Let's end I-40's downtown nightmare
by Barry Henderson
One fine Friday the 13th in the early 1990s, Jack Rentfro was driving his truck home from work downtown at the old, reputable, daily version of The Knoxville Journal. Just at dusk, he drove up the ramp from the Downtown Loop, now the James White Parkway, onto I-40 Westbound.
He was craning his neck to see what was approaching from his right in the fast lane of the interstate. Merging into the passing lane is practically impossible to do with any feeling of safety. Because of the angles and the grade separation, drivers have to take a second or two to look one way and drive the other. Safety lost on that evening. A woman motorist in the same situation as Rentfro stopped her car, rather than be pinned against the viaduct railing at the top of the ramp. His truck slammed into the rear of her auto, totaling both vehicles. The impact left them slap in the path of the oncoming I-40 traffic, which maneuvered around them with a great squealing and smoking of tires. Thanks to his seat belt/harness, Rentfro survived. So did the woman.
Rentfro lived to write a lot of fun stuff as a free-lancer, but his everyday career was over. The impact turned a congenital degenerative arthritis case in his neck from mildly debilitating to crippling. He went on disability. He never drove that route again. He can no longer crane his neck, for one thing.
Just a few years earlier, I rode my Kawasaki up that ramp and accelerated to merge in front of a truck, one in a long line of tractor-trailers motoring nose-to-tail in the passing lane that Friday (not a 13th). As I reached the end of the ramp and entered the fast lane, my rear tire blew, a squirrely experience on a motorcycle at 60-plus mph. A rider is helpless in that situation to steer, or to apply brakes, or to use the throttle in any way. It's a hair-raising coast to a stop somewhere, and there was no room on my side of the expressway. The railing is right there.
The trucker behind me, who had wheel-hopped his trailer with his air brakes to keep from hitting me, instantly understood my plight and carefully trailed me across the lanes to the right shoulder, blocking other traffic. He stopped in front of me on the open berm there and called a wrecker for me on his CB radio.
I cursed the highway out of one side of my mouth and gave thanks to that trucker out of the other side that I was not one of the many who have died there, victims of an engineering prank so diabolical it defies imagination.
So it's gratifying to see that both the major mayoral candidates in this year's election see the interchange the same way. "It's taking your life in your own hands," says Madeline Rogero, who refuses to use it. "It is scary," says Bill Haslam, who does use it warily but advises his kids against it. They agree it should be given a higher priority by the Tennessee Department of Transportation, an agency that is to some extent hamstrung by the federal Department of Transportation, which has authority over the interstate system and any changes in it.
The presently approved plan is to construct a flyover ramp to allow standard merging from the left into the slow lane like the Good Lord intended.The problem is that the plan, which would also eliminate the pinball game of crossing both lanes in a couple hundred yards to get from the Broadway Connector, now called Hall of Fame Drive, to the James White Parkway from the east, is mired in a massive expansion of the whole I-4O path through the downtown, with up to five lanes going each way in spots and a massive new viaduct system.
The Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization has wisely recommended moving through traffic from I-40 to I-640, which held that traffic nicely when it was opened. At the very least the truck traffic should be rerouted there. Such a shift would eliminate the need for additional lanes downtown, where the James White Parkway interchange could be redesigned at a much lower cost and any new lanes could be rightly added to the I-640 segment.
July 31, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 31
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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