How the care and maintenance of Chattanooga’s roads may make it a safer and more prosperous city
The road crew was out before the sun had cracked the tops of the trees. Paving a road is summer work, but why do a hot job in the heat of the day? The road in question was a dead-end street that lay on the northern end of Woodmore Lane.
According to John Gibson, who has worked for 18 years as a paving inspector, it’s been forever since someone paved this road. And even though it was a short road, even though it only serviced a handful of houses, it showed what happens when a road goes neglected.
The milling machine, resting on the side of the road like a Brontosaurus, had made a deep cut to remove the road’s base material. The road had been falling apart. Patches of base material showed. In some parts, you could see mud, Gibson said.
But now the smell of bitumen filled the air as a red dump truck delivered fresh, black asphalt. The next time this dead-end will need to be repaved is 50 years in the future. A pave job on a well-traveled road will last half the time.
Blythe Bailey, the administrator for the Chattanooga Department of Transportation, watches the proceedings on the street corner. Mayor Andy Berke tapped Bailey for the job when Berke created the department shortly after he was first elected.
The former practicing architect agreed and Bailey now wears a fluorescent traffic vest, dress pants and work boots.
“Our street system is so fundamentally important to the quality of our neighborhoods and business districts, whether you can walk and whether you feel comfortable on a street, is I think directly related to the street itself,” he said.
A Fundamental Part of a City
Bailey sees his mission with the streets as twofold. First, like a good homeowner, you keep the asset functioning.
“Think about a house. if the paint is so bad that the siding is gonna rot, then you should repaint,” Bailey said. “And so you want to keep your house painted, well, because it looks better, but mostly because you don’t want to have to deal with rotten walls. So our priority is to make sure that our street system is stable and the asset is maintained as long as possible for as little taxpayer dollars as possible.”
On the flipside, if the pavement buckles and cracks, if the mud starts to seep up to the road, then a city needs to spend more money in the long term to make it drivable. That’s less money spent on the schools and police department, Bailey said.
Besides, a fresh swatch of blacktop is one of those things that spruce up a neighborhood—like a fresh coat of paint.
The second priority for Bailey’s office is figuring out the best way to manage the road system as a whole, managing it in a way that the city can grow.
A Change in Focus
Bailey said that his department is breaking from how the city has managed roadways in the past. Before, Chattanooga’s focus was similar of many other cities: building and expanding.
“We’ve grown geographically very fast,” Bailey said. “I’m not talking in the last year; I’m talking in the last many decades. This generation and the previous generation—we’ve expanded the boundary of our city in a very fast way so we’re spread out more than we used to be. Which means the asset that we’ve got in the form of our street system becomes harder to maintain.”
When the Chattanooga Department of Transportation receives federal funding for road work—Transportation Improvement Program funding—the city has stopped earmarking a portion of that for increasing the capacity of the roads. Instead, it is devoting a healthy percentage—over 25 percent—to maintenance. No longer is it working towards building capacity, which Bailey said is another word for widening a road.
The net result is more developments further away from each other (urban sprawl), more cars on that road, more congestion. The projects that were supposed to relieve the demands placed on a busy road had an effect of bringing more cars to that throughway.
“We think that more connectivity and more options for people is the best way to grow. Not by necessarily increasing capacity,” Bailey said.
In February, the Chattanooga Department of Transportation started a new metric by how it judges the conditions of the roads in the city. Introduced to the City Council in February, Bailey said the Paving Condition Index is a “consistent, transparent methodology” to explain which road gets a fresh pave and which ones can wait for a future year.
Having an index is important, Bailey said, because some people want the neighborhood street paved because it looks bad. It’s cosmetic.
Slower and Multi-Use
For an example of a new kind of road projects the city is pursuing, look no further than Martin Luther King Boulevard. The four-lane road was put on a road diet, shrinking the number of lanes on the road to three, with a center turning lane.
