Metro Pulse/Editor's Corner/Corridor or Corrida?

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S. Knoxville looks again at its highway needs

by Barry Henderson

It’s been decades in the making, with a cast of thousands. It’s been more trouble than fun, with arguments and political bickering marking every turn. It’s the “plan,” if you can call it that, for improving the highways serving South Knoxville.

Mainly Chapman Highway and, lately, the James White Parkway Extension have been the battleground over which the state, the city, the county and the locals have been contending.

Suddenly, they’re making nice, at least temporarily, and trying to achieve some semblance of consensus. With the impetus coming from City Council, a 25-member James White Parkway-Chapman Highway Corridor Task Force has been formed to address the whole spiced-up enchilada. It met this week, with Leadership Knoxville CEO Jeannie Dulaney, former Knox County Finance Director Kathy Hamilton and Knoxville Police Department trainer David Kitts acting as “facilitators.”

Those facilitators turned the first meeting into a social get-together, with the attendees sharing personal observations of the history of South Knoxville as they saw it or experienced it. They’ll get back together March 29 to continue the discussion, and perhaps get around to the future of South Knox transportation.

Mayor Bill Haslam opened this week’s session, saying “I recognize it’s been a very contentious thing,” but encouraging the group by telling them that “TDOT and the governor have said, ‘We want to hear what you think,’” and emphasizing that the newly reconstituted Tennessee Department of Transportation “honestly wants our feedback” before proceeding with plans that have been on the drawing board for years and years.

The task force is taking up both the parkway and Chapman Highway because, in the words of South Knoxville Councilman Joe Hultquist, the group’s co-chair, “they are inextricably tied together.”

It’s true that they parallel each other for several miles until the parkway rejoins Chapman, but they surely will serve different constituencies at different times, with the former being a limited-access thruway, and the latter being the main commercial artery that serves the entire area.

What’s wrong with the plans so far—and I risk offending many, and perhaps all, other South Knoxvillians by coming right out with it—is that the parkway doesn’t go far enough to be really useful. As proposed most recently, it would continue south from Moody Avenue, where it now ends, follow the valley of Baker Creek for a while, cut the top off a ridgeline along the west side of the creek, present itself through interchanges at Redbud Drive and Sevierville Parkway, and cut back west to Chapman at about Little Switzerland Road, just north of Ye Olde Steakhouse’s reviving location. In other words, it dumps its through traffic back onto Chapman short of Gov. John Sevier Highway when it should proceed through John Sevier, with an interchange there, and join Chapman somewhere on south, perhaps around Kimberlin Heights Road, perhaps farther down toward Seymour.

It would cost lots more to do that, but it would lose its odd, hookworm look and would provide a truly effective transportation alternative to Chapman that is necessitated by growth in South Knox, Blount and Sevier Counties. The current route proposal seems utterly shortsighted.

Then there is the matter of the need for some connector across South Knoxville between Chapman and Alcoa Highways. As it is, there is no easy way to get between those two main highways until one gets to John Sevier, five miles south of the river, and the route there is more than six miles long. The other east-west way from Chapman to Alcoa is to take Young High Pike to Martin Mill Pike, jog south to Avenue A, cut across to Sims Road, cross Maryville Pike, proceed to Cherokee Trail on Edington Road, and pop out onto Alcoa Highway at UT Hospital. It’s a winding, narrow route, passing through a one-lane railroad underpass, with stop signs to contend with. It nearly requires a global positioning device to follow all its tricks and turns.

It would help a little if Moody Avenue were widened between Chapman Highway and Martin Mill and extended to Maryville Pike, allowing for easier access to Woodson Drive and Maloney Road, but those two roads leave almost no opportunity to turn south (left) onto Alcoa Highway. Better to extend the Moody four-lane all the way across Cherokee Trail to the Alcoa Highway interchange at the hospital, where safe access to Alcoa going either direction is already possible.

Those cross routes would be city projects, without state DOT involvement, and there is no city money to accomplish either of them. But then there’s never been city money to do much of anything to ease South Knoxville’s transportation woes. Why should we expect that to change now? Because we have a task force that reputedly has the ear of the city, the county, and TDOT, that’s why. Let’s think bigger than usual. It can’t hurt.