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MDOT's plans for Exit 7 on I-295 amount to a waste of money
Not only won't traffic be helped, but Portland's hopes for pedestrian access will be trumped.
PORTLAND — Last year, $4-per-gallon gas prices had Mainers clamoring for better transportation options. The city of Portland initiated a redevelopment plan for a more pedestrian-friendly Franklin Arterial.
To deal with rapidly increasing costs of parking and road projects downtown, the city government, with broad support from citizen and business groups, has resolved to move more people on foot and in buses, instead of in private vehicles.
And across the state, diminishing tax revenues have led more and more leaders to call for frugality throughout state government.
These are all eminently sensible goals. Earlier this year, though, Maine's Department of Transportation announced that Portland's sensible plan would be trumped by their own plan, which calls for more traffic, more public debt, more oil-dependency and more pavement that the state can't afford to maintain.
After their $100 million proposal to widen Portland's downtown freeway went down in flames for lack of funds and support, Augusta's highway engineers are now barging ahead with an expensive project to widen a few hundred yards' worth of roadway at Exit 7 -- the interchange between I-295 and Franklin Arterial.
Anyone who's been near Exit 7 can see that there's plenty of room for improvement.
The roadway is flanked by two 14-foot-wide sidewalks to nowhere -- they currently dead-end in patches of grass, with a chain-link-fence on one side. Connecting this sidewalk through the underpass, between East Bayside and Back Cove Park, has been a goal in the city's Comprehensive Plan since the 1990s.
Cars coming off of the freeway merge in a chaotic mess amidst the wide expanse of pavement -- there's no logic to the intersections. To its credit, the Maine DOT's plan would sensibly add a traffic light at the northbound off-ramp, which would also create a safe crossing-point for pedestrians headed to Back Cove.
But instead of imposing order to the intersection, MDOT intends to make it even more chaotic, with more lanes and new opportunities for vehicular conflict, while encouraging faster speeds for vehicles coming off the freeway and forcing pedestrians to jaywalk.
In a classic example of bureaucratic doublespeak, they're euphemistically calling their project a "safety improvement."
The Maine Department of Transportation's plans would also either cut off pedestrian access altogether or reduce it to a narrow, 5-foot dirt path squeezed underneath a dark freeway underpass.
This directly undermines the city of Portland's economic development goals for the Bayside neighborhood, which is intended to be a high-value, pedestrian-friendly district.
Augusta seems intent on turning the neighborhood into a freeway pit stop.
The project's engineers claim that cars need more space at this interchange -- but their own data show that traffic levels at this intersection have been flat or in decline for the past 20 years.
While car traffic is stagnant, recent development has caused a surge in foot traffic in the neighborhood. Building new sidewalks costs a tiny fraction of what it would cost to build a new highway lane.
The Maine DOT could save hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars -- and support the city's economic development goals -- by extending the existing sidewalks, instead of tearing them up.
It's hard to make sense of Augusta's motives in their current plan. MDOT is struggling to pay its bills, and roads and bridges across the state are crumbling away.
Still, the agency has sunk hundreds of hours' worth of staff time into pursuing this $1 million expansion project, even though the congestion and safety issues at this intersection are, by its own records, insignificant compared to other locations.
By forging ahead with plans to widen freeways without pursuing more economical alternatives, the Maine DOT is also flouting a number of state and federal accountability laws -- including Maine's admirable but long-ignored Sensible Transportation Policy Act -- which are designed to promote fiscal responsibility and energy independence.
It's a relatively small project, but Exit 7 demonstrates how desperately this agency needs to be held accountable to reducing Mainers' transportation costs, controlling its own budget deficits and supporting economic development in Maine's towns and cities.
