Figure 1: There is a lot in the way of that yellow line.
As you can see in the figure above, in the middle, there are two obstacles that prevent a road from being built: houses and a mountain. Eastview Drive almost fills this void, but unfortunately, the road was designed to be a residential street instead of a main arterial though town. Plus, it doesn't connect with County Line Road, which is a minus. Gillespie Road extended due east to meet with Farrow Rd and the western entrance of Cummings Research Park would be a wonderful way to connect the entire city of Madison together while giving commuters another option of getting to work instead of US 72, Slaughter Rd, and Old Madison Pike. It builds redundancy in the system in case a road needs to be closed.
Am I advocating that we just go in and demolish everything so that a straight-as-an-arrow road can be built? Of course not. Although this would be the best thing from a road network standpoint to do, it would be a horrible thing to do in most other ways. If you are a property owner onthat yellow line, you aren’t going to want to have your house taken by eminent domain for such a road to be built. Even if that got done, it would be more expensive to build the road over the mountain that is in the middle. Those that live close to the yellow line aren’t going to want to deal with more traffic at higher speeds.
Another option is to rebuild Eastview Drive. Again, this road was built to be a residential street. Widening this road alone without correcting some of the site-distance problems along the road would affect the houses that front the road on both sides for most of its length. Re-grading Eastview Drive would take out houses, so this isn’t an attractive option, either. Plus, as mentioned earlier, Eastview Drive doesn’t go all the way west to County Line Road; it stops at Sullivan Street.
Of course you can widen the roads that go around this area: US 72, Old Madison Pike, Hughes Road, and Slaughter Road. Most of this is already planned. However, at some point without some big decision, whether it be mass transit, building a road through a subdivision, or rebuilding an existing road at a high cost, will have to be made in order to keep Madison from being choked by its own growth.
What do you all think would be a good solution to this problem?
