Knox highway projects for which the Metropolitan Planning Organization has recommended state funding

Alcoa Highway: widen to 6 lanes from I-40 to south of Airport with limited access
$126,000,000

Campbell Station Road: extension from Kingston Pk. to Northshore Dr. via Concord Rd.
$10,000,000

Emory Road: widen to 5 lanes from Clinton Hwy. to Tazewell Pk.
$64,000,000

Gay Street Bridge: rehabilitation
$7,000,000

I-40: widen to 6 lanes from I-275 to Broadway interchange plus new connectors
$150,000,000

1-40/75: widen to 8 lanes from Papermill Rd. to I-640 plus interchange work
$40,000,000

I-40/75: reconstruction of Campbell Rd. interchange
$20,000,000

I-40/75: reconstruction of West Hills interchange plus widening to 8 lanes
$30,000,000

I-75: reconstruction of Merchant Rd. interchange
$30,000,000

I-75: reconstruction of Emory Rd. interchange
$15,000,000

I-640: widen to 6 lanes from I-275 to Broadway plus reconstruction of Broadway interchange
$58,000,000

John Sevier Highway: widen to 4 lanes from Alcoa Hwy. to I-40
$58,000,000

Lovell Road: widen to 5 lanes from I-40/75 to Pellissippi Pkwy.
$5,000,000

Maynardville Highway: widen to 4 lanes from Emory Rd. to Union County line
$14,000,000

Neyland Drive: reconstruct with median and landscaping
$5,000,000

Northshore Drive: widen to 4 lanes from Ebenezer Rd. to Lyons Bend Dr.
$33,000,000

Oak Ridge Highway: widen to 4 lanes from Schaad Rd. to Pellissippi Pkwy.
$25,000,000

Pellissippi Parkway: extend from Alcoa Hwy. to Highway 321
$38,000,000

South Knoxville Blvd.: construct 4 lanes from Moody Avenue to Chapman Hwy./John Sevier Hwy.
$45,000,000

Tazewell Pike: widen to 4 lanes from Broadway to Emory Rd.
$35,000,000

Western Avenue: widen segments to 4/5 lanes feeding into Oak Ridge Hwy. at Schaad Rd.
$22,000,000

TOTAL: $830,000,000

Developers, industrialists, residents, and everyone with traffic problems all have a stake in the decision to build a new freeway. And in the case of a proposed interstate bypass, common ground may be difficult to find.

by Joe Sullivan

Perched on the front porch of her family's red brick colonial home in the heart of Hardin Valley, Angela Robbins points a finger toward the rolling hills just to her west. Speckled with trees, cows, and a few homes, the grassy terrain is a quiet testament to country living and wide open spaces.

"That's where the road would go," she says. And the prospective roadway toward which the animated Robbins gesticulates isn't just a byway to accommodate new subdivisions that are springing up amid the pasture land in this most westerly of Knox County communities. Rather, it's the mother of all Knox highway constructs: a $225 million interstate bypass that would steer I-75 clear of the congested asphalt and steel protrusion it now shares with I-40 from the Loudon County line through West Knoxville.

Not even the new subdivisions are much to the liking of the 34-year-old Robbins, whose great-grandfather settled on the 100-acre tract on which four generations of her family have built their homes. But she's made her peace with residential development of the valley whereas the prospect of highway robbery spells war.

"Houses are just mortar and bricks, but a highway coming through here just rips your heart out," Robbins laments.

About 20 miles to the north in Norris, a flat bed trailer loaded with a manufactured home pulls out of Clayton Homes' plant in David Jones Industrial Park. To reach its destination in Athens, the trailer must head south on I-75, traverse I-640, then fight the heavy West Knox traffic on I-40/75. The favored route for the bypass would link up to I-75 just south of Norris, sparing truckers perhaps a half-an-hour's driving time and (along with fellow motorists) a lot of aggravation in getting back and forth between points west or south of Knoxville and the northerly parts of the metropolitan area.

Captains of industry in these parts, such as Jim Clayton of Clayton Homes and Pete DeBusk of DeRoyal Industries, are predictably strong proponents of the bypass. So are industrial development boosters in both Knox and Anderson Counties who see the new road as not only helping existing concerns but also opening up a plenitude of new industrial sites along its route, solving a prospective scarcity problem.

