It has been a year since it was announced that Intel would be investing more than $20 billion in the construction of two new chip factories in Central Ohio. This was welcome and exciting news for the entire state, and has spurred considerable debate about the impact this will have in both the short and long term for the region. This too, is a welcome debate.
Recently, the Newark Advocate published A second outerbelt? Intel growth forcing Ohio transportation execs to think big, which focused on the efforts of transportation planners working to decide how best to improve and grow transportation infrastructure resulting from this development. The headline of course was focused on the hypothetical construction of a second outerbelt around the Columbus metropolitan region, presumably connecting Newark to places as far north as Mansfield, as far south as Chillicothe, and possibly as far west as, say Springfield (the article only specifically mentioned Mansfield and Chillicothe). Ohio Department of Transportation Director Jack Marchbanks was quoted as saying regarding those two cities extension in the Columbus metro region as “now it’s actually filling out to those boundaries.”
While this is certainly attention grabbing, envisioning a second six (or in some instances 11 lane) highway encircling our capital region, the article is more so focused on the many efforts underway to consider closer to home options which include widening roadways in order to accommodate traffic as high as 4-5,000 vehicles per day. The state has already approved funding to widen Ohio Route 161 from Columbus to Newark (which is already a six-lane limited access highway between I-270 and New Albany) in order to accommodate more traffic. Efforts will also be underway to repurpose existing roads, upgrading them from two lane to five or six lane boulevards and eventually, new roadways that do not even exist will be proposed, cutting across the Licking County landscape forever changing the character of the region in order to accommodate more and more single-occupancy vehicles.
The Katy Freeway in Texas. The section of roadway from the western suburbs to downtown Houston supports a total of 26 lanes (including the 6 lane feeder roads which run adjacent to the roadway. Promised to ease congestion of what was dubbed “the second worst bottleneck in the nation with 25 million hours a year of wasted commuter time, the expanded highway has instead increased commute times by 30 percent in mornings and 55 percent in afternoons.
It is a proven fact that the construction of larger highways leads not to reduced traffic, but more traffic. For nearly one hundred years, we have seen this vicious cycle repeat itself time and time again. We build a highway connecting point A to point B. People see it as a faster alternative and take the highway. Because more people are using the highway, congestion gets worse each year, and we determine the only way to solve the problem is to build more lanes, which leads to more people on the road and more congestion, and so on.
The New York Times recently published an article Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It? The article notes that “in a metropolitan area, when road capacity increases by 1 percent, the number of cars on the road after a few years also increases by 1 percent.” This is what is known as induced demand, first identified in the 1930’s and best exemplified in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.
During the last two or three years before [the entrance of the United States into World War II], a few planners had...begun to understand that, without a balanced system [of transportation], roads would not only not alleviate transportation congestion but would aggravate it. Watching Moses open the Triborough Bridge to ease congestion on the Queensborough Bridge, open the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to ease congestion on the Triborough Bridge and then watching traffic counts on all three bridges mount until all three were as congested as one had been before, planners could hardly avoid the conclusion that "traffic generation" was no longer a theory but a proven fact: the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour into them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways – which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an ever-widening spiral that contained far-reaching implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas.
ODOT itself has in the past admitted both in public comments and private conversations that we cannot build our way out of congestion, and yet they continue to turn to the same playbook year after year with the further development and construction of more highways.
The construction of the Intel facility should instead serve as an opportunity for Central Ohio planners and transportation engineers to instead embrace the development of a multifaceted transportation system that will serve as a catalyst for responsible growth now and into the future. Already, we have seen positive developments on the local front as the Central Ohio Transportation Agency (COTA) is progressing with the development of a bus rapid transit (BRT) system along major transportation corridors in the Greater Columbus area, and there is renewed discussion centered around the proposed expansion of a statewide rail system which will help to connect our capital city to the rest of the state and region via Amtrak. These are positive and worthwhile developments which should be expanded.
The bus rapid transit service which COTA is exploring is a perfect example of a short-term solution that needs to be front and center in the discussions centered around the Intel development. Having the regional transit agency at the table during this project development is an absolute must. One way to ensure that there is less demand for highway development along the corridors in and around the Intel development is to have an alternative service available from the beginning – not considered as an alternative after the fact. If construction will be occurring along the SR161 corridor in Franklin and Licking counties, why not include BRT in that plan, with a suitable transfer station at the county line permitting seamless service transfer (or better still allow for COTA’s expansion into Licking County). The state also needs to examine the outdated regulations which do not allow transit agencies to operate outside of their service area and work to make ‘regional transit’ actually regional.
Furthermore, if the state is going to give serious consideration to the Amtrak expansion plan, regional leaders need to be considering the long-term application of the service beyond travelers commuting back and forth between Ohio’s Three C’s and Dayton. It is one thing for the casual traveler who may be looking to spend a day traveling from Cincinnati to Columbus to enjoy the amenities of the Short North, Downtown, or Campus area, all of which would be in close proximity to a proposed train station near the convention center. It is quite another to expect wide-ranging use of the service it people arriving in Columbus then need to rent a car in order to access Intel, the airport, or any other number of businesses, entertainment venues, or general recreational services available in the region. Planning needs to be undertaken now to ensure that local mass transit or commuter services are available to help to reduce congestion and make travel in the region that much easier, connected, and accessible to the wider population.
Recently released census data shows that 8 percent of Columbus residents, 8.8% of Newark residents, 13.6% of Mansfield residents, and 11.3% of Chillicothe residents (those communities cited by ODOT in the article) do not have access to an automobile. That same data shows that the majority of households in those communities only have a single automobile, which creates further stresses for those households that rely on an automobile as their sole means for travel.
Let us embrace this opportunity and shift our focus from paving over our future with miles of new highways, and instead use this as a catalyst for the development of a true multifaceted transportation network that will meet our regions needs for decades to come.