No to the North Mendota Parkway!

Dear Reader,

For years, state, county and local authorities have been talking about the construction of the North Mendota Parkway (sometimes also called North Beltline).

Many informational and public hearing have been held while the project has slowly been moving forward, and as the final options are becoming clearer, predictable fronts are hardening between those who want the road built as quickly as possible with higher speed limits, those who want it built, too, but somewhere else, those who want it built with as many local connections as possible, so they can benefit from adjacent real estate development, those who don’t want adjacent real estate development, but wider environmental corridors, those who ...

Very faint in that chorus are the voices of those who offer a different, more forward-looking and certainly more sustainable approach: Those, who, like this newspaper, say:
Let’s not build the North Mendota Parkway at all.

In highway departments all across the country, a feeding frenzy has broken out since the federal government has started giving money away to pay for infrastructure projects in the name of economic stimulus.

Officials have been falling each other to present idiotically named ‘shovel-ready’ projects (usually a euphemism for less-than-half-thought-through ideas) that they can now ram down the throat of the taxpayers, present and mainly future.

A North Mendota Parkway is admittedly not one of those projects. But it is still superfluous and a step in the wrong direction.

The problem in the Madison area (as in most other places) is not that we don’t have enough roads, but that we have too many already.

It is a well established and documented fact that automobile traffic increases to take advantage of all available roadways. Build more roads, and you create more traffic.

The reverse reasoning, and the one that is at the basis of projects like the North Mendota Parkway, namely that we need more roads to get rid of traffic, is an old fallacy perpetuated by highway departments, civil engineers, land-misuse planners and road construction companies (and parroted by politicians).

Yes, there is sometimes heavy traffic in urban areas. But that’s where it belongs!

That’s where most of it originates and it is where most of it ends up. Everybody drives cars, but nobody wants traffic in their neighborhood!

If we really want to do something about automobile traffic (and about reducing the external costs associated with it, like pollution, noise, land use and EMS and police time), then we should rethink the way we plan cities, the places where we live and work.

We should also take the money we’d waste on roads and use it to build an efficient public transportation system. That would be sustainable, forward-thinking planning.