Widening Roads as Development Comes

There are a lot of new developments being built in and around Huntsville these days. New development is always nice, but with that development always comes increased strain on the local road network to carry people to jobs, recreation, shopping, or whatever else. Huntsville is already spread-out (the city limits stretch into both Limestone and Madison Counties), and the road system hasn’t kept up. Those people who drive roads like Jeff Road, Capshaw Rd, Winchester Road, and Old Big Cove Road, just to name a few, suffer through bumper to bumper traffic through rush hour. Local governments are strapped for cash, so they can only widen so much before there is no more money to go around. What can be done to get the roads widened?

When you build a new house or buy a new house. you have to pay a deposit in order to turn the utilities on. This pays for the utility company to provide the proper infrastructure necessary to deliver power, water, sewer, phone, and cable to your home. To extend this analogy, why can’t the developer pay for widening roads that are adjacent to large residential and commercial developments?  The developer most likely already pays the utility company to put in the infrastructure needed so that it is ready once a house is built. Why doesn’t this apply to roads?

To take a look at what this looks like, firstly we go to Shelby County, TN and the city of Memphis. Many roads there either have been widened or are widened in random places. Shelby Drive is an east-west arterial that is six lanes in the city of Memphis, but returns to two lanes in some places around the suburb of Collierville, TN. However, notice what a developer has done to Shelby Drive here:


Shelby Drive does a switchback here (not unlike what some of the Madison County roads do here). However, when the developer built the subdivision above, they shelled out the money to build a widened Shelby Drive to be ready for when the rest of the road is widened. Here is another example along Shelby Drive farther west near the recently-built open-air development “The Avenue”:

As you can see, where a development has access to and from the main road, the road is widened adjacent to the development. Where the development ends, the road returns to two lanes. In some cases, the asphalt and everything is built, but the lanes aren’t used since the section that has been widened is so short that it wouldn’t make sense to open all lanes to traffic.


This obviously wouldn't take care of widening an entire length of road, but it would reduce the amount of money needed by the city or county to widen what remains. It would put widening projects in closer reach, and it would allow cities and counties to reallocate transportation funding for other projects


I ask this question: why isn’t this a requirement for roads in Madison County or Limestone County? Even if it is done through some sort of tax increment financing agreement (similar to what the city of Huntsville is using to improve infrastructure around the Redstone Gateway Development), it would be better than doing nothing at all. A lot of the roads we are driving on are stuck in the 1960’s while the traffic and development has left them far behind. Should we wait for the city or county to come up with the money to widen the roads, or is there another alternative? I think there is.