We’re beginning a new feature that’s our version of the CA’s News From Bygone Days. From time to time, we’ll be reprising blog posts from 10 years ago. Some will demonstrate how much progress we’ve made and others will point up how far we have to go. As the quotation says, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Ten years ago, we were writing about the way that the city engineer’s was determined to build a massive bridge into Shelby Farms Park was reminiscent of the plan to build an interstate through Overton Park. Unfortunately, the giant bridge into Shelby Farms Park was built, but fortunately, all of the roads except one that were planned to cross the park are now dead.
Overton Park Expressway Memories Triggered By Walnut Grove Road Bridge Project
You can forgive environmentalists for flashbacks to the Overton Park expressway controversy in the 1970’s as they watch the relentless push to to construct the massive Walnut Grove Road/Humphreys Boulevard redesign although a final decision hasn’t even been reached on the alignment and design of Kirby-Whitten Road through Shelby Farms Park.
The city’s single-minded attitude rightfully inspires memories of the federal lawsuit to stop the interstate through its signature Midtown park in the early 1970s. As the trial was under way and testimony was being given by witnesses, bulldozers and construction crews were building the interstate closer and closer to Overton Park.
Incredibly, despite the federal lawsuit, the Tennessee Department of Transportation never stopped construction of the highway aimed straight at the park. Remarkably, TDOT’s attorneys even had the audacity to argue that so much money had already been spent on the road, it just had to go through the park.
U.S. District Judge Bailey Brown wisely decided otherwise, commenting on the brazen attempt to paint the court into a corner. As a result of his ruling, the portion of the interstate headed for the park was never finished and ultimately became Sam Cooper Boulevard instead.
Supporters of Shelby Farms Park have watched a similar sensitivity on the Walnut Grove project. While a special context sensitive design committee is weighing alternatives for the highway through the park and will make recommendations soon, Tennessee Department of Transportation and the Memphis City Engineer’s office couldn’t even wait for that road decision to be made.
Rather than allow the committee to make its decisions without the smell of asphalt in their nostrils, the engineers embarked on a project that will enlarge the Wolf River bridge entering Shelby Farms Park on its western edge from its present wide of 50 feet to a massive 250 feet. Construction at the bridge site (see photograph) already hints at the size of this project. When completed, the bridge will be about 1,000 feet long, and actually there will be three bridges. The one in the middle will have six lanes and the two on the outside of it will have two lanes each.
The immensity of the project raises quite reasonable suspicions by some that the engineers intend to build a huge concrete funnel pointed at the park, so they can then argue that the Kirby-Whitten highway must be larger to keep traffic from backing up. Essentially, it would be a reprise of the Overton Park argument, just with a 30-year fresh face put on it.
There’s one other similarity to the landmark parkland case. Back then, testimony revealed that transportation engineers actually aligned their highways to go through parks. They saw parkland as free land which helped to keep project costs down.
Looking at the Long Range Transportation Plan of the Metropolitan Planning Organization, it is easy to conclude that the same attitude exists today. While the Kirby-Whitten highway has received a barrage of media attention for the past 10 years, there are actually a cluster of highway lanes aimed directly at Shelby Farms Park.
Despite the community uproar about highway plans for Shelby Farms Park, current road plans actually aim 24 to 27 more new lanes of traffic (not even counting the six new lanes of the Walnut Grove bridge) at the 4,500 acres of green space in the heart of Shelby County. All together, they will eat up hundreds of acres of Shelby Farms Park, but no matter, it’s free land.
The new highway lanes aimed at the park:
• five new lanes from Sycamore View
• six or seven new lanes from Whitten Road
• six or seven new lanes from Appling Road
• five new lanes widening Mullins Station Road into the northern perimeter of the park
• two or three new lanes widening Walnut Grove Road
All of these road expansion plans are puzzling in light of the report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group that Memphis is 6th in the U.S. in the number of lanes of highways per capita, contributing to our city’s ranking as the 17th worst city for air pollution from vehicles. Meanwhile, Memphis and Shelby County were cited by the Federal Highway Administration for lack of safe alternative forms of transportation such as bike and pedestrian lanes and light rail.
Speaking of bike lanes, the current Walnut Grove bridge plans do not now call for them. Despite being the western entry point to one of the nation’s largest urban parks and serving as access point to several park trails, the city engineer’s office did not include bicycle lanes as part of his plans. Somehow, cars were worthy of getting 200 feet of new pavement, but bike riders couldn’t even get four. It says volumes about the sensitivity to community needs generally and Shelby Farms users’ needs specifically.
It has been reported that the city engineer’s office will now look at the potential of adding bike lanes, but the office warns that it may be too late to change anything at this point.
Shades of Overton Park.
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This is an interesting look back and an interesting take on the situation. For a blogger who often speaks of segregation by geography, you seem to oppose anything that would make it easier for people to traverse geography to access jobs and amenities. If you’re in any of the northern areas of Memphis and want or need to access the Shelby Farms or East Memphis or southeast Memphis areas, you can’t do it easily. If there’s a traffic accident (or park construction) on one of the narrow two-lane roads in that area, you have very few options to get around.
