NIMBYS!!!!!!!!!

[Mergingtraffic]

ALSO, why can't NIMBYs see that by blocking expressway projects they are ruining their local towns by forcing through traffic onto local 2-way roads, not intended for a lot of traffic.

This impacts them by not being able to turn out of side-streets, parking lots b/c of high volume of traffic on the main road.  If there is an accident on the main road, all the through traffic takes back roads, clogging up the charming quaint town.

I think there is a stereotype that by building highways, you will get neighborhoods like I-95 in New Haven, CT or I-95 in Providence etc.  Places where there is no town charm by the highway b/c of strip malls, development etc.

However, I think bypass expressways are the way to recapture town charm.  In Brookfield, CT, the US-7 Expressway was extended around Brookfield, so locals could recapture their downtown.  There are now plans to redo their main street into a little village.  Without the expressway bypass, they wouldn't be able to do that.  Brookfield got it right.  There is a buffer zone to prevent sprawl and not many exits.

Drive down US-7 to Ridgefield and you have the first example I wrote about b/c they are against a bypass.
These people have the old idea of expressways, when they tore through a town and tore it up and also when urban sprawl resulted.


We need to change people's stereotype about highway building.

[roadfro]

ALSO, why can't NIMBYs see that by blocking expressway projects they are ruining their local towns by forcing through traffic onto local 2-way roads, not intended for a lot of traffic.

Those that oppose highway construction/widening often take the view that building/widening a highway creates increased capacity that invites more traffic into the area.  A viewpoint that may be true, but one also has to weigh the increased capacity against the strain on the existing roadway system...how much will traffic increase on the existing network without such an improvement? This is a question that is not always considered by the NIMBYs.

[Scott5114]

ALSO, why can't NIMBYs see that by blocking expressway projects they are ruining their local towns by forcing through traffic onto local 2-way roads, not intended for a lot of traffic.

Those that oppose highway construction/widening often take the view that building/widening a highway creates increased capacity that invites more traffic into the area.

What percentage of NIMBYs have gotten their appropriate reproductive parts surgically disabled? That's the biggest invitation of more traffic to the area...

[agentsteel53]

What percentage of NIMBYs have gotten their appropriate reproductive parts surgically disabled? That's the biggest invitation of more traffic to the area...

in the interest of fairness, I must note that yuppies tend to reproduce less than various other demographics.

[Bickendan]

lol

Oregon NIMBYs:
Mt Hood Freeway (I-80N, US 26)
Harbor Drive (US 99W -- freeway demolished*)
95th Ave (I-205 -- built with concessions**)
Laurelhurst Freeway/52nd Ave (I-205)
Thurman St (I-505)
Westside Bypass (I-'205')
Salem Parkway (I-305 -- built as the parkway, Bus OR 99E)
Roosevelt Freeway (OR 126?)
West Eugene Parkway (OR 126)
Genessee St alignment (I-5, Medford)
Foothill alignment (I-5, Medford)
West Medford alignment (I-5)
Eastbank Freeway (I-5, US 30***)
Newberg-Dundee Bypass (OR 18****)
Woodburn-Dundee Cutoff (OR 219?*****)
Columbia River Crossing (I-5, Yellow Line MAX)

*To be fair, Harbor Dr was redundant with the I-5 Eastbank Freeway and Marquam Bridge.
**The joke of exit 19 Division/Powell, specifically.
***Hey, let's rip out I-5 on the eastbank to restore access to the eastbank of the Willamette. Uh, there never was public access to the river there. Before the freeway was there, it was a railyard. Before that, riverfront industrial facilities. Before that, there was no East Portland.
****There is a danger that the OR 18 tollway won't be built, leaving OR 99W choked with cars in Dundee.
*****Private developers want to build a toll cutoff from Woodburn to Dundee, at their own cost. They're going to each landholder and asking their price to sell. NIMBYs got wind. There is also a state law saying that 'prime' farmland has to be a minimum of 80 acre parcels and this tollway would cut some parcels into two 40 acre segments...

Also:
North-South MAX. It's getting built anyway, what with Clark County warming up to it and it being part of the Columbia River Crossing, and the Milwaukie portion being built separately in a few years. 'No' means 'yes', I guess... Don't get me wrong; I like Portland's light rail system and will gladly vote for extensions, but I don't like it at the cost of the road infrastructure system.

[flowmotion]

I live in an area of extreme NIMBYism and it is ridiculous. Local businesses have to beg on bended knee to expand or alter their facilities. Lamps in the neighborhood park were ripped out and replaced not because there was anything wrong with them, but because "they didn't consult with the neighborhood". A bike path was classically referred to as "the bike freeway".

But on the other hand, I realize these public input requirements were only put in place after politicians and their "experts" rammed through numerous ill-conceived and destructive projects in every corner of this country. At its core, NIMBYism is simply local democracy at work. Its enablers are your friendly neighborhood politicians doing everything they can to get re-elected.

Furthermore, "road geeks" have trouble admitting that not every road is necessarily a public good, part of sound transportation policy. Numerous highways in this country are built with the only purpose of enriching a handful of well-connected land speculators and contractors. Areas of the country which have no population growth for the last 20 years still manage to sink public largess into unneeded freeways. States can't afford to fill potholes, but still manage to budget new ring roads. In growing areas, people are sick of seeing their own home values and infrastructure devalued just so some SUV-driving fatty can have a brand new sub-prime shack & adjacent McDonalds.

