And here come the NIMBY's...
https://www.toledoblade.com/local/transportation/2023/07/20/i-475-proposal-addresses-phantom-problems-critics-say-during-meeting/stories/20230720130?utm_source=theblade&utm_medium=newsroom&utm_campaign=storyref"When empty-nesters Allyson Viertlbeck and her husband, Tony, bought a house on Devon Hill Road that backed up to I-475 a little more than two years ago, they knew there would be freeway noise.
But the racket from speeding cars and jake-braking trucks behind the house they thought would be their 'forever home' turned out to be much more than they expected.
'It is super, super loud. It is a racetrack,' Mrs. Viertlbeck said Thursday evening during a meeting organized by opponents of an I-475 widening proposal they say will only make the freeway noisier, rather than correcting safety and congestion problems the Ohio Department of Transportation says exist there.
'What they want to do is just going to make things worse,' said Brett Dupont, who lives on Surrey Road near the freeway’s Talmadge Road ramps. 'It’s not going to help anything with the speed or the noise.'
'I find nothing redeeming in widening I-[4]75 through the neighborhoods. Nothing,' Peggy Daly-Masternak, who lives near the freeway’s Douglas Road interchange and is organizing an I-475 Neighborhoods Coalition, said after hearing several testimonials during the meeting she organized at the Sanger Branch library.
Just over 100 people filled a conference room there.
ODOT hired consultant Mannik & Smith of Toledo late last year for $8 million to do detailed planning for I-475’s roughly four-mile section between U.S. 23 and Douglas Road that has daily traffic counts ranging from 53,550 to 79,404.
Built in the 1960s and significantly repaired in 1994 and 1995, the freeway is due for reconstruction regardless of whether it is expanded. The traffic now using part of it meets a federal standard for adding a third lane in each direction to the two lanes I-475 now has west of Monroe Street to the U.S. 23 junction, Kacey Young, the capital programs administrator at ODOT’s Bowling Green district office, said in December.
But information Ms. Daly-Masternak distributed at the meeting Thursday cast doubt on both the congestion and safety justifications for the project.
Typical delays in the targeted area amount to only about a minute, she repeated at the meeting, and the 295 crashes that ODOT counted there between 2019 and 2021 represent a rate so low that the odds of being in one are comparable to the odds of being dealt a royal flush playing poker.
Widening the freeway, Ms. Daly-Masternak said, will take some homes out of a housing market in crisis in an affordable part of Toledo, worsen noise and air quality, and reduce property values. She suggested that what ODOT should be doing instead is to convert I-475 in that area to a boulevard, as Buffalo, N.Y., already plans to do with two of its expressways rather than widen them.
Jan Meyer, who lives on Woodmont Road near a part of I-475 between Douglas and the I-75 'Jeep Split' that was widened about a decade ago, said her experience has been just as Ms. Daly-Masternak warned will happen farther west.
'The noise went up and the speeds went up after it went from four lanes to six,' she said.
And several audience members theorized that speed is a cause of many of I-475’s crashes, so making it easier for traffic to go faster will not help.
Ms. Daly-Masternak called on audience members to help her with neighborhood-level organizing, fund-raising, and brainstorming ways to resist the ODOT proposal, such as a possible letter-writing campaign to city leaders.
Kelsie Hoagland, a spokesman at ODOT’s district office, said earlier Thursday the department expects to receive a preliminary draft of Mannik & Smith’s report during the spring of 2024.
No construction money has been allocated for the project, which has a ballpark cost estimate of $186 million, Ms. Hoagland said.
She said that in 2020, ODOT estimated the cost of rebuilding the highway as it is at $154 million, while milling and resurfacing would cost $136 million.
Several Toledo City Council members attended but ODOT did not send anyone to the meeting Thursday evening because 'we were not formally made aware of it,' Ms. Hoagland said.
ODOT currently is widening I-475 from four lanes to six between the Ohio Turnpike and U.S. 24. So far no consideration has been made public about widening the other remaining four-lane section between U.S. 24 and the I-75 junction in Perrysburg, which would require major bridge work at the Maumee River."
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Topic: I-475 expansion leaving Toledo neighbors worried about their homes (Read 3080 times)