Adding just 1 more lane won’t fix North Chancery
Roads are one aspect of our society which always draw a great deal of interest. As taxpayers, we expect our roads to be well-maintained and wide enough to handle the volume of traffic they are forced to support.
We don’t have to look any further than Nashville Highway to find a road people have long yearned to see upgraded. Now that state and federal funding appears well on the way to being approved to begin a four-lane to Woodbury, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Inside McMinnville city limits, there’s a similar problem with the two-lane portion of North Chancery Street. It’s a tight road with cracks and dips and plenty of traffic turning in all directions. It’s a road that’s mainly commercial since Wal-Mart located on N. Chancery almost eight years ago and has drawn in dozens of other businesses in its draft.
Fortunately, McMinnville officials are well aware of this problem. They have been for quite some time.
They saw the difficulties that were arising back in 1995 when they had a traffic study conducted. What the study concluded was N. Chancery Street was quickly outgrowing its current capabilities. The study indicated that in four years, around 1999, the traffic on N. Chancery would rise to a level of unacceptable delays.
Alderman have done a fine job of forward thinking in the past and they need to make sure to continue that trend. As McMinnville grows, we need to make sure our road system also grows accordingly.
We don’t have to look any further than Murfreesboro to see what a strain uncontrolled growth puts on roads. McMinnville isn’t likely to experience a Murfreesboro-type population explosion, but the city is steadily growing.
That’s why city officials would be wise to listen to the recommendation made by the 1995 study. It indicated some nine years ago that N. Chancery Street should be expanded to five lanes: two lanes in each direction with a continuous turning lane. That would put it in line with the segments of N. Chancery Street and New Smithville Highway which compose “the strip.” That stretch of road, while busy, does its job in moving a high volume of traffic efficiently.
McMinnville officials have indicated any action on N. Chancery Street will likely have to wait until 2007 when the city pays off a couple of its major bond issues. Any action beforehand would more than likely require a tax increase, they say.
Three years is on the borderline of acceptability, but it’s hard to argue for a tax increase if the city doesn’t have the money. What is easy to argue for is a better plan than turning N. Chancery Street into a three-lane road, as is currently the idea. If a 1995 report said N. Chancery should be five lanes, why build a three-lane road some 12 years later in 2007?
If a perceptible dent is to be made in the traffic woes on N. Chancery Street, a three-lane road is not going to do it. In fact, the road will already be outdated the moment the asphalt cools.
The Standard understands space is tight, but, at the same time, sound reasoning should not be tossed out the window. If the city seriously wants to address the N. Chancery Street traffic woes, it will take more than an extra turning lane to do it. When peering into the not-so-distant future five or 10 years down the road, it’s easy to see that.