KGB conundrum: Road carries thousands more vehicles than capacity

KNIK — So what are we going to do about Knik-Goose Bay Road?

The road is really the only feasible route to bring traffic from the main state artery of the Parks Highway to both the soon-to-open Goose Creek Correctional Center and the expanding Port MacKenzie area.

And everyone agrees that if the Knik Arm Bridge is built, a lot of the traffic using it will be spawned in the neighborhoods around Knik-Goose Bay Road. These areas are already the fastest growing in the Mat-Su Borough. And the bridge will likely accelerate their pace of growth.

So while truck traffic will likely need another road entirely — one that bypasses Wasilla — for the bridge to be useful, car traffic is a whole different story.

So is the road ready to handle it?

Nope.

“KGB and the Parks Highway are kind of in the same boat — they both need to be widened out to four lanes to handle even the amount of traffic they’re handling now,” said borough transportation planner Brad Sworts.

In 2008, the borough put in a request for $3 million to start work on widening KGB to four lanes from where it intersects the Palmer-Wasilla Highway extension to Settlers Bay Drive.

“Current numbers exceed 16,000 vehicles a day on this highway that was designed for 10,000,” that funding request says.

And during the three years since those estimates were made, traffic and growth in the area has increased.

Alan Kemplen, the state’s Mat-Su area planner, has a different rule of thumb — 12,000 maxes out the capacity of a road. But that doesn’t exactly make the picture any rosier.

The funding request was granted. The state has that money in hand now and is using it to do reconnaissance work in the area.

But the sticker shock comes later in the request. The borough estimates upgrading Knik-Goose Bay to four lanes will cost $37 million. That’s nearly double the $21-million cost of the new Trunk Road that opened this summer.

Bridge planners have said in the past that the state has enough time to get these roads upgraded. The bridge is set to start construction in two years and construction will take three years. And even after those five years are up, nobody expects traffic to show up all of a sudden.

Still planners say the timeline might be cutting it a little close.

Sworts said it took 25 years to get Trunk upgraded.

“Hopefully, that’s not the standard,” he said. “Typically with DOT projects, if you’re using federal funds it could be up somewhere in the 10-year to 12-year range from start to completion of the project.”

If the state uses its own money, a project only takes seven years. Sworts said that’s because federal rules require more studies and reports, but also because the feds have a stricter timeline that prevents working on one phase of the project while another is under way.

Knik-Goose Bay Road is one of two roads in the borough the state has designated as Highway Safety Corridors in which traffic fines are doubled.

When that corridor was established, the idea was that corridor would be a temporary measure and traffic-calming measures would be used to reduce the number of accidents and thus eliminate the need for the safety corridor.

Sworts said he’s starting to see that in the other corridor — the Parks Highway from Mile 44.5 to Mile 53. That one is older than the Knik-Goose Bay corridor.

“There’s been more of a push to get the design and the right of way purchased and the whole project moving on the Parks Highway out north of Wasilla there,” Sworts said. “I would imagine that KGB would follow the same pattern as the Parks Highway.”

One thing both of those corridors have in common is that they are state-owned, state-maintained roads and as such, fixing them falls on the state.

But the borough is doing some things to try and relieve congestion. Sworts said two projects included in the raft of road bonds voters approved Oct. 4 will help. Widening Vine Road will likely entice more cars to use that route and avoid the pileup in Wasilla. The same is likely true for the extension of Clapp Road to connect Wasilla’s sports complex to Knik-Goose Bay Road.

However, neither of those projects will move forward unless the state agrees to match the borough’s bond money.

Darcie Salmon, set to take a seat in a couple weeks on the borough assembly representing the area, has appeared in commercials telling the story of how a wreck on Knik-Goose Bay Road put him in a wheelchair.

At public appearances when Knik-Goose Bay comes up he describes the road as “near and dear” to his heart.

“What we have for road money is, in my opinion, Band-Aid money. It will help. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very grateful for that,” Salmon said. “But that needs to be a four-lane road, in my humble opinion, clear to Mile 13.”

Growth projections, he said, indicate there will be 20,000 cars daily on Knik-Goose Bay in the not-too-distant future.

He named another big source of traffic likely to impact travel on the road, a new middle/high school in the area.

“The school issue is just another nail in the coffin of why something must be done out there,” he said.

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