Roads and a River

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | May 7, 2022

Traverse City is in the middle of significant bridge and road rebuilding. Though a trifle inconvenient for those trying to negotiate their way around the bridge work, the projects have gone more smoothly than most assumed when they were announced.

Things have become a bit more complicated with the reconstruction of US-31 including the Grandview Parkway and Front Street to Garfield. It’s an overdue redo made more complex by a debate of who is actually in charge of the project and what it should include.

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) is the responsible construction party, and they likely assumed they’d create nice, new roads and move along. They probably didn’t understand that nothing is quite that simple in Traverse City; what the city wants and what MDOT intended to do were apparently not the same thing.

Traverse City always wants more. In this case, some believe the existing TART trail running parallel to the Parkway is just not big enough. Plus, the city wants something separate to keep bicycles and pedestrians apart; we really can’t be trusted to figure out how to safely co-mingle so we must have completely separate paths. More cost, more land usage, more impervious surface, more runoff…

They also want more pedestrian crossings to help folks get to the waterfront and back. The crosswalks with traffic signals at Park, Union, and Hall Streets plus the tunnel at Cass are not quite enough because walking half a block is just too far in a community that constantly brags about its active biking/hiking/walking citizens. Adding new pedestrian crossings on that stretch of Front Street, already a slog most of the year, will slow things even further.

Perhaps more troubling, some of our Traverse City City Commissioners clearly do not trust their own very capable city manager and traffic engineer to work out any design differences between the city and MDOT, so they’ve hired a consultant to sort of mediate. We do love hiring consultants, though the glitch seems easy to spot—the city wants more bells and whistles and MDOT isn’t at all sure they should be responsible for constructing such niceties.

Honestly, our City Commission doesn’t much like vehicles, and our Downtown Development Authority (DDA) doesn’t like them at all. At some point, both will have to recognize the primary purpose of a U.S. highway is to safely move traffic. Our Commissioners seem to believe its primary purpose should be to safely accommodate non-vehicular users. Hence, the conflict.

In town, we’re also now discussing returning State Street from one-way to two-way, as it was years ago and more recently when Front Street was closed downtown.

The DDA did a survey only to discover the majority of folks, by a narrow margin, would prefer it be kept one-way. The DDA also said they’d like the city and city staff to “weigh in” on the decision, though most of us were not aware the DDA now controlled some city streets. Silly us—we thought the City Commission would decide such a thing and the DDA would be welcome to weigh in, not the other way around.

We’re also told returning to a two-way configuration would help “slow down” traffic, as if it isn’t already slow enough. We are not aware of any police reports indicating there is a speed issue on that short stretch with traffic lights every block.

Whatever is decided, we’ll adapt as we always have, but making such a change might benefit a few at the inconvenience of many.

Finally, a word about the Boardman River. Efforts to restore both the upper and lower sections of the river have been noble, and the DDA’s efforts on the lower end are laudable. But we have to stop talking about returning it to its “natural” state because that is never going to happen absent changes so dramatic they would be impossible.

We would have to remove the sheet pilings that now adorn parts of the lower Boardman and remove a rather substantial concrete wall, not to mention the structures we’ve allowed on what would be the natural riverbanks.

This comes to mind after a story about planting 75,000 salmon in pens in the river. They’ll stay in those pens until they grow a couple more inches, then be released. Those that survive to adulthood will return to the river to spawn. We understand the purpose and the value of having brought salmon to the Great Lakes, but here’s the thing: Salmon are not native to Lake Michigan, much less the Boardman River. They might be invited, but they’re nonetheless invaders and hardly a natural part of that ecosystem.

Our roads will be redone, probably in spite of us. And our river will keep running, not quite natural.