Mobility is Region?s Albatross (Jeffrey Wood Publisher’s Note)

Arkansas has fought the Dogpatch stereotype, but maybe it’s time to kick our shoes back off. We can break out the “Triple-X” jugs and all pile around in the shade like a pack of bloated redbone hounds. After all, we Arkies had us a good run.

We got us a President. We overtook the Fortune 1 (Wal-Mart Stores Inc.) and for a year held the Milken Institute’s top spot (Fayetteville’s MSA). Downtown Little Rock has transformed into a commercial showplace, and we’ve even created a state budget surplus.

So we done good, folks. Let’s “set a spell” and be grateful.

The “Dogpatch mentality,” coupled with some anti-business sentiment, is the only thing that can explain recent efforts by those who would have Northwest Arkansas ignore its western corridor.

The “Western Beltway,” identified in 2006 by the region’s 2030 Plan, could be a major north-south artery leaving the Bella Vista Bypass near its interchange with Arkansas Highway 72 and reconnecting with Interstate 540 between Fayetteville and West Fork. It would run just east or west of the regional airport at Highfill.

The 2008 Federal Transportation Appropriation Bill included a $604,729 earmark for a preliminary Western Beltway study. It requires a $151,183 match, which the state has declined to help with since it’s not already listed in the 2009-2013 State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP).

So Northwest Arkansas is left to cough up the match to study one potential angioplasty for our clogging transportation arteries. Never mind the economic turbine that Benton and Washington counties are for the state.

As only one example, the average daily traffic count just north of the Arkansas Highway 264 interchange in Lowell (the center of the region) in 1991 was 19,450. According to regional planning, that count was 66,000 in 2007. Projections for 2024 are that it will be 110,000, or nearly double what it is now. Additional planned lanes on I-540 won’t solve the whole problem.

Fayetteville’s Art Hobson, who in early August described the potential beltway project as “a bypass to bypass a bypass,” is a retired physics professor and a local contributing columnist — a contributor to a contributing newspaper, if you will, since his Northwest Arkansas Times locally supplements the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Hobson makes some good points related to energy and mass transit. If the region is to truly maximize its “Green Valley” synergies, then some mass transit components must be developed. But he gets it dead wrong that any road is a done deal just because it’s studied.

I submit the debacle that is Springdale’s U.S. Highway 412 bypass, which for three decades has quagmired its way to requiring an estimated $80 million in right of way acquisition and $420 million in construction. This particular one will get done, but not before my 1-year-old graduates college.

(The current STIP has about $27 million in federal and state funding earmarked to start the project.)

Rogers Mayor Steve Womack sums up the Springdale Bypass best:

“To be sitting here today no further along on a bypass around Springdale is a failure on the part of the leadership of anyone connected to the planning of area mobility improvements for the last 25 to 30 years,” Womack said.

Only a feasibility study – considering environmental, social and economic factors – can determine whether or not a Western Beltway is viable. Do nothing to even study it, and you can triple the estimated $400 million it will cost by the time it’s near obsolete, a la, the Springdale Bypass.

It is irresponsible to not explore all alternative means to moving traffic. Regional mobility is the long pole in the tent for future opportunities.

Hobson’s assertion that the “Waltons, Tysons and Hunts” intend to ramrod the project through approval is sophomoric, and furthermore his cannon of writings only exacerbate the collaborative divide between business and conservation. Fayetteville has been the biggest beneficiary of the region’s entrepreneurial success via the philanthropy that’s made, among other things, its library, numerous stadiums and culture and arts center possible.

Fayetteville would do well to remember that every once in awhile.

Many sessions were held for public input in 2006, including a couple in which the public ranked a Western Beltway as their second biggest priority. (A light rail system was No. 1, and Hobson is right that we should also be pursing more study for this despite its billion dollar price tag and substantial cultural impediments.)

Interstate 49, which will be a major North American corridor hooking Texas up by Fort Smith to Kansas City, is already planned. Evaluating a Western Beltway that’s merged into that project seems like a no-brainer.

Considering any scenario though requires getting past Dogpatch.