Widening I-405 Won’t Ease Traffic Problems

by Renee Kjartan, the Free Press

The I-405 Corridor Program is considering several proposals to ease traffic congestion, most of which constitute a direct subsidy to the highway-building and auto industries.

The plan they most prefer calls for spending $7.7 billion to add four lanes to the most congested 30-mile stretch of I-405. The group 1000 Friends of Washington calls this plan “a monster highway widening that not only risks hobbling taxpayers for years to come, but threatens wetlands, salmon and neighborhoods up and down the corridor.” 1000 Friends says the problems with the plan include:

1) It costs too much.

2) It won’t work. “Repeated studies show that new highway capacity rapidly fills up, making the costs of roadway expansion unjustifiable.”

3) It harms neighborhoods. “More highway capacity means arterial widening through a dozen or more Eastside neighborhoods, leading to more local traffic at higher speeds and more noise.”

4) It worsens sprawl and pollution. Many studies show that increasing general-purpose lane capacity “encourages people to drive more often and greater distances, generating more sprawl. The additional freeway and arterial lanes lead to more oil-laden run-off into salmon streams.”

Widening freeways destroys communities, increases noise, pollution, asthma (particularly among children, the elderly and the sick), and global warming. Widening won’t solve traffic problems, either. Many have likened widening roads to a fat person loosening his belt. Rather than acting as a solution, it just allows more of the same wrong behavior.

Transportation Choices, a coalition of groups advocating an end to sprawl [info@405solutions.org] advocates Alternative 5, which includes:

Smart Growth. Use financial incentives to encourage more jobs and housing to locate in major centers with the best transit service and opportunities to walk and cycle in the corridor.

Trip Reduction. Fund more aggressive trip reduction programs, including an innovative Entrepreneurial Grant Program to purchase capacity with demand-reducing incentives. Public, private and non-profit employers, developers and property managers would have financial incentives to prevent traffic by providing incentives such as Flexpass, parking cash-out, telework, proximate commuting, showers, bicycle parking, priority parking and vanpools.

Strategic Investments in Choke Points. Make strategic investments in general purpose and/or HOV capacity at key choke points. Aggressively implement Transportation System Management: signal prioritization & synchronization, ramp metering and HOV priority.Strategic Transit Improvements. Invest in cost-effective, strategic transit and bike/ped improvements. This should include “fast bus” service, consideration of a new bus rapid transit (BRT) lane, and improvements to bike/ped facilities in the I-405 corridor. Bus lanes and bicycles move more people at a lower monetary and environmental cost per person.

Pricing. Consider pricing parking and new general purpose capacity to both moderate demand and provide revenue.

Neighborhood Protection. Fund traffic calming measures to discourage and slow cut-through traffic on neighborhood streets in the I-405 corridor.

Contact Sensible Solutions for 405, PO Box 131, Seattle, WA 98111; 206-298-9338; info@405solutions.org; or www.1000friends.org.