Anchorage Daily News

A new vision for how people and cars should co-exist on the north end of Spenard Road is dividing a neighborhood.

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Three traffic lanes for the most part, instead of four. Big, wide sidewalks. A bike lane. Bus pullouts. Little plots of shared, off-street parking. A median splitting the four lanes of Spenard between Benson and Northern Lights boulevards.

City traffic planners and enthusiastic community council leaders say changes like that would make the half-mile of Spenard that runs from Benson past Blaine’s Art Supply and La Mex and Chilkoot’s and the Sunrise Bakery a lot safer for both drivers and pedestrians. A six-year state study found 587 accidents occurred along that stretch — rear enders, T-bone collisions catching a driver turning left from an inside lane, bike and pedestrian crashes and others.

But the city’s proposed fix really torques some of the small business owners in the most eclectic corner of one of Anchorage’s most eclectic neighborhoods.

“We’re very much in favor of safety, beautification, better lighting, better accessibility,” said Baxter Gamble, who owns a printing shop at the corner of Spenard and Fireweed Lane.

Problem is, Gamble, Sunrise Bakery manager Larry Brandt and several other business owners say they’re afraid the city’s road improvement project could put them out of business, or at least do serious damage. “Just about every small business in America is hurting right now,” said Trina Johnson, whose parents opened La Mex at 2550 Spenard in 1971. “This might be the breaking line.”

That thought worries Blaine’s owner Rene Haag too. Spenard would stay four lanes in front of her store, but the city plans to build a median between the north and southbound lanes. Northern Lights already is one way on the other side.

“When you’re a business that all of a sudden is on two one-ways, it tends to drop business down substantially,” she said.

Many longtime Spenard merchants say they don’t understand where the push to change the road is coming from.

“We don’t need it and we don’t want it,” said Lottie Michael, who owns a building that houses three small businesses.

THE ARCTIC DISASTER

Memories of a torturous, two-year construction project just a few blocks east on Arctic Boulevard are still fresh. Even city planners, who point out that the Arctic project was managed by the state, concede that one was a disaster:

• Construction crews tore up the entire stretch between Fireweed and Benson at the same time.

• Completion targets came and went. The work dragged on.

• When the road did re-open, a confusing transition zone between the new three-lane configuration and four lanes left drivers guessing where they were supposed to go.

Anchorage took over the proposed Spenard Road changes in 2003, and city traffic engineer Bob Kniefel and project manager John Smith insist things would be different this time.

The Spenard project will be built in smaller sections, minimizing construction closures, they said. The new roadway will be better marked, and — unlike Arctic — finished before winter, giving drivers time to master it before snow covers up lane stripes. The city’s contract would award incentives for finishing on time and penalties for failing to, avoiding long delays that caused construction on Arctic to drag out two years. Not everyone is convinced.

“They said 90 days, they could get this whole section done,” Johnson said of the part of the job in front of her restaurant.

“I don’t believe it.”

The city’s project would take away pull-in parking in front of La Mex that Johnson’s customers have used for years, but it would add some parallel on-street parking slots. Not a good trade-off, Johnson said, especially because it would move her handicap parking spaces onto the street, where people would be exiting their cars next to a traffic lane.

Down the street at the bakery, Brandt is worried about losing access to a city-owned right of way he uses to stage his delivery trucks. “We’re in this bakery seven days a week, and we have delivery trucks running six days a week,” he said.

ARDENT BACKERS

The notion of a three-lane Spenard Road has champions too, and they’re just as passionate as the proposal’s foes.

Across the street from Blaine’s, REI manager Mike Herzog says the pedestrian friendly, bike friendly atmosphere the new Spenard would encourage is just the sort of location the outdoors store looks for. People come from all over Anchorage to shop at REI, Blaine’s, take in flicks and suds at the Bear Tooth cinema pub and hit the other shops in the neighborhood, Herzog said.

“That really makes a compelling destination for folks rather than just some kind of generic big mall someplace. The thing that was missing … was a roadway that is conducive to retail.

“Study after study shows that if you can slow down traffic speed, increase pedestrian safety, make it more viable for people to park one place and walk all over — if you can increase that kind of activity that’s good for all retail businesses in an area.”

Matt Johnson is president of the North Star Community Council, which borders this stretch of Spenard Road. He grew up in the neighborhood and said he remembers when Fireweed Lane was a gravel road. He argues that the ardently opposed small business owners are outnumbered by neighborhood residents and other merchants who want a safer Spenard.

“They say the changes will hurt their businesses,” Johnson said. “Yet when I look at improved roads, modern roads across Anchorage, I see nothing but signs of vitality.”

Kniefel, the city traffic engineer, says study after study shows that accidents go down when four-lane roads are changed to a three-lane configuration — one lane of traffic in each direction with a center turn lane.

Accidents on Arctic are down about 40 percent since the reconstruction there, he and Smith said, although Gamble, Trina Johnson, Chilkoot’s owner Mike Gordon and others argue that’s likely because fewer people are driving Arctic these days.

Converting Spenard to three lanes will make the road safer for drivers and pedestrians alike, Matt Johnson and other supporters say.

The turn lane will eliminate sudden stