Highway to Highway Comments due Friday, October 30, 2009

October 30, 2009 is today. How many of you have been to one of the meetings that shows all the options? The ADN had a front page story with rough maps of their seven options today, but what do we actually know?

Rep. Les Gara wrote at Alaska Dispatch a week ago:

Lots of you are justifiably scared that state, city and private traffic planners have, well, gone loopy on us. It's time for some straight talk about threats you've heard that traffic experts would actually build a new highway through Anchorage's densest neighborhoods, and maybe even through your kitchen.

Here's the skinny. These folks aren't necessarily nuts. They're just messing with you. The National Environmental Policy Act probably requires them to pretend they are considering completely insane highway route alternatives through Anchorage that, from the mail I'm receiving, have scared the bejesus out of many of you. What they haven't told you is that most of their proposed route alternatives have almost no chance of moving forward.

I've been out of town for the last three weeks so I've only seen what it says on the website. But I'd like to add a couple more options:

Option 8: Just forget the link and use the money to improve other forms of transportation to make walking, biking, and taking the bus more feasible for commuters.

and

Option 9: This is going too fast. I haven't had time to get to one of the meetings and the website isn't clear. Push this back a couple of months and let more people get involved.

The goal, to alleviate Anchorage traffic by allowing vehicles to bypass surface streets in town, sounds reasonable. But if it means a freeway cutting through established neighborhoods or large urban parks like Russian Jack, it may not be worth it. We need to have some creative thinking that establishes a solution that works fifty years from now, not something that maybe made sense fifty years ago when no one ever heard of global climate change and gas was 25 cents a gallon.


But today is the deadline. So you if you don't know what the implications are, you could cut and paste Option 9 into an email to let them know there are people out there who haven't been to the meetings but still are concerned. Here's the address:

contact@highway2highway website.

Here's their website

Here's the Anchorage Citizens Coalition site which offers alternative ideas. But you have to send in your comments today.