Send trucks up onto I-640, for safety's sake, please
by Barry Henderson
It's an argument that's been going on for more than 20 years. Move interstate truck traffic from Interstate 40 through downtown Knoxville to I-640 through the north end. Incredibly, with total disregard for center city traffic congestion and the obvious safety issues, it's always been rejected.
Well, not always. Through the six-month run of the 1982 World's Fair, through-truck traffic was diverted onto 640. The city got a special dispensation from U.S. and Tennessee Departments of Transportation to erect signs directing trucks to use the recently completed downtown bypass. It was a blissful time to drive into and out of the downtown, even with the extra traffic the fair drew into the city.
At the end of that six-month period, and despite the loud protestations of virtually every Knoxvillian who used the downtown link, the signs were ordered torn down by federal authorities. The 18-wheelers, who had complied admirably with the sign directions, resumed their willful ways right down I-40 to save themselves less than two miles of travel and to curl the hair of four-wheel motorists who had to share the interstate with them.
Compounding the danger to both truckers and city drivers, the outrageous on-ramp from the James White Parkway into the fast lane of I-40 westbound stayed in place. It's still there, along with the route from the N. Broadway connector onto I-40 and off again onto James White Parkway southbound, which requires a maneuver across three lanes of Interstate in a couple-hundred yards, exiting from the fast lane with little room to decelerate.
Those are two features left over from the days when the I-75/I-40 interchange at the north edge of the downtown was known across America as "Malfunction Junction."They're so foreign to any notion of reasoned highway design or intelligent traffic management they should still be known as the malfeasance easements.
The whole issue is coming up again this year with the TDOT's Rube Goldberg Memorial Comprehensive Plan for Downtown Knoxville Interstate Expansion. The agency we've grown to love to hate is poised to add a couple more lanes (and a lot more mayhem) at a nominal cost of $150 million. We say nominal because the TDOT track record is to run up overruns in the 30-percent range, making $200 million a moving target.
To do this, TDOT's highwaymen have proposed diverting all traffic to I-640 for an indefinite period, except for those intrepid souls who must wend their way around barriers and through cones to get to work and back, or to shop downtown, or avail themselves of city or county services, or visit friends or family who've shown the temerity to live there. Such a closing will be necessary to fix the James White Parkway ingress and egress debacle, but much of the proposed downtown interstate construction might be altogether unnecessary, at least for years, if trucks were sent up to I-640 now.
That may not be a long-term solution to any of Knoxville's traffic woes, but it's a painfully easy short-term fix for a problem that's been festering needlessly for decades.
To that end, perhaps, the Knoxville region's Transportation Planning Organization, a federally required group of local officials, has been asked by its technical committee to approve the overall TDOT plan with a couple of caveats. The engineer types on the tech committee (the TDOT representative voting no) want the TPO's executive board to petition TDOT to take trucks off I-40 for safety considerations and to conduct a so-called origin-and-destination study to determine how much of the I-40 traffic is local and how much is just passing through.
The move is important because it could influence the state's department, which once sided with Knoxville on the issue of restricting interstate trucks to I-640, to rejoin the fray. If the city, the county, the regional planners, and the state could show a united front and gain the support of Rep. Jimmy Duncan, the Knoxville congressman who is a senior member of the House Transportation Committee, it's just possible that the federal worm could be turned so that a huge chunk of traffic congestion here could be broken up.
Those couldas, shouldas, and perhapses are necessary to the argument, even today, because the problem has been so persistent for so long in the face of a veritable torrent of irrefutable logic. Maybe this time.
July 10, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 28
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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