Fixing I-69
Interesting article in the Star yesterday about I-69 upgrades around Fishers and the NE side.
For those of you not from the area, the NE corner of Indy, where I-69 mets I-465 and feeds in traffic from the NE suburbs of Fishers and Noblesville, is probably the WORST congested traffic in the city. They’ve done a series of interstate expansions but they never seem to help (maybe CJ can comment on that a little more, as he’s talked about this before at Drinking Liberally).
Anyway, apparently some of the Mavor Moves/Toll Road money is going to go towards helpign fix the traffic there. But I’ve got to wonder about how they are going to go about it.
That money would be used to expand I-69 through Fishers and improve interchanges in the area. Those improvements won’t come until 2014, though.
Interstate expansion isn’t really goign to help. Again, CJ knows the specifics on why but basically it’s because as you widen a high traffic road, it is instantly filled by people saying “oh now it’s wider so I can take it” and you are back where you started. I-69 on the NE side is at that point - widening it isn’t going to help. In fact, widening it in Fishers will just cause higher volume in shorter time to congest down at 465.
To me, the answer is rail. How much Mavor Moves money is goign to be spent on Marion County and the Donut Counties to fix interstate congestion - congestion that will just keep on getting worse even with expansion?
How much of a rail system could be built for that money?
Maybe I’m being idealistic, but I’d like to think that with rising congestion and rising gas prices, it would be much easier to promote a metro rail system than it was even 5 years ago. It’s getting to the point that Indy’s goign to HAVE to solve it’s transit problems, and not just through continual widening of the interstates.
Shawn wrote:
I’d be first in line to take a metro train. Let’s bring back the Inter-Urban system!
Posted on 21-Jul-06 at 12:24 pm | Permalink
Plato’s Pharmacy » Blog Archive » If you don’t like traffic, don’t live in Fishers wrote:
[…] Jason wants me to go into more detail about why the state’s plans to clean up Indianapolis’s I-69 corridor won’t work. The answer lies in something in the field of transportation planning calls the “Lewis-Mogridge Position“, or more simply, “Induced Demand”. Read the Wikipedia entries for more detail, but in essence the idea is that increasing the number of lanes on a road decreases the cost of traveling on that road, and as we all learned from Econ 101, a decrease in price will result in an increase in demand. By widening I-69, you’re making it easier for people to live further out in the north suburbs, which will induce more people to do so, and before you know it you’re back to where you started. It leads to a never-ending cycle of road-widening/more sprawl/more road widening. If you don’t want to have to come back and fix the problem again in five years you need to make sure those new lanes don’t decrease the cost of using the road by either making them HOV lanes or implementing some form of road pricing. Interestingly, the reason why an increase in CAFE standards may not actually lower fossil-fuel consumption is quite similar. If my car gets more miles per gallon, the cost per mile driven is lower, meaning we’ll get more miles driven. It will become more affordable for people to live even farther from the urban core, also increasing sprawl. The negative environmental externalities of more miles and more sprawl can wind up eating the saving you get from the more efficient cars. In much the same way as charging for new lanes helps fight induced demand, a higher gas tax winds up being a much more effective way to reduce fuel consumption than CAFE standards (provided the tax is high enough to overcome the relative inelasticity of gasoline demand). […]
Posted on 24-Jul-06 at 10:14 pm | Permalink
Steph Mineart wrote:
Exactly. Fixing the systemic problem rather than simply treating the symptoms is the only real solution. Curb sprawl by encouraging future development into less trafficked areas, and incentives for re-developing blighted sections of town.
Posted on 25-Jul-06 at 4:35 pm | Permalink
Jason wrote:
I couldn’t agree more. That, combined with more efficient mass transit in the city could really transform both the traffic problems in the city as well as the entire profile of the city for the better.
Posted on 25-Jul-06 at 6:24 pm | Permalink