M.L. King, Bailey plans move into passing lane
Renewed interest in downtown could reverse traffic flow ... again
Chattanooga City Councilman Yusuf Hakeem remembered the year, 1957, he was pretty sure, when M.L. King Boulevard and Bailey Avenue were converted to one-way streets designed to serve a clear purpose.
“To afford people the opportunity to get out of town as quickly as they could and get to the suburbs,” Hakeem, the District 9 councilman, recalled from his seat at last week’s council meeting.
Now, nearly 50 years later, the same roads are likely to get a revamp that will intentionally do the opposite.
A proposed road right-sizing project for M.L. King and Bailey would slow traffic on the streets and encourage people to stop, shop, dine and walk along the road that once funneled motorists away from a decaying urban core.
Thursday marks the final day of a public comment period for the proposal that has yielded a more positive response from area stakeholders than a recent, similar proposal for Frazier Avenue that city officials nixed after it garnered widespread skepticism.
At its core, the Bailey-M.L. King plan is designed to “calm” traffic by reducing traffic from four lanes to three — one in each direction and a center-turn lane.
One iteration of the proposal also includes separated bicycle lanes. Another iteration features no bike lanes but wider driving lines that would conceivably be safer for cyclists.
“For us, we’re really interested in slowing down traffic and making the whole area more pedestrian and bike-friendly,” said Camp House director Matt Busby, who represents a group of business owners on the M.L. King corridor called the Big9 Merchants Association. “We see that as a way to grow things residentally and commercially.”
Busby and others with a vested interest in the area have been compiling petition signatures, attending meetings with city officials and rallying support for the proposal.
City transportation officials will use the feedback to formulate a final plan in the coming weeks.
Work is tentatively scheduled to begin in the spring to implement the changes, but anticipation for the project in the Highland Park area began as soon as the city announced it had received a grant to build bike lane connections in 2014.
Neighborhood activists continued promoting the benefits of the Bailey-M.L. King proposal, even as a bike lane project on Broad Street drew criticism from stakeholders there and the Frazier project fizzled.
Though public support is higher for the Bailey-M.L. King project than it was for the Frazier project, some still have concerns.
Highland Park resident Christopher Dahl spoke at the recent city council meeting, encouraging city planners to consider putting the bike lanes on neighborhood streets, not a “main road.” He said he’s skeptical that traffic will really slow down, anyway.
“They always say that the road diet will slow down traffic,” Dahl said in a later interview. “In all reality, even after they did the road diet to Willow Street, from time-to-time you’ll still see a car cut around slower traffic using the middle lane. They get angry because the other car is doing the speed limit.”
“When the first article about this came out in 2014, we shared it with one another,” Highland Park Neighborhood Association president Emerson Burch said. “It’s literally been two years that we’ve been preparing for this.”
Burch said people living in Highland Park desire to be engaged with each other in a community environment and that the right-sizing project helps to accomplish that goal.
“We want a neighborhood that is connected, and this current crazy, speedy pattern that runs through the center of our neighborhood is really unreasonable for a neighborhood,” he said.
In some places, the speed limit along Bailey and M.L. King is just 25 mph, but city transportation director Blythe Bailey said motorists regularly travel more than 40 mph through the area.
“When cars are going more than 35 mph, the rate of fatality, especially for pedestrians, goes way up,” Bailey said.
Just Friday night, a motorist struck and injured two cyclists on Bailey Avenue in the Highland Park area, underscoring the necessity of the project in the minds of those who support it.
The M.L. King-Bailey project will be funded by a federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grant, accepted by the city two years ago, that also funded previous bike lane installations on Broad and North Market streets.
It would have funded the Frazier Avenue project had city officials continued with it.
Bailey said there were many good reasons to do a project on Frazier, but numerous challenges, too, including poor public perception.
Reaction to the proposal for M.L. King and Bailey has been much better, Bailey said. He and other city transportation officials have met with the merchants association, the neighborhood associations and distributed information at public events such as the Bessie Smith Strut and Nightfall concerts.
Bailey said framing the proposal as more than just a bike lane project has helped with perception, too.
“The [congestion mitigation] grant is to fund a bike project, so it’s not fair to say it’s not a bike project,” he said. “It is a bike project. But it’s so much more than that. The MLK commercial district, in particular, includes new crosswalks for pedestrians, new sidewalks, new trees that will improve the sense of place, and also new lighting to improve the feeling of safety.”
The proposal also comes with a cost in travel efficiency that could bother commuters who rely on the approximately 2.5-mile stretch of road to get to and from downtown during the mornings and evenings.
A study conducted by Alta, the city’s transportation design firm, showed that traffic will be delayed by 48 seconds at the intersection of East M.L. King and Central Avenue during peak afternoon commuting time.
At the intersection of Bailey and South Willow Street, drivers will be delayed by 66 seconds during peak commuting time, according to Alta.
“It will be frustrating for drivers during that rush hour time, but it’s frustrating for them during rush hour now,” Bailey said. “Rush hour is frustrating, period. It will take a little bit longer.
“But in the grand scheme of things, for the street to be safer and more comfortable for pedestrians 24 hours a day, we think it’s a huge pro compared to the small con of there being an additional delay during the 30-60 minutes of rush hour traffic in the morning and afternoon five days a week.”
Bailey said M.L. King and Bailey have “a full grid” of supporting and secondary streets surrounding it, which can accommodate traffic. Frazier Avenue does not have a similar supporting grid.
“The increased travel time is due to the project’s expected result of making traffic calmer on M.L. King and Bailey,” he said.
John Kerns, who represented the Highland Park Neighborhood Association at the city council meeting, presented the council with a list of 155 handwritten signatures from neighborhood residents.
As cycling continues to grow in popularity and the downtown population continues to grow, it’s essential, he said, that the city provide safe passage for these commuters.
“They [the 155 residents] all seem to agree that traffic calming and bike lanes on this corridor are a good idea,” Kerns told the council. “In short, this is the right project in the right place at the right time.”
Hakeem, who was a Chattanooga grade-school student when the corridor was made a one-way street to funnel traffic away from the city, agreed.
The Bailey-M.L. King corridor was changed back to a two-way street under former mayor Bob Corker, and this proposal, Hakeem said, is part of an evolution that has been occuring.
“In my view, what is being proposed is taking another step towards being resident-friendly, meaning those persons who have invested in the communities around that area,” he said. “It may take some informing or understanding with some citizens who may have a concern about how these streets are done.
“But if it prevents accidents, makes it safer for residents, I believe it will be a benefit to all of us.”
Contact staff writer David Cobb at dcobb@ timesfreepress.com.