Better, not great bypass won’t solve Bella Vista congestion woes

As we get older, visits to the doctor’s office become a little more routine than any of us prefer. An ache here. A pain there. The hearing and the eyesight aren’t what they used to be.

In younger days, those less frequent visits often resulted in corrective action. Here are some contacts to make your vision nearly perfect. That aching ankle will recover if you just take it a little easier for a couple of weeks. Let me give you a quick injection and that should clear up quickly. What’s the point? For the people of Bella Vista, traffic congestion appears to be a long-term part of living there.

It’s a little different each time, but the doc almost always can find a fix.

Sooner or later though, a doctor (and it’s always a young whippersnapper) has to look us in the eyes and start an explanation along these lines: “Well, as we get older, there’s only so much medicine can do to fix things.”

In other words, deal with it.

The prognosis for traffic congestion in Bella Vista apparently is a lot like that second kind of doctor’s visit, according to state highway officials. There has been great progress on the development of a bypass around the Benton County town of about 28,000, but state officials say completion of that long-awaited project won’t, on its own, rescue Bella Vista from the twice-daily glut of vehicles on the stretch of U.S. 71 running through it. The bypass will help with through traffic, but there’s a mass of vehicles every day headed south to employers in Bentonville and other cities. In the evenings, the traffic moves north.

A new study by the Arkansas Department of Transportation says intersection improvements, added lanes and improved access controls such as traffic signals are needed. Those will cost as much as $34 million.

Welcome to more of the same, Bella Vista.

Local officials say they’ve been making signal improvements that have kept traffic moving, if slowly. But that’s better than a standstill, at least until there’s a crash. One little disruption and it all sometimes comes to a screeching halt.

The good news is that studies always have to come before any solutions, so one could call this progress. The fact there’s no pot of money waiting to be spent on improvements limits just how much progress can happen quickly.

Even with money, the message for Bella Vistans appears to largely be the same as that dreaded doctor’s advice: Learn to deal with it.

It’s no fun hearing that from a doctor or an engineer.