But, people have no way of expressing their frustration with overall policy, so whenever something is proposed in their backyards, their immediate reaction is "enough is enough!". Personally I think if this country actually had sound land-use and infrastructure planning, much of the NIMBY opposition would simply dissipate. The fundamental issue is the lack of trust.

[golden eagle]

Honestly, as bad as NIMBY-ism can be, you have to look at why it exists.  A lot of it is rather irrational, such as fighting things like bike paths and sidewalks.  Other times it can be downright racist, where folks oppose public transit extensions because it "might let black people move in."  People fight transit and denser development because they think there's something inherently bad about it, and that only "bad people" prefer to live that way.

That's one of the reasons why Metro Atlanta public transportation sucks. When MARTA was started back in the day, no other counties other than Fulton and DeKalb wanted to fund it; however, many residents from the neighboring counties (Clayton, Gwinnett, Cobb, Douglas, etc.) use MARTA. Recently, C-Tran (Clayton County Transit) was dissolved because the county commissioners couldn't allocate funds to fund the transit system for its citizens, many of whom used C-Tran and MARTA.


Be well,

Bryant

I remember being told that the main reason Gwinnett countians didn't want MARTA to come out there was race. While they do have their own service now, look how long it took for that to happen. Gwinnett, at one point, was the largest jurisdiction in the U.S. without mass transit.

One project that might've been killed because of NIMBYism was the Northern Arc, which would've cut through the northern metro Atlanta area. Though where I lived wasn't in the path, I felt like it would've added too much traffic to an already-clogged freeway system. Environmentalists, though, may've played more of a hand in killing the arc. It maybe the main reason why Roy Barnes was defeated in the governor's race some years back since he was a huge proponent of the arc.   

[SSOWorld]

JJ that could be true.
In CT, the DOT wanted to 4-lane CT-66 with a median jersey barrier.  CT-66 was widened but without the median jersey barrier because NIMBYs, who didn't want the project anyway, thought the widening was too large.  There are no stores here, just woods and a reservoir.  It was also finished ahead of schedule.

Now, the widened portion of CT-66 is at the end I-691, so even though the speed limit drops to 40mph, people are still going a lot faster.  Actually, I think the road is dangerous because there is no jersey barrier.  There are some curves and the chances for a head on collision are ripe.  Plus traffic going at highway speeds.

What I think happened, is that the NIMBYs saw the plans and got nervous, so they were against the jersey barrier.  So, the DOT caved in and there you go.

I mean, really...in the end, would the jersey barrier make that big a difference on the local community?  No, I notice NIMBYs look at certain things and raise a big stink over it, and now the motoring public has to deal with issues because the project was scaled back in someway. (In this case, no median jersey barrier)

Soon, there is going to be a fatality because of no median barrier and people will say "put in the barrier"

Ask the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission

[hm insulators]

I-710 from Pasadena to Alhambra--the city of South Pasadena has successfully fought off that freeway for 50 years!

[CL]

People in Utah tend to be more accepting of freeway construction and see the benefits of it, but there have been a few cases of NIMBYism.

The first case that comes to mind is Legacy Parkway. It's not like it was going through anyone's backyard, but environmentalists (as well as the mayor of Salt Lake City, which Legacy does not pass through) protested it was going through wetland. That's debatable... but as a result, a six-lane freeway was watered down to a four-lane "parkway" (still technically a freeway) without a direct connection to I-15 at its southern terminus. Trucks can't go on it and billboards aren't allowed (which I'm all for) but the speed limit is a frustrating 55 mph.

Another case is the southeastern section of I-215. From the late '60s to the late '80s, the freeway had a huge gap between State Street in Murray and 4500 South in Holladay (map). UDOT wanted to construct its present route to complete the Belt Route but NIMBYs blocked the construction of the road. It wasn't until 1988 the last link was opened.

[The Premier]

Here's one: I-490 in Cleveland. It originally was supposed to go to I-271, but it ended at I-77.

[SignBridge]

I-95 is finally going to be completed in New Jersey in the form of a second bridge span over the Delaware River combined with expansion of the N.J. and Penna. Turnpikes and a new interchange (where there isn't one now) between the existing I-95 and the Penna. Tpk. All of this is long overdue.

Also let me add a Long Island horror story. On the infamous Long Island Expwy. there are parallel service roads in each direction. But they were not continuous in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. In the 1990's the state proposed an ambitious plan to make the service roads continuous which would have improved the total flow of traffic. But, in the somewhat affluent Syosset community this would have meant building extensive collector-distributor roads thru the area for the interchange with Route-135 (Exit-44).

I thought it was a good plan, but the NIMBY's formed an ad-hoc coalition based at the Syosset Public Library on the corner of S.Oyster Bay Road (Exit-43) and the North Service Rd. and put enough pressure on the area politicians to stop the project. So instead, the state added an extra lane in each direction on the Expressway itself thru that area which the service roads merge into and split off again a few miles down the road. Today this is the only section of the L.I.E. that does not have continuous service roads. And so it goes...............