Basement Office

How not to spend $15 million

Reposted from the comments thread at Strong Towns:

@Nathaniel brings up a good point in that optimizing for throughput of cars could lead to a whole host of negative consequences for the rest of the city.

Take, for example, my town of Fergus Falls, which is currently in the midst of building a bridge over the Otter Tail River to the tune of $15 million. There are five crossings of the river in our downtown area, and two farther east, but nothing to the west of downtown until I-94. The particular site where they chose to build the bridge has been eyed for some time now, and apparently the financial pieces finally fell into place to allow for construction of this bridge to commence.

Here’s a map of the crossing [above], which is highlighted in red. The closest crossing to this skirts the west edge of our downtown (blue area), and the typical path that someone from that side of town would take is shown as a blue line. The red area denotes the suburban commercial development area that has been growing for the past 30 years or so.

One can argue that this fills in a gap in our transportation network, but up until now it seems that our town has survived without it. Our downtown, at least compared to other cities of comparable size in the area, is doing well — most of the storefronts are occupied, there’s a healthy residential population above the ground floor shops, there’s no missing teeth along Lincoln Avenue, our main drag, and we’ve even managed to retain a full-service grocery store in the middle of it all, despite the presence of a larger grocer on the old edge of town and a Super Walmart by the interstate. I bet the daily traffic that passes through downtown as a result of our particular configuration of roads has something to do with that.

When you look at what this bridge connects, one wouldn’t be faulted for assuming that it’s just been built to let the southwestern suburban fringe get to Fleet Farm and Target five minutes faster. The official line is that it will lessen the truck traffic from our “main” exit off of the interstate, #54, and allow a more straightforward connection to the industrial park on the north side of town, but I think that’s an explanation in search of a problem. Coming off of exit 54 is a four-lane divided highway, which if it wasn’t built to accommodate trucks, would be overkill for the amount of traffic it regularly receives.

While the city is putting out no general fund money to pay for the bridge — it’s funded by transfer payments from the federal and state levels — it’s going to be put on the county and city’s shoulders to maintain the bridge, which is a perfect example of the “benefit now, pay later” approach that Chuck and Co. regularly warn about.

Finances aside, I worry about what kind of growth example this will set. By building this bridge, we’re just upping the ante on the wager that we can continue to build out a system where happy motoring is the only goal.