MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 3 Mar 2007
The Future of Mission Boulevard
As Mission Boulevard becomes more congested, city councilors and this
newspaper have discussed whether it should be widened. ItÕs a fair question.
For full disclosure: The
Washington-Willow neighborhood, where I live, is greatly affected by Mission
Boulevard.
As Alex MarshallÕs wonderful book How Cities Work explains,
cities rest on three interacting pillars:
An economic base, politics, and transportation decisions. The transportation decisions generally revolve around catering
to AmericaÕs car culture, versus everything else (walking, buses, etc.).
Except for recent laudable efforts to build trails, Fayetteville has
turned its periphery entirely over to automobiles, with predictably atrocious
results, especially around the Mall.
We still have a few remaining nice older neighborhoods in the middle
of town, such as the Wilson Park and Washington-Willow areas.
The future of Mission Boulevard depends on how highly we value such
neighborhoods.
WeÕve been here before. Most
of you probably know the story of the once tree-lined, mansion-lined North
College Avenue, described during the 1950s as Òone of the loveliest streets
in the land,Ó and the decision to turn it over to automobile dealerships and
four lanes of traffic. More recently,
during the 1980s the city widened North Gregg Street to four lanes, from Township
to North Street. The widening
generated increased and faster traffic, as widening always does, along Gregg
right up to its intersection with North. But from there, the increased south-flowing traffic had to
either cut through the small streets around Wilson Park, or turn east or west
onto North Street. The resulting
through traffic, on streets never meant to serve as highways, has damaged
the quality of life around Wilson Park.
The Wilson Park experience is common.
Cities frequently build highways right up to established neighborhoods
and then wait until the cut-through traffic has destroyed the neighborhood,
after which they can extend the highway without organized opposition.
Conventional non-planning is unconscious and simply follows the path
of least resistance: Wherever
the traffic goes, bigger roads follow.
But conversely, wherever bigger roads go, more traffic follows. So traffic and roads feed on each other
in a mindless interplay that leads to the car-plagued city that many of us
moved here to avoid. If we donÕt
want this ÒLos AngelesationÓ of Fayetteville, weÕve got to take control of
the traffic and decide consciously how we want it to move.
Mission Boulevard—Highway 45—is congested for only about
an hour around 8 am and 5 pm five days a week, with cars carrying AmericaÕs
average 1.15 occupants per vehicle.
What would be the consequences of widening Mission for these commuters
to four and five lanes from perhaps Crossover Road to Lafayette Street, as
has been suggested? Four lanes
from North Street to Lafayette Street will cut into sidewalks and front yards
and reduce the quality of life along that stretch.
The denser faster traffic along Lafayette will reduce the quality of
life along Lafayette. There will
be increased cut-through traffic on smaller streets such as East Prospect,
Rebecca, East Maple, and East Dickson.
And there will be the mother of all bottlenecks where four-lane Mission
Boulevard runs into two-lane Lafayette Street. Will we then wait until people move out of Lafayette Street
in hopes that the new residents will be resigned to four-laning that street
too?
We need to re-think Highway 45.
Since at least the mid-1990s, there have been city-state discussions
about moving it. There are four
plausible ways it could go: the
present route, over the hill on North Street from Mission to College, north
on Crossover Road, and south on Crossover Road.
The first alternative destroys the Washington-Willow neighborhood,
the second destroys the North Street neighborhood, the third doesnÕt get most
people where they want to go (downtown or the university), and the fourth
gets people where they want to go while destroying no neighborhoods. The choice is obvious:
The city needs to persuade the state to re-route the highway south
along Crossover Road.
Of course, this will not stop all traffic from coming into town along
Mission. But it opens the way
for the city to install traffic lights and other traffic calming and control
measures on Mission and Lafayette (we canÕt do this while Mission is a state
highway), while encouraging people to take Crossover Road instead. This will go far toward preserving an
important neighborhood in the heart of our city.
Some people have used Mission Boulevard congestion as an argument against
the planned Ruskin Heights large scale development along Mission. Such thinking is short-sighted, backward,
and not very smart. Ruskin Heights
is a dense-infill, pedestrian-friendly, transit-friendly project.
If all Fayetteville development were built to these high standards,
we wouldnÕt have a congestion problem.
A decision to build a single enormous (three times the size that educators
recommend) high school and to locate it out in the northwest corner of town
beyond I-540 and practically in Johnson on land that the school board recently
purchased will sink our town further into Los Angeles-like congestion. Unfortunately, most parents and students
will persist in driving instead of riding a bus to the new school.
Putting the school in the center instead of out on the edge would roughly
halve the average commute distance, and switching to two high schools instead
of one would reduce commutes even further.
As Jared Diamond documents in his book Collapse, many civilizations have destroyed themselves because they were unwilling to change destructive cultural patterns and instead followed the path of least resistance. For America, highway widening is always the path of least resistance. What will be FayettevilleÕs path?