. Either route would have meant construction invasion to span
the Sheepscot estuary, a fragile ecosystem home to several rare biota, and
which is just beginning to recover from upstream pollution and the presence
of the now, fortunately, late lamented Maine Yankee Atomic Power Plant. The
northern route would have required an interchange on route 218 (full
disclosure statement ahead) the road I live on, which already is carrying
traffic, especially gravel-truck traffic, at the limits of its designed
capacity. This interchange would have made Route 218, which currently is
rural/residential, a likely candidate to become a major arterial feeder to
Route 1 for a large section of the inland coastal region, and would
probably have resulted in the usual interchange-proximate development of
gas stations and fast-food joints. This was extremely likely since
Wiscasset, the town demanding congestion relief, is highly land management
averse, which is what caused the problems south of town to begin with, and
showed no inclination to protect the area around the interchange with any
kind of regulation. This probably would result in a sweeping change in the
quality of life for a large stretch of Route 218 and the surrounding
countryside. It could also mean that when the next boom occurs in Portland,
the removal of any traffic impediment to making a commute from our region
(another traffic flow problem south of us in Brunswick has just been sort
of dealt with, and a second one in Bath is now being addressed with a new
bridge), combined with substantially lower land prices than are found
nearer the "metropolis" we will feel developmental pressures that we are
not equipped to deal with. Rural Maine planning boards, where they exist at
all, have a strong tendency to ignore threats until it is too late. From a
preservationist point of view this would be highly undesirable, since Alna,
for a number of interesting reasons, has escaped incremental roadside
development, and thus remains more nearly a pristine rural road than most
in this area.
If the bypass were to be driven through south of town it would have to
invade Westport Island, which is currently about as developed as it should
be, and Route 27 leading to the Boothbay Peninsular. That is an event
devoutly wished for by the restaurant and motel owners of Boothbay Harbor,
since they built a good deal of capacity in the booming late seventies and
early eighties that is going unused. But the infrastructure of the
Peninsular is already taxed beyond its capacity, and the excess beds and
chairs are only there because of lax and irresponsible bank lending
policies, which does not signify that Boothbay's problems be solved (and
they wouldn't, but that's a whole other story) at the expense of the
taxpayers of the state and the residents of a whole county.
The same holds true for Wiscasset, which could solve its problems with a
little creativity, like a pedestrian overpass and a short traffic tunnel
(the layout of the town and its topography makes both of these solutions
possible in a very unintrusive way), at a fraction of the cost,
financially, environmentally, and preservation-wise to a whole region.
The kicker, of course, is that there are numerous further bottlenecks and
dangerous interchanges along Route 1as it works its way toward Acadia Park
the prime coastal attraction, and a great deal of the summer traffic flow
could be removed from a great stretch of Route 1 by expanding one of the
already existing east-west arteries that connect the coast with the Maine
Turnpike further up. This would, of course infuriate those who live along
the chosen road, but it least it would get the job done, not simply relieve
one bottleneck of short duration and a tremendous expense.
There is very little available in the way of concrete study reported on the
relationship between road development and growth patterns (though a good
deal more than there was when we last fought the battle) but there is a
good deal of anecdotal evidence that bypasses and other methods of road
capacity expansions not accompanied by very carefully thought out land-use,
environmental and preservation planning create havoc from their inception
and tend to be self-defeating in the long run, especially in rural areas,
since they seem to be prime proofs of the Fields of Dreams adage "build it
and they will come".
There is also, by the way, a Federal prohibition against incremental road
expansion without regional planning, but in the Mid-coast region, at least,
neither the MDOT or the Feds seem to be paying too much attention to that.
Bruce
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