In a four-lane road, there were more opportunities for accidents. The new configuration prevents people in the left lane from stopping suddenly and making left-turn lanes – a situation ripe for a rear-end whoopsie. And with only one lane per direction of travel, gone is the “race track mentality” of a multi-lane road, Bailey said.
And it gives pedestrians a safer road to cross because, as Bailey said, because the median offers a place where pedestrians can wait for one side of the road to clear.
Plus, by going from four lanes to three, the city can put in bike lanes. Bailey said there are many different kinds of road diet projects going on across the country, with the most common being eliminating a lane in a road. “Road diets are known to reduce crashes by sometimes as much as 50 percent,” he said.
And one of the reasons is that a diet can slow down the cars. Wide roads, Bailey said, encourage fast driving.
“The Veterans Bridge is a great example,” Bailey said. “The speed limit on that bridge is 35 miles per hour, but you feel like you’re crawling if you’re going 35 because Veterans bridge is so big. And for a time, we did things like that because we felt well, we’re going to need this capacity, so we should go ahead and build it really big and we can grow into it. The downside of that is you get faster traffic, which is what kills people.”
Meanwhile, the National Transportation and Safety Board is beginning to stress how serious speeding is when it comes to roadway fatalities.
In July 2017, the NTSB released a study that found a little over 112,000 people died on American highways from 2005 to 2014 due to crashes linked to speeding—almost the exact number of people who died at the hands of drunk drivers during the same period, the NTSB said.
“The current level of emphasis on speeding as a national traffic safety issue is lower than warranted and insufficient to achieve the goal of zero traffic fatalities in the United States,” the study said. In an ironic twist, one factor that increases the speed of traffic is a freshly paved road, Bailey said. No bumpy surface. It’s quieter.
The Open Road
While the City of Chattanooga handles the roads in the city, the Tennessee Department of Transportation handles the state routes, the U.S. routes and the mighty interstates. TDOT also inspects the bridges, according to Jennifer Flynn, a community relations officer for the department.
“One of our biggest challenges in Chattanooga is congestion on our interstates,” Flynn wrote in an email to The Pulse. “Even a stalled car can cause a considerable traffic backup and increase the chances of a crash.”
Like the city, the state realized it cannot simply build its way to a better transport system, so it uses an “Intelligent Transportation Systems,” which also employs message signs and cameras to manage the traffic.
But the interchange where Interstates 24 and 75 meet presents a challenge. Over the years, Flynn wrote, the number of cars driving along that route has increased but the ramp geometry, the distances given to drivers to merge into traffic, for example, were left wanting.
Later this summer, the Tennessee Department of Transportation will solicit bids to fix the interchange.
“The planned design consists of widening the existing roads and ramps, increasing ramp radii, reconfiguring I-24 ramps to enter and exit I-75 from the right side, shifting the interchange to the west, and modifying the Welcome Center area traffic circulation,” Flynn wrote.
In the city, Bailey said the city is planning on extending the project along Martin Luther King Boulevard when more state funding comes in. It also hopes to create connections to Riverfront Parkway near 3rd and 4th Street, with the hopes of fostering a health and wellness district near the hospitals. Shallowford Road—which represents another way to move east and west through the city besides the highway—needs work to accommodate growth, Bailey said.
Once again, Bailey said the Chattanooga Department of Transportation is looking to increase the money it has to pave roads by 20 percent this year. And overall, the goal is to make Chattanooga’s transportation routes safer, and to give Chattanoogans travel options.
“We want it to be more practical for people to walk or bike or take transit,” Bailey said. “But we also want people to have different driving routes. The tighter your street grid, the more alternatives there are, and the smaller your streets can be. And smaller streets tend to be more comfortable for pedestrians.”
Daniel Jackson is an independent journalist working in the Chattanooga area. He studied Communications at Bryan College and covered national events at the Washington Times before moving to Chattanooga several years ago.