Clayton proffers that, "Henry Ford said 'Build the cars and the roads will come.' So to the extent that our community builds the infrastructure, current businesses will grow, and new businesses will come, resulting in new jobs and prosperity for the region."

Thus the battle lines are forming for a struggle that will determine whether several hundred residents along the proposed bypass route through Hardin Valley get bulldozed or if industry gets served. But these are by no means the only contending forces involved. Advocates of numerous other highway improvements throughout the Knoxville area are fearful that the $225 million bypass will compete for state road money with their pet projects, some of which have been languishing for years. On the other hand, commuters, shoppers, and businesses dependent on the flow of traffic along the I-40/75 corridor in West Knoxville crave action that will avert the prospect of worsened clogging of that artery. Contractors, developers, fortuitously situated property owners, and environmentalists are all making their interests known as well. And somewhere amid this din an idealistic band of urbanites is entreating that an ever extending network of roads is the source of sprawl that's both depleting cities and desecrating the countryside.

This tumultuous tug-of-war will be fought out principally in the corridors of political power in Nashville. Since nearly everyone in Knoxville has a stake in the outcome, it's instructive to look at how government goes about deciding whether a new road is needed, where it should be routed, and how the state's $1.3 billion annual transportation budget gets divvied up among a multitude of competing claimants.

Follow the Paving Gourd

When Knoxville's first interstate highway (I-40) cleaved through the West Knox County countryside in the early 1960s, it was hard to envision anything but clear sailing on its four lanes of unimpeded asphalt and concrete. But as developers grabbed up the nearby farmland and baby boomers started nesting, entire new divisions of Knoxville sprang up in an ever widening perimeter around I-40's interchanges at West Hills, Cedar Bluff and Farragut. The previously pastoral stretch of adjacent Kingston Pike from Bearden Hill to the Loudon County line emerged as one of the longest near-continuous strip malls in the land. And as north/south I-75 cohabited the highway with east/west I-40 from their infamous malfunction junction in downtown Knoxville to the Loudon County line as well, motorists and truckers headed in all directions combined forces with commuters and shoppers to outstrip the road's capacity.

Widening to six lanes commenced in the 1970's and now extends for I-40's full course across the county (except for a perversely resistant 1.2 mile interstice in the heart of the city). When widening didn't get the job done, a 9-mile bypass (I-640) was constructed around the center of the city just in time for the 1982 World's Fair. But this bypass didn't pick up far enough to the west to divert any traffic from the most jammed point in all of Knoxdom: I-40/75 just east of its interchange at Papermill Rd. Moreover, in the absence of any further remedial action, traffic on the interstate west of Papermill all the way to Pellissippi Parkway is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years.

What's to be done to avert vehicle strangulation?

For starters, work is already under way on two new arteries that will parallel the interstate through most of West Knoxville. Just to its north, Middlebrook Pike is being widened to four lanes. Just to its south, Parkside Drive is well on its way to becoming a four-lane thoroughfare that extends as far west as Campbell Station Road in Farragut. Yet another road widening project is on the drawing boards to the south of Kingston Pike. This one would four-lane Northshore Drive in its entirety and link it up with Campbell Station Road.

Beyond that, the Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is mandated by Federal law to give direction to all surface transportation planning in the area, has recommended a further widening (to eight lanes) of I-40/75 from West Hills eastward to the I-640 bypass. In a much more complex and costly undertaking, MPO has also requested state funding for a re-engineering of I-40's treacherous downtown bottleneck. And I-640 is also due to get a widening and re-do of its horrific Broadway interchange.

Just how much all of these projects will do for how long to alleviate interstate congestion is a matter for conjecture. MPO officials readily acknowledge that their own traffic count projections for the future are a lot less than reliable. But the lack of any clear and convincing evidence as to what more may be needed hasn't deterred another set of forces from pressing for a more radical solution: namely, a new bypass that would circumnavigate West Knoxville altogether.

Ravishing or Ravaging?

To proponents of an I-75 bypass around West Knox, all of the widening of existing arteries that's within the realm of possibility represents little more than a band-aid approach to treating deep-seated longer-term problems. Only a new highway that diverts through traffic away from them altogether can begin to make Knoxville drivable in any longer run, it's contended.

