Greenville's in a hole with traffic congestion; it should stop digging

A colleague of mine here in Greenville was talking about how expensive it would be to widen Woodruff Road, a massively oversized “stroad.”

I pointed out that it is an even bigger price tag than he suggests. This congestion “reduction” project (widening an already overly wide road) is a tragic, unaffordable, counterproductive, wasteful mistake that will damage retail and residential on and near Woodruff Road.

Motor vehicle crashes with other motor vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists will increase substantially, as will air emissions and fuel consumption. It will reduce bicycling, walking, and public transit trips, while increasing motor vehicle trips.

And it will result in far more development sprawling unaffordably into remote locations in the region, and more low-density strip developments along the project corridor. That low-density, sprawling development will come nowhere near paying its way, which will thereby contribute to financial woes for all levels of government, not to mention for households in the area.

We know (a century of experience throughout the nation confirms this) that reducing congestion by adding more capacity is a solution that will – at best -- only last for 3-5 years. After that, the "Triple Convergence" described so well by Anthony Downs will have artificially induced so many new car trips (trips that would not have ever occurred had we not added capacity) that we will be left with greater congestion on a bigger road system. Adding capacity to reduce congestion, then, is equivalent to loosening your belt to solve obesity.

Or as I point out in my books and speeches, when we add capacity (i.e. widen) we are not durably eliminating congestion. We have only two alternatives to choose from:

1.  Spend millions (billions?) of public dollars to obtain the alternative of bigger congestion on a bigger roadway.

2.  Don’t spend millions (billions?) to widen the road, and instead accept the inevitable congestion on a smaller road.

I prefer alternative two.

One person in this conversation responded by saying, “People are moving to Greenville, so we are forced to accommodate that.”

To which I suggested that if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

I pointed out two things for this person to consider:

1. Using this logic, which is the logic used by almost everyone for the past century, roadways in New York City should be 500 lanes wide. After all, people have been moving to NYC (a city with far more people than Greenville) for the past century.

2. This thinking is part of the thinking that brought down the Soviet Union. Like in this case, their thinking was that the "solution" to long bread lines was to make more free bread. By not understanding basic economics, the Soviet "solution" did nothing to end the bread lines.

Similarly, adding more free-to-use roadway capacity -- as we have seen over and over again for the past century in the U.S. -- inevitably results in the "solution" of doing nothing to end congestion (except to give us an eight-lane congested road rather than a four-lane congested road -- at a staggering public expense).

By the way, the "logic" of our "need" to widen roads to accommodate a growing Greenville is puzzling, given the history of Greenville. After all, Main Street was taken from 5 lanes to 3 several decades ago. Greenville has been growing in population for many years, yet 3-lane Main Street (at a smaller size) is now significantly better than the previous 5-lane Main Street for nearly all metrics: crime, retail and residential and office health, crashes, homelessness, abandonment/vacancies, tax revenue compared with public expenses, visual appearance, and civic pride.

I suspect Main Street would not be better if -- in 1980 -- we had decided to continue widening Main Street because "people are moving to Greenville."

Dom Nozzi has a bachelor of arts degree in environmental science from SUNY Plattsburgh and a master's degree in town and transportation planning from Florida State University. For 20 years, he served as a senior town and transportation planner for Gainesville Florida, and was briefly the growth rate control planner for Boulder, Colorado. Today, he maintains a consulting practice in which he writes and speaks about street design, urban design, and quality of life.