This is a guest post by Wisconsin Bike Fed staffer Ben Varick. It was originally published on the Bike Fed’s blog and is republished with permission. You can sign up for the Bike Fed newsletter or support their work with a donation on their website: https://wisconsinbikefed.org/
The Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s plan to widen the Beltline will make air and noise pollution worse, increase carbon emissions, and commit our region to costly maintenance for decades. Time and time again, highway expansions have shown to increase traffic congestion and encourage sprawl. There are better options for our transportation system.
The Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) is planning a major project on the Beltline to the West and South of Madison. They just released the results of their planning study and their proposal is to add another lane and rebuild the existing interchanges to increase car traffic. This is shortsighted and misguided. We need your help telling WisDOT that this plan is not what we want.
By 2050, the City of Madison’s population is projected to grow 42% and the rest of the Dane County is likely to grow similarly. This is a significant increase and will require thoughtful infrastructure to welcome our new neighbors.
WisDOT plans to address the growing population by increasing the number of lanes on the Beltline (and I-39/90/94). Now on the surface, this might seem like a good idea: if there are more people, and those people are driving, you need more space for those cars. And this has been the philosophy of many transportation agencies since the 1950s, with very poor results.
Induced Demand
Increasing the lanes on a highway does reduce traffic in the short-term (1-5 years). But then some people change their transportation habits to drive more, some people move farther from their jobs and drive more, some businesses that rely on driving (i.e. Amazon warehouses) move in. This causes the traffic on the stretch of road that was widened to return to an equilibrium that is as congested as it was before. This is called induced demand, this article from the New York times, this article from Wired or this video from Not Just Bikes are good explanations of the phenomenon. Verona Road was widened 4 years ago and already “traffic volumes have exceeded projections along the Verona Road corridor”.
We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on widening highways, commit ourselves to billions more in maintenance costs, and the congestion on the road is the same. And all of those new car trips start or end on surface streets, making those streets more congested. This will make our region more car-dependent, putting a higher financial burden on families and reducing the autonomy and freedom of movement for the ~40% of residents in the Madison area who are not drivers.
WisDOT is not incorporating induced demand in their models of this project’s impacts. In part, this is because modeling induced demand is quite difficult, which is true. To ignore induced demand and then make claims about reducing congestion is a glaring oversight. Chris McCahill at UW’s State Smart Transportation Initiative recently wrote a great article about how transportation agencies can include induced demand in their decisions even when precise modeling is difficult. He summarizes induced demand nicely: “Build for cars, and you’ll get more driving; build for transit or biking, and you’ll get more of those too.”
One of the proposed “improvements” on the Beltline is to increase car throughput at various interchanges. This will make traffic flowing onto the local roads faster than it already is. One of those interchanges is at Gammon Road, where we’ve written about the dangers for students walking or biking to Memorial High School and Gillespie Middle School. Gammon Road is on the City of Madison’s High Injury Network and in MMSD’s Unusually Hazardous Area. The planned interchange expansion at Gammon will increase the speed and volume of car traffic, increasing the risk for students and families at those schools.
What’s the Alternative?
The mindset among state transportation agencies is finally starting to change. Among others, the Colorado, Minnesota, and Michigan Departments of Transportation have started to cancel urban highway expansion projects. In Rochester, NY, the city removed a highway that went to through the city and replaced it with a boulevard, a bike/pedestrian path, apartments, and shops. The New York Times wrote a great article about highway removal projects and their impacts a few months ago.
Traffic currently gets congested at rush hour, and as more people move to Dane County, there will be more demand on our transportation system. But building more lanes on the highways around Madison will make the congestion worse. In order to reduce traffic, we need to start thinking about how can we move the most people as possible, instead of how can we move the most cars.
Imagine if the extraordinary sums of money proposed for these highway expansions were instead spent on building bike paths connecting more areas to a safe bike network? Or if we used the money to build more transit lines serving other parts of the Madison area? Or if we finally build the train line that connects Madison to Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis? Or if we allowed grocery stores to be built in residential neighborhoods so people could walk to them? Or if streets were made safer so that kids could bike to school? These ideas would all reduce traffic for everyone and will make our cities nicer to live in.
We don’t need people to stop driving all together (nor is that possible), we just need to give people alternatives to driving that are safe, comfortable and efficient. Every trip that is walked, biked, or bused is one less car trip on the road, and less car traffic.
“There is no solution to car traffic, except viable alternatives to driving.”
– Not Just Bikes
How you can help
The City of Madison and surrounding municipalities are doing a lot of these ideas, but WisDOT’s plans to expand the Beltline will hinder their efforts and make our cities and towns less livable.
While these highway plans also include some bike, pedestrian and transit improvements, they are vastly overshadowed by the negative impact that the increased traffic will bring. WisDOT has the potential to support great improvements to our transportation system, highway expansions are not those improvements. We support maintaining the existing roadway – Strategy Package 1 (SP1) – but with the proposed bike and pedestrian connections. This combination is not currently an option that WisDOT is willing to consider, help us change that!
We need to tell WisDOT and our local elected officials that these highway expansions are a mistake that we need to stop digging ourselves into a deeper hole.