City seeks to shape KGB design

WASILLA — As the struggle over expanding the Parks Highway from two lanes to four from Wasilla to Big Lake Road continues, city officials are already preparing for the next fight — Knik-Goose Bay Road.

“We’re trying to get out in front of this one,” said Wasilla Public Works Director Archie Giddings.

Toward that, the city hired a consultant to study the traffic and help work with the state Department of Transportation.

“I know the reason why the mayor and Archie brought me here is they were looking for a way to negotiate a better design of Knik-Goose Bay Road,” said Gary Toth, an independent consultant in transportation planning and engineering.

Toth spoke Friday, the day after he and other city officials sat down with state Department of Transportation officials to lay out their ideas.

“They kept their cards close to the vest,” Toth said. “But we didn’t think that they were, based on one 90-minute meeting, going to say, ‘we’ll do it your way.’”

And, unlike the Parks Highway project, which is set to start construction in 2014, the city has more time to workout a plan with the state. The KGB expansion won’t open until 2019, meaning design work likely won’t start until 2015.

So, what is the city’s proposal?

Essentially, Toth said, it’s a bargain. The state wants to expand Knik-Goose Bay Road from two lanes to four all the way to Settler’s Bay Drive. But if the state agrees to design the upgrade as four lanes with a center turn lane through the Wasilla city limits — the first three miles — the city will work to build out its road grid.

The goal, he said, would be to “keep as much of the traffic off of KGB Road as possible.”

He said that in his experience — 34 years working for the New Jersey transportation department — road planners and designers tend to work “in a silo.” The state takes care of its roads, the city takes care of its roads, but they never get together and take a look at how one affects the other.

But, Toth said, that leads to only temporary fixes.

“There’s been no city in the country that has been successful in eliminating congestion by building wider, straighter, faster roads only,” Toth said.

Yes, traffic gets better briefly, but soon the state or city is back at it, tearing up roads and adding more lanes. Atlanta, he said, is considering 23 lanes going into the city. That, he said, should be a sign that there are better ways to do this.

So what’s the plan? Giddings said it involves things like the downtown couplet of one-way streets, the Mack Road expansion and other projects to create a grid system of roads in downtown Wasilla. The theory is that if more motorists can be enticed off of KGB and on to side roads, the solution created is more permanent.

Toth said it makes no sense to upgrade a main road, but not improve the network of side roads, which local drivers also use.

“Who am I kidding? What’s the point of widening the big road? The problem is everywhere,” he said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.