Number 29

The SPID, which I've blogged about before, is getting bigger. The CC Metropolitan Planning Office has plans to make the SPID wider, buying property on the southside of the road and adding up to two more lanes for ramp transitions. Making the SPID less dangerous is a worthwhile pursuit, but accomplishing this by making it bigger and faster is foolish. The SPID already is killing this town by subsidizing businesses located away from our neighborhoods, by encouraging denser business and home-buidling growth further and further away from the city center, and environmentally by acting as a heat island and major source of runoff, and socially, by physically dividing the city and acting as a dramatic barrier to people moving around city (pedestrians and the elderly have to cross what amounts to an interstate to get groceries). To improve traffic safety in CC, the city should develop the roads equally. Congestion on the SPID would be diverted to the SPID's tributaries and parallels making the arterial safer by virtue of traffic density.