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Dear Editor:
Now that the carnage is underway and more buildings are bulldozed everyday, it’s a good time to take stock of where we stand on the Pleasant Street bypass and ask ourselves if the gains are worth the price.
The monetary price is upwards of $100 million and sure to rise, but what about the other costs? How do you measure the impact of losing dozens of affordable homes in the middle of an affordable home crisis? How do you measure the social costs of plowing a 100-foot-wide swath through the middle of your city and covering it with asphalt? How do you measure the costs of displacing a longtime business whose parking lot happened to be in the right-of-way (in addition to the real economic costs of buying its cooperation by helping finance a new location)?
The last administration offered assurances that the bypass (or reliever, or extension, or other word du jour) would be a city street, not a suburban road, but the clear cutting going on now seems to indicate otherwise. This will be nothing more than a thoroughfare for drivers to get across town quickly without stopping or slowing down much, right through the middle of our city. That is, a way for out of towners to avoid Noblesville, paid for by the taxpayers of Noblesville.
In the future when city leaders are asking themselves why we thought this was a good idea, they’ll shrug and figure we were working from the best data and knowledge we had at the time, but that’s not true. For years, concerned citizens have been offering suggestions on how this plan could be better, could avoid peoples’ homes, could avoid displacing businesses and open new areas for development, but the city hasn’t listened, despite holding countless “listening sessions.” Thirty years on, we are building a road on pretty much the same route envisioned when the city first started talking about it. What’s that tell you? It tells me that the “listening sessions” were just perfunctory, a waste of citizens’ time. Despite all the suggestions, we are getting a dreaded “stroad,” the street/road hybrid that’s been discredited as an economic driver and city asset. Cities all over the nation are reclaiming neighborhoods that succumbed to ill-considered highways at the same time we’re building one and plowing through a neighborhood to do it!
The only significant change in this plan since its inception avoided a historic district that the city was forced into if it wanted to continue to receive road funding in the future. Fortunately, higher government entities recognize the value of historic neighborhoods and the power of the purse in persuading local politicians to tame their ambitions. It was the right thing to do but Noblesville had to be dragged kicking and screaming into submission.
The goal? Reducing traffic on State Road 32 by 24 percent will be considered success. Is it worth the price? Everyone has to make up their own mind on that. You can do a lot of good with $100 million, or you can just waste it on a road like the Pleasant Street Extension.
Mike Corbett
Noblesville