I-475 expansion leaving Toledo neighbors worried about their homes

Started by TempoNick, June 04, 2023, 12:26:08 PM

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cbeach40

Quote from: sprjus4 on June 06, 2023, 01:09:14 AM
I never meant no shoulder… I was saying, convert the existing shoulder into a travel lane, and then construct a new full depth paved shoulder in the existing grassy area between the pavement and the sound wall.

No new right of way acquisition, fits within the existing footprint, and would provide three 12 foot travel lanes and a full 10 foot paved right shoulder. I never suggested providing zero right shoulder, or even a reduced one.

Edit: It appears there may only be room for a 7 or 8 foot shoulder, but that’s still reasonable in that small segment. The sound wall could be pushed out a slight amount and Imperial St narrowed slightly, if full consistency was truly desired. Either way, I’m not seeing a need for a total take of any property.

Where does the water go when a new, larger highway surface needs to drain? How do you deal with the loss of that slope on the approach to the underpasses? Plus you're going to have to replace the sound barrier itself with a system that has a high performance barrier. And there's no room to do any of this on the south side: https://goo.gl/maps/bQRUyAgDugNKqVoP9

Honestly, acquiring the adjacent properties is probably the cheaper solution. And far and away the practical one from any engineering standpoint.


Edit: plus how on earth do you stage that construction? Based on the quoted volumes in this thread, there's no way you can single lane it. So more and more trying to wedge a lane into the existing platform becomes a physical impossibility.
and waterrrrrrr!


sprjus4

^ I was talking about specifically in the original section mentioned near Imperial St, not for the entire highway.

How is drainage managed in the area you linked?

cbeach40

Quote from: sprjus4 on June 07, 2023, 11:51:04 AM
^ I was talking about specifically in the original section mentioned near Imperial St, not for the entire highway.

How is drainage managed in the area you linked?

The area around Imperial is where that physical barriers to such a design are most pronounced.

I appears as though there is small capacity median drainage but primarily there is drainage pass-through to ditching behind the sound barrier.
and waterrrrrrr!

JREwing78

Quote from: cbeach40 on June 07, 2023, 10:39:22 AM
Quote from: sprjus4 on June 06, 2023, 01:09:14 AM
I never meant no shoulder... I was saying, convert the existing shoulder into a travel lane, and then construct a new full depth paved shoulder in the existing grassy area between the pavement and the sound wall.

No new right of way acquisition, fits within the existing footprint, and would provide three 12 foot travel lanes and a full 10 foot paved right shoulder. I never suggested providing zero right shoulder, or even a reduced one.

Edit: It appears there may only be room for a 7 or 8 foot shoulder, but that's still reasonable in that small segment. The sound wall could be pushed out a slight amount and Imperial St narrowed slightly, if full consistency was truly desired. Either way, I'm not seeing a need for a total take of any property.

Where does the water go when a new, larger highway surface needs to drain? How do you deal with the loss of that slope on the approach to the underpasses? Plus you're going to have to replace the sound barrier itself with a system that has a high performance barrier. And there's no room to do any of this on the south side: https://goo.gl/maps/bQRUyAgDugNKqVoP9

Sure there is. They need to relocate the sound barrier south right up against the property line. They need to replace the above-ground drainage with properly-sized storm sewers in the median and along the ROW on each side of the roadway. I can't see how that would be worse than taking out massive chunks of neighborhood on either (or both) sides of I-475.

I would have done none of those things if full ROW allowed me to maintain above-ground drainage ditches, but in a heavily urban area that's not practical. Neither is taking out a massive number of properties (and their associated property tax base) because the civil engineers can't figure out how to put drainage underground.

cbeach40

Quote from: JREwing78 on June 10, 2023, 11:54:12 PM

Sure there is. They need to relocate the sound barrier south right up against the property line. They need to replace the above-ground drainage with properly-sized storm sewers in the median and along the ROW on each side of the roadway. I can't see how that would be worse than taking out massive chunks of neighborhood on either (or both) sides of I-475.

I would have done none of those things if full ROW allowed me to maintain above-ground drainage ditches, but in a heavily urban area that's not practical. Neither is taking out a massive number of properties (and their associated property tax base) because the civil engineers can't figure out how to put drainage underground.

Constructing what you propose would be far more expensive than buying out those properties, and the legacy cost to maintain that infrastructure would far exceed any tax base they would provide. Though there may be political motivation to do so of course, we shall see.

At least that solution is practical and constructible. Retrofitting the existing shoulder as the earlier post suggested is nigh on physically impossible to stage and construct, and would leave you with an awful design to deal with going forward.
and waterrrrrrr!

thenetwork

When I was going to college at UT and living in that area off of I-475 & Monroe nearly 40 years ago, the stretch in question was a fairly free-flowing freeway almost 24/7.  And around that time, I-475 was 2x2 all the way from Monroe Street most of the way down the US-23 duplex to I-75 in Perrysburg.

As far as urban growth, once you went west of McCord Road (the first paralleling artery west of I-475/US-23) you quickly went from residential to country. 

That has long since changed since the 80s and I-475 between US-23 and I-75 is the only real freeway connection to downtown and points east from this area.  And as a result, I-475/US-23 has added a lane in each direction, added a Dorr Street interchange and reconfigured both the SR-2/Airport Highway and US-20/Central Avenue interchanges to adapt to the larger area population.   The east-west section of I-475 is currently the small neck of a horizontal hourglass that needs to be enlarged.




countysigns

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."

The Ghostbuster

Ohio's DOT should just ignore the NIMBYs and widen all remaining four lane segments to six lanes. I understand their concerns, but sometimes a road just needs to be expanded, and Interstate 475 definitely needs expansion.

sprjus4

Quote from: countysigns on July 28, 2023, 09:02:04 PM
She said that in 2020, ODOT estimated [...] milling and resurfacing would cost $136 million.
What type of material are they using to resurface the highway?!?

JREwing78

Quote from: sprjus4 on July 28, 2023, 10:45:00 PM
Quote from: countysigns on July 28, 2023, 09:02:04 PM
She said that in 2020, ODOT estimated [...] milling and resurfacing would cost $136 million.
What type of material are they using to resurface the highway?!?

Good question. The math isn't mathing; no way a ground-up rebuild comes in only $20 million higher that a resurface.



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