People often take the path of least resistance in their travels and schedules — especially if income is limiting. If it’s hard to access a place, people won’t go there. This is especially true for lower income folks who often don’t have reliable transportation, don’t have money for fuel or bus fare, and who have limited free time because of their non-standard working hours. Perhaps you’ve never been one of the working poor with only one car and a family to transport, and that your only job opportunities are odd-hour jobs, like 2nd shift, 3rd shift, or the like, where you don’t have time to take a long circuitous route full of other cars and traffic to access things.
Making it more difficult to access jobs and amenities by restricting how people can move around only worsens this de facto segregation by disallowing ways for poor folks to easily and quickly travel to opportunities outside of their own neighborhood. When folks can travel easily, they can go to the places where money is earned, bring it back to their homes and neighborhoods for property and quality of life improvements, and lift their neighborhood out of poverty. Making it harder to get around only further cements these neighborhoods into poverty.
It must be nice to have enough privilege that you can afford to keep a car and buy fuel to drive it many extra miles, or that you can afford the time to navigate the tortuous and discontinuous path to access jobs and amenities, or that you are privileged enough to live close enough to jobs and amenities that difficult travel is but a minor inconvenience to you. However, Memphians most in need of access to jobs and amenities don’t have the luxuries that you enjoy.
George: Our primary point was how if we leave it to engineers, they regularly show no sensitivity to what makes the community livable. This bridge into Shelby Farms Park – like the major highway changes that devastated Raleigh – was overbuilt, never made any sense except as a monument to engineering, paid no attention to bicycle and pedestrian access in a serious way, tried to justify more lanes of traffic through the park, etc. We can’t leave it up to traffic engineers to build our community.
Plus, no accompanying, meaningful plan for public transit.
It’s easy to say that the roads should be narrow and that parks should be hard to get to when sitting on the perch of privilege.
When your skin color is darker, your income is lower, and there’s no privilege in sight, anything that makes it easier to get to jobs or parks is very much needed.
Thanks for the cognitive dissonance and logical disconnect.
George’s comments are perplexing. He seems to be saying that for the sake of families of limited income, we should keep designing the city in such a way that a family is forced to purchase a car in order to traverse the city to arrive at places of employment and leisure, even given that it takes about $10,000/yr for car ownership. If we’re truly concerned about transportation for those of limited means, it seems that rather than road widening, we’d start a vigorous BRT system and favor transit oriented developments.
PS. I also wanted to comment that given how traffic engineers have designed the area around Baptist east and Christian brothers, it is impossible to enjoy what was an attractive area on foot. It’s basically now a highway, with too much traffic for any pedestrian life. Easily a missed opportunity for what could have been a walkable, eastern medical district neighborhood-center with organic connections to Shelby farms, perhaps even with a few condo towers for folks to enjoy views of the park.
The issue is that smaller roads with less room for cars carry an inherent bias is favor of those living close by (thus shutting out those not privileged enough to live nearby) and in favor of those with rich enough to have extra time to wait in the long lines of traffic backups.
Keeping the access points to Shelby Farms small and keeping north-south and east-west travel barriers in place, you’re making it difficult for the poor and brown people to travel to the amenities or to the jobs. When I lived in Orange Mound, I didn’t get to Shelby Farms much because it was so hard to get to and took so long with the traffic. It’s a bit better now, but improving roads east of Humphreys would make it a lot better.
When roads are smaller, fewer cars can be accommodated, and speeds are greatly reduced, which helps only those with the white privilege to live close enough and have the time to wait. AND, this is only the local aspect. What about tourism — travelers and passers through? We have lots of great things in Memphis, but our road network (I-40, especially, as it takes the long detour north of town instead of its original route) is so inconvenient for travelers that we lose out on tourism. When it’s not easy to get to things, people don’t go.
George, I’m not sure your positions can be rationally debated. We’ve done nothing but widen roads the last half century, which has done nothing but favor flight of the middle class and destruction of the city’s original neighborhood. I see no logical connection between widening roads even further around Shelby farms to ease the transportation woes of those in orange mound. You’d actually be amazed what an undersized road with pedestrian activity can do for small, minority business owners and the economic vitality of their shops. Cheers.
George: You’re overlaying your own opinions onto this post. This was about building the right number of lanes and without the massive engineering design that devastated the approach to Shelby Farms. Research also shows no correlation between more lanes of traffic and less congestion. It’s about getting the number of lanes right, but in this country, we allow traffic engineers to overbuild beyond what is required for manageable traffic flows. That was certainly the case in Shelby Farms. There was no logical need for more than two dozen more lanes of traffic, and time has proven that to be the case.
The Shelby Farms plan is built on increasing access, but it’s not about paving the park for congestion that largely occurs two times a day weekdays during rush hours. With the plan that is being implemented now, there will be improved internal access within the park.
As we said,cities should never let traffic engineers define their quality of life. We get car-centric, overbuilt, overengineered highways that in the long term have negative impacts and degrade livability.