Business owners and concerned citizens gathered Tuesday night at Franklin City Hall to learn more about plans to widen Columbia Avenue. It was the second public meeting devoted to the topic.
A number of displays provided visitors with information and illustrations of the three plans drawn up by a design team at Barge, Waggoner, Sumner and Cannon. Members of the design team stood nearby to answer questions from the public, and a presentation was given by BWSC and city staff to further explain the options for the road widening. Attendees were encouraged to leave comments on comment cards or on the city website.
BWSC Transportation Director Daniel Spann went through each of the three concepts his team drew up, discussing their strengths and weaknesses as he went along.
The first design he talked about calls for widening Columbia Avenue to a five-lane road.
“This would be a traditional five lane road that we see all over the place in wide use,” Spann said. The three existing lanes on Columbia Avenue would be augmented by two additional through lanes, one in each direction.
The team projected that such a design would improve travel times on Columbia Avenue, but that it would not do much to improve congestion on side streets, driveways and access points along the route. In fact, Spann said, this design might actually make those things worse. This design would also likely result in two higher speed lanes, which could increase crash rates.
The second design was for a four-lane road with a median. This design would cause all entrances onto Columbia Avenue from side roads or driveways at points other than signalized intersections to be right turn only.
“We saw much better operations from one end to the other” with this plan, Spann said. “Much better speeds and travel times.”
This design also improved projected travel times from side roads and other access points, since people would no longer have to wait to make a left turn onto Columbia Avenue. They would simply make a right turn and then go make a U-turn at the next traffic signal.
This design was also deemed likely to result in fewer car crashes than the five-lane concept.
On the negative side, however, this plan would be wider than the five lane plan, aggravating right-of-way concerns. The role U-turns would play in this plan could also present problems to large trucks and commercial vehicles.
The final plan calls for a series of roundabouts to be built at certain intersections along Columbia Avenue. This plan would have two lanes traveling in either direction with a smaller median than was proposed for the four lane plan. Like with the four-lane plan, right turn only entrances and exits would be provided between intersections.
This proposal would have a little more impact at intersections, but a little less impact on businesses between intersections. “With this plan we could leave driveways where they are…with exception of right at the intersection,” Spann explained.
The design team found that this plan would have a positive impact on travel times on Columbia Avenue as well as on side roads. The team also projected that this proposal would significantly reduce the crash rate on Columbia Avenue. Another potential positive is that large trucks would have an easier time turning around at a roundabout than at a traffic signal.
Some local business owners expressed serious concerns about the plan, however.
Although the presentation was not intended to be a public forum, Ames Krebs, owner of the Franklin Kubota tractor store, took the floor after Spann’s talk and voiced his dismay at the proposals.
“I remain truculently in the position of no changes to Columbia Avenue until Mack Hatcher is complete,” Krebs said.
He later described how he feared the project would affect his livelihood. “We’ll be hugely impacted both after the project is complete and during construction,” he said, adding that he feared such a project could “put people like us out of business.”
Jonathan Marston, Franklin’s assistant director of engineering, had anticipated this line of argument at the beginning of the meeting when he said the number one question he got asked about the Columbia Avenue project was, “Why can’t you just divert this money to Mack Hatcher?”
Although a plan to expand Mack Hatcher into a circle encompassing the western half of the city is on TDOT’s list of projects, Marston said that the city could not simply take the $22 million it had coming for the Columbia Avenue project and put it elsewhere.
“Funding doesn’t work that way,” he said.
If the city did not accept the funding for the Columbia Avenue project, it could simply go to another city, as Marston explained.
“If we were gonna give this money back it doesn’t necessarily go to Mack Hatcher,” Marston said. “More likely than not it goes to another project in our region.”
Another business owner who had a problem with the plans was Jamie Crutcher, whose family business, Crutcher’s Auto Repair, is located at the intersection of Columbia Avenue and Century Court.
“There’s a roundabout in my office,” is how he described his reason for attending the meeting. Since his business is located at an intersection, a roundabout would impinge on his company’s space.
Like Krebs, Crutcher wondered why more attention wasn’t being focused on the expansion of Mack Hatcher Parkway.
“They’ve been talking about it since I finished high school, and it’s never happened,” he said.
Although he appreciated the city’s position as far as funding for the project is concerned, Crutcher is more concerned with the livelihoods of business owners who he believes will be adversely impacted by the road project.
“I think spending [money] just because you have it on doing the wrong thing is the wrong decision,” he said.
Not everyone was so sour on the proposed plans.
Darrin Buswell is the manager at Harpeth True Value, at the intersection of Columbia Avenue and Downs Boulevard.
He has lived in some different parts of the country where roundabouts are a little more common and has been impressed by how well they work.
Buswell understands the apprehension on the part of some business owners on Columbia Avenue about the road widening, but thinks that it is important to consider how the current state of affairs might be negatively affecting local business as well.
“It’s going to impact our business but what also impacts our business is that people can’t turn in and out of our driveway because of traffic as it is,” Buswell said, adding that he thinks many people avoid the area altogether due to the current congestion.
He also raised safety concerns as a reason he is in favor of the roundabout project.
“It will cut down on major accidents because people won’t be trying to turn left across several lanes of traffic,” he said.
The design team intends to take all of the feedback from Tuesday night’s meeting and use it to narrow their ideas down to one plan, which will be presented at a third public involvement meeting in the spring.
“We’ll either head down the road on one of these concepts, some hybrid of one of these concepts, or we might go back to the drawing board completely,” as Spann put it.
The project is currently in its first of four major phases, Spann explained. If everything goes according to plan, construction would eventually take 500 days to complete and be finished at the beginning of 2023.
As previously reported in the Franklin Home Page, here is a timeline of the Columbia Avenue road widening project from 2006 until the hiring of BWSC:
Sept. 26, 2006 – The board approved a professional service agreement with Fischbach Transportation Group, Inc. in the amount of $21,500 for the Columbia Ave Transportation Planning Report.
Jan. 23, 2008 – A public meeting was held with citizens and affected property owners.
Nov. 17, 2010 – The Transportation Planning Report for Columbia Avenue (SR-6/US31), from Mack Hatcher Parkway to Downs Boulevard, was approved by TDOT.
Dec. 11, 2013 – The Executive Board of the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization adopted the fiscal year 2014-2017 Transportation Improvement Program funding the environmental and design phase associated with this project in the amount of $2 million (80 percent federal and 20 percent local).
March 13, 2014 – Franklin aldermen approved Resolution 2014-13, adopting the funding plan for the fiscal year 2014-2018 capital investment place, which includes $821,500 for professional design services for the Columbia Avenue Widening Project.
June 4, 2014 – The city received a letter from Paul Degges, TDOT deputy commissioner and chief engineer, committing the state to participate in covering the required 20 percent match associated with the cost of this project.
Sept. 9, 2014 – Franklin aldermen approved Resolution 2014-63, which authorized the mayor and city staff to submit the project initiation form and checklist.
June 7, 2015 – Public notice regarding a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) and Letters of Interests (LOI) for design services was advertised in The Tennessean.
July 8, 2015 – City received letters of interest and statements of qualifications from 16 engineering design consultants.
July 14, 2015 – Franklin aldermen approved Local Agency Project Agreement with TDOT to begin the Columbia Avenue Widening Project.
Sept. 14-15, 2015 – City staff interviewed top five scoring design firms.
Oct. 13, 2015 – BOMA approved Resolution 2015-82, authorizing staff to enter contract negotiations with Barge, Waggoner, Sumner and Cannon, the highest scoring firm from the consultant interviews.
