Stop giving our roads diets
The western part of Hancock County is one of the fastest-growing regions in Indiana.
Its main surface arterial is U.S. 40, which for years was a four-lane road that could quickly ferry lots of local traffic while also serving as a relief route for Interstate 70 two miles north.
Well, it was a four-lane road. Recently, the Indiana Department of Transportation decided to re-stripe the road to turn it into a two-lane road with a center turn lane for the two miles between the Hancock-Marion County Line and Mt. Comfort Road.
The old canards will be trotted out about safety and traffic calming, but this has always been a relatively safe stretch of road. But it’s also a busy stretch of road. In fact, it’s by far the busiest stretch of road in Hancock County that’s not within a mile of an interstate highway.
Average daily traffic numbers range between 17,500 at the county line and 18,300 at Mt. Comfort Road, and those numbers will only grow as the areas near Cumberland, Mt. Comfort and New Palestine continue to explode in population.
The service capacity for a two-lane road is about 10,000 cars per day, nearly half of the AADT that stretch of U.S. 40 already sees.
Already, motorists are feeling the frustration. Two-lane Mt. Comfort Road — which connects U.S. 40 to I-70 — already suffers from congestion, especially during the afternoon rush hour. Backups and long queues at stoplights are now becoming common in the new two-lane segment of U.S. 40.
It’s not because of a constricted road capacity. There’s enough room to land a plane on the now ultra-wide shoulders. OK, maybe not that wide, but there’s certainly enough room for an additional travel lane in each direction and have some room to spare. It’s not because of a need for additional bike lanes, with the Pennsy Trail a couple hundred yards south of the highway providing a much safter path for bicycles than the shoulder of a high-speed arterial road.
The same thing was done on a lower-traffic stretch in Greenfield, and in the years since it’s been built, I have yet to see a single cyclist in the newly-built bike lanes along U.S. 40.
Whoever decided this — and the blame should rest firmly at the feet of INDOT — clearly did so without seeking or considering much public input. This is almost universally reviled by those of us who live here and have to navigate our unnecessarily-congested roads. The capacity of the main arterial in our community has been cut in half by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen in an Indianapolis office building.
Once upon a time, traffic engineers tried to move traffic as quickly and efficiently as possible. If a road was congested, it would get widened, or stoplight timing would be modified, or something would be done as to not snarl traffic and frustrate its users.
But the current fad in urban planning circles is “complete streets.” The actual users of the road are not considered. Well, they are, but they’re seen as being a problem to be dealt with, not consumers who should be accommodated. Engineers are much more concerned with impressing their buddies at planning conventions with how many miles of roads they’ve “dieted.” They see cars as an unnecessary evil to be “evaporated,” and thus traffic snarls and congestion are a feature, not a bug.
The goal, now, is to make driving as frustrating of an experience as possible, so you’ll consider biking, using transit, or better yet, abandoning your comfy suburban home for a cramped urban apartment where you’ll be dependent on your bicycle and the bus.
We are just their guinea pigs. That we are inconvenienced, that we are stuck in traffic, that it’s only going to get worse as the population grows, is not an issue to them.
While INDOT should get the lion’s share of the blame, since it owns the road, the governments of Hancock County and Cumberland are not without their share of the blame. Too often, Hancock County’s government has ignored or hand-waved away the needs of communities west of Greenfield, as if we don’t matter. While the county — rightly — helped the citizens fight for four lanes to be preserved between Greenfield and Mt. Comfort Road (at least for now — INDOT has been trying to give the rest of U.S. 40 a “road diet” all the way to Greenfield), it did nothing to stop this needless “diet” in the most heavily-traveled part of the road between Mt. Comfort and the county line.
Half of the road sits within Cumberland town limits, and Cumberland appears to not only have done nothing to stop it, but it has actively encouraged it through putting a “complete streets” emphasis in its comprehensive plan. But it only advocated for it in the heavily-congested, growing parts of Hancock County — where a number of people live near, but not inside, town limits — and not the Marion County segment where most of its residents live. Essentially, they’re happy to inconvenience us, but not themselves.
The growth isn’t going to stop, no matter what people wish. Fewer lanes means more congestion, more frustration and more difficulty getting around. It also means more pollution, as cars spend more time idling and accelerating in the needlessly heavy traffic.
Thankfully, the pavement is still there and certainly wide enough for four travel lanes plus a center turn lane throughout the two-mile “road diet” corridor.
It’s time for traffic engineers to actually pay attention to their customers — the people using the roads — and stop playing SimCity with our lives. Use the pavement you have and prioritize us, not people who attend planning conventions.