Road projects need steam

Reading over the rancorous comments on our website regarding the Trunk Road roundabout, we are reminded of another acrimonious road project.

Granted, Trunk Road is nothing like the Bogard Road extension. For one thing, the roundabout set to open this week didn’t require the state Department of Transportation to put a major road through an established neighborhood or tear up farmland.

But what is interesting is that the state’s project was already built and ready to open by the time most folks got around to complaining about it.

That certainly wasn’t the case with Bogard. We followed that story for the better part of three months in the early part of 2008 and since. Public hearing after public hearing drew standing-room-only crowds. Few who favored the project did so with enough passion to testify. So the hearings were hours upon hours of upset neighbors and angry residents.

It looked for quite awhile like the project was doomed, like the Mat-Su Borough Assembly would punt and choose some other way to fix the problem at which Bogard was targeted — traffic congestion on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

In the end, the assembly voted to extend the road and chose the straightest route with the most opposition.

The difference between Trunk and Bogard, in our minds, is who is in the driver’s seat. For good or ill, the state seems to take a lot less heat from the public. Perhaps that’s because state meetings aren’t as well publicized as borough meetings. Perhaps people just feel more of a right to scream at the borough than at the state. To be sure, there have been public meetings to discuss Trunk and the roundabout, but none were as well attended as the Bogard meetings. We haven’t heard any that were as contentious.

So which process is better?

Both road projects are necessary improvements that will improve public safety. Studies show roundabouts, while initially confusing to navigate, simply work better than stoplights in some locations. While many still avoid Dowling Road in Anchorage, that roundabout has cleared up what was once a horrifically congested area.

If there are more accidents in roundabouts as motorists get a feel for them, accidents decrease eventually and are the kinds of accidents people walk away from, whereas T-bones and head-ons at signalized intersections many times are not.

Bogard was also necessary. The Palmer-Wasilla Highway is in the top five of the most dangerous stretches of roads in Alaska. People are dying on that highway and have been for some time. The Valley needs another east-west corridor, and Bogard is the best solution. Nobody has identified a workable alternative, as far as we are aware.

In the end, both projects were approved. Trunk’s roundabout is in place. Ground is yet to be broken on the Bogard extension, but the borough has snatched up rights-of-way along its path.

While some may have felt steamrollered by the state on the Trunk Road process, maybe sometimes a steamroller is the right tool.

We would be the last organization to advocate for top-down decision-making — the word for that is totalitarianism — but we have to say it is nice, in the case of Trunk, to see a necessary road project proceed with more action than conversation.