The MPO projects that traffic counts on the stretch of I-40/75 from Pellissippi Parkway to Papermill Road will nearly double to around 180,000 vehicles per day by 2025. MPO's coordinator, Jeff Welch, acknowledges that those projections are highly conjectural. ("You plug a whole bunch of assumptions into a computer model, and that's what comes out," he says.) But he points out that many of MPO's projections have erred on the low side in the past. For example, a 1987 analysis didn't foresee traffic counts on I-40/75 just east of Papermill reaching 150,000 vehicles per day until 2007, but more than that number are already rolling over the cables deployed to count them.

As much as they may benefit from it, though, West Knoxville residents, by and large, aren't in the forefront of the push for the bypass. Instead, it's coming foremostly from North Knox and adjoining parts of Anderson County near I-75. Not that interstate congestion is nearly as big a problem in those parts, especially now that I-75 has been six-laned as far north as Emory Road. But along with moving more vehicles, new roadways also serve another purpose: namely, opening up the land around them for industrial, commercial and residential development.

A group called Better Roads in North Knoxville (BRINK) isn't just an economic development booster group. It's effectively squeaked its wheel in getting relief work started, or at least pledged, on numerous North Knox bottlenecks including the widening of I-75, Emory Road, Maynardville Highway and the I-640/Broadway interchange. But when it comes to the bypass, visions of sugarplums clearly dance in the heads of BRINK's developer interests.

"The only way we're going to grow our economy is with roads, and a beltway is vital to that growth," asserts Earl Hall, a commercial realtor and auctioneer who is a BRINK stalwart. The reason he uses the term beltway is because the I-75 bypass is envisioned as just the first leg of a proposed highway that would extend across the entire northern perimeter of Knox County and then loop down to reconnect with I-40 at—you guessed it—the Dollywood interchange in Sevier County. Estimated cost of the entire beltway: $500 million.

"The beltway opens up thousands of acres that are exceedingly hard to get at now, and developing land like that is essential if we're going to keep the Knoxville area attractive for industrial relocations," claims Jerry Shattuck, longtime chairman of the Melton Hill Industrial Development Association, which is based in Clinton.

Anderson County interests have been especially vocal in support of the new highway because much of the land that would become ripe for development lies there. But the man who oversees Knox County's efforts to assemble new industrial parks shares the view that these development efforts need to extend beyond county lines.

"Because of topography and zoning constraints in Knox County, we've got real concerns about meeting our future land needs for industrial development," says developer Pat Wood who serves as chairman of the county's Development Corp. "Based on past experience, we foresee a need for about 250 acres a year in new sites, and to find them we're going to have to start looking at adjacent counties which have an abundance of suitable land compared to Knox."

Meanwhile, existing industries in North Knox and Anderson Counties have been weighing in as well. These range from the some of the area's largest employers, such as Clayton Homes and DeRoyal Industries, to smaller fry such as I-75 Crushed Stone Co.

Jay Crippen is the owner of I-75 Crushed Stone, which is located at I-75's Raccoon Valley Road interchange-two miles south of where the bypass would link up. "A lot of days we're hauling 40 to 50 loads to the Cedar Bluff area, and the bypass would save us a minimum of 30 minutes each trip," Crippen says.

Crippen is also one of perhaps many property owners in the vicinity who've started anticipating the bypass in other ways as well. He recently acquired 150 acres near the Raccoon Valley Road interchange and managed to get industrial zoning for it approved by Knox County Commission despite the opposition of nearby residents and the Metropolitan Planning Commission. Crippen doesn't know of any other land deals being made that represent bypass bets; but he acknowledges that, "Wherever there's a new road, you're going to find speculators."

Perhaps the only set of property owners pitted against all these forces pushing for the bypass are those who've built their homes or maintained their farms nearby. "The people who've moved out to Hardin Valley did so for a reason," says Angela Robbins. "They wanted to get away from the hurlyburly and enjoy a more tranquil lifestyle."

When the Tennessee Department of Transportation held a public meeting at Karns High School to unveil its plans for the bypass, nearly 500 residents of Hardin Valley and Heiskell to its north turned out in opposition to the route through their communities. Robbins now claims 800 members for an organization she calls CABOL, which stands for Citizens Against Beltway Orange Location.

Unlike many larger metropolitan areas, Knoxville doesn't yet have a champion of the urban-centric view that an ever widening ring of roads around a city is inherently undesirable. The closest one around is the iconoclastic chairman of Chattanooga's City Council, David Crockett. "The way we've gone about building highways has just about savaged the cities," says Crockett, who has spearheaded Chattanooga's efforts to make its mantra the "sustainable" city. "In places like Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix, they've come to realize that building more beltways and ring roads will make them look like Saturn from the air, and the center will be just about as dead." A man whose turns of phrase are not given to understatement, Crockett adds that, "I've never seen a road fix a traffic problem. It's like a diet plan that recommends larger clothes...We've got to ask ourselves if we keep on sprawling, where are we going to be 25 years from now. Then maybe we'll come to realize that if we spent the same amount of money on making our center cities attractive places for people to live and work, we'd be a whole lot healthier."

The Orange and the Blue

At the Karns High meeting, TDOT actually presented two alternative routes for the bypass. (See map.) One was labeled "O" and the other "B", and they have come to be referred to as the Orange and the Blue. (Guess which color full-blooded Tennesseans are subliminally supposed to favor.)

The Orange route would start at the convergence of I-40 and I-75 just across the Loudon County line. Its swath would cut northeast through Hardin Valley, across the Pellissippi Parkway and Clinton Highway, then onward through Heiskell to its northern connection with I-75 near the Knox/Anderson county line. Upon completion, this 23.5-mile stretch of interstate-like highway would be christened I-475. Because of federal constraints on additions to the National Highway System, though, it would not qualify for any federal funding. Hence, its estimated $225 million cost would have to be borne entirely by the state. (By contrast, enhancements to existing interstates typically get federal funding to the tune of 80 cents on the dollar, thus leveraging state dollars four-to-one.)

The 35.4-mile, $300 million Blue route would start several miles further south in Loudon County and steer clear of Knox County altogether. After veering far enough to the north to avoid "hot spots" in Oak Ridge, its eastward path through Anderson County to a terminus near Lake City would be bounded by rugged Cumberland Mountain terrain. Along with its higher cost and lower economic development potential, the Blue route has further disadvantages. According to TDOT projections, it would only get trafficked by about half as many vehicles as the Orange route—hardly enough to make a dent in any West Knox 1-40/75 overload. Moreover, it wouldn't connect with the route for the rest of the beltway around North Knox that's envisioned.

While the business powers that be in Knox and Anderson counties have already made their minds up that the Orange route is both preferable and much needed, neither TDOT nor MPO has yet reached any conclusions.

"We don't have enough information to make any recommendation," says MPO's Welch. "We're still studying all of the alternatives," adds TDOT Commissioner Bruce Saltsman. And earlier this week, TDOT officials identified that one option is to proceed with only that segment of the Orange route between Pellissippi Parkway and I-75 (thus leaving Hardin Valley unscathed for now).

If construction of the bypass-cum-beltway involved the use of federal funds, an MPO endorsement would be obligatory. Under the National Highway Act, any federally-funded project must be part of an MPO's Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP). And for any major project to get on the TIP list (see sidebar) it must have been the subject of a Major Investment Study (MIS) that assesses the feasibility of mass transit and other alternatives to additional road construction. No such study has taken place or is even contemplated.

By the same token, all federally-funded projects also entail an Environmental Impact Study covering effects on everything from air pollution to endangered species. Since the Knoxville area is now out of compliance with the more stringent federal air quality standards that were adopted last year, these cannot be ignored. And Saltsman insists that an environmental assessment is a big part of the overall study of alternatives that TDOT's now engaged in.

Still, because no federal funding is involved, pure state politics is likely to prevail over all other considerations. Ordinarily, that would give the advantage to Gov. Don Sundquist's big Orange-minded financial backers over a few hundred Hardin Valley dwellers. But it just so happens that the Hardin Valleyites have an influential advocate in the corridors of power. Veteran State Rep. H. E. Bittle has lived there for many years, and he proclaims, "That road is going through Hardin Valley over my dead body." (To which an anonymity-seeking champion of development retorts, "If everybody climbs on Don's ass, he'll forget H.E.")

Sundquist's most recent pronouncement on the subject, per the Knoxville News-Sentinel, was that, "We're trying to find a solution that will please everyone."

Getting Our Fair Share

From its monumental headquarters in Nashville's James K. Polk Building, TDOT dispenses upwards of $1.2 billion a year in highway funds around the state. About half of the money comes from Washington, and the other half is derived from the state's gasoline and diesel fuel taxes, whose proceeds are dedicated to road building. So are the federal fuel taxes that go into its Highway Trust Fund (with allowances for fostering mass transit alternatives to pavement for more cars).

During former Gov. Ned McWherter's eight years in office (1987 to 1995), there was a perception in these parts that a McWherterite band of West Tennessee Democrats was seeing to it that their section of the state got the biggest chunks of asphalt. If Don Sundquist has accomplished anything during his first term as governor, it's keeping his 1994 campaign pledge to route more road money to East Tennessee in general and the Knoxville area in particular. According to TDOT, funding for projects in Knox County has risen to $236 million over the past four years from $196 million in the preceding four years. The $830 million embodied in the more than 20 projects on MPO's TIP list for funding over the next three years (see sidebar) represents an even more ambitious agenda for the future. Because a typical project takes seven years from its initial planning stage until construction is completed, actual spending of the $830 million could extend over as much as 10 years—or longer if some of the projects get stretched out.

Spread equally over 10 years, the $830 million represents a 40 percent increase over what's been spent annually during Sundquist's first term. Moreover, it's exclusive of the $225 million for the Orange route (let alone the full $500 million cost of a North Knox beltway) for which the MPO has only requested a preliminary engineering study. When pitted against all of the other highly politicized pulls for road money from all across the state, the totality of these Knox projects clearly constitutes a wish list. So the clamor to "get our fair share" may turn from a battle cry in Nashville into internecine warfare as competing claimants in different sectors of the metropolitan area vie for prioritization of their pet projects.

For example, the very North Knox and Anderson county interests that are now championing the beltway claim that MPO is biased against them. And a look at MPO's make-up gives some credence to these claims. Its nine voting members include the mayors of Knoxville, Farragut, Maryville and Alcoa, the Knox and Blount county executives, a TDOT representative and a representative of the 16-county East Tennessee Development District. Why isn't Anderson, or for that matter, any other surrounding county, entitled to equal representation?

"Under the National Highway Act, the composition of an MPO is statutorily determined and only Knox and Blount counties have sufficient population density to qualify," Welch explains. "We've invited Anderson County officials to attend our meetings," he adds a little lamely.

BRINK was formed in large part to combat a perceived "pro-southern" bent on MPO's part toward projects that mutually benefited Knox and Blount. To hear the BRINKsters tell it, Pellissippi Parkway, John Sevier Highway, a South Knox connector to I-40 and a new Alcoa Highway interchange at I-40 all got funded while projects to relieve severe congestion in North Knox languished. Through their lobbying efforts, though, the BRINKsters can now boast of numerous successes.

Perhaps in part because of these, at least some South Knoxvillians have begun to develop a poor relations syndrome of their own. Neighborhoods along Alcoa Highway, for example, have been pressing for more than a decade for solutions to what they consider the most dangerous highway conditions in all of Knoxdom. But the frustrated leader of MASH (for Making Alcoa a Safe Highway), Britt Wisniewski, says, "I never seem to be able to get answers about where we stand." (Note: Both Alcoa Highway work and the long-awaited extension of South Knoxville Boulevard to Chapman Highway have been held up in part because of squabbles over their design and routing.)

Assuming the BRINKsters are sincere in their professed concerns about overloads on I-40 and its existing I-640 bypass, then a consensus should carry the day for MPO's recommended enhancements to these roadways. The estimated cost of the five projects on this list (see sidebar) totals $300 million—enough to consume nearly all of Knoxville's prospective highway rations for the next five years all by itself. Once these projects are completed, along with the work on Middlebrook Pike, Parkside Drive and Concord Road/North-shore Drive that's intended to produce three supplemental east-west arteries, perhaps the highway planners will be in a better position than they are today to assess the need for a sprawling $225 million-going on $500 million-bypass/beltway around Knox County's northern perimeter. If the need for more industrial sites becomes pressing in the meantime, then work could be set in motion on a segment of the new highway running from I-75 to the Pellissippi Parkway. That would leave a sword of Damocles hanging over Hardin Valley's head. But it might not fall for decades, and who knows what else might happen in the meantime if the likes of David Crockett were paid more heed.

The ultimate decision maker in all these matters for the next four years is none other than Don Sundquist. And only the governor knows whom he pays the most heed when he decides which roads get built, where, and in what order.

"I spent my six years in the state legislature trying to decipher how the governor's highway funding choices could be so subjective given the supposedly strict formulas in place," says recently retired Rep. Wayne Ritchie.

In other words, don't assume that orderly planning processes and priority setting will prevail over political log rolling when it comes to determining how the bacon gets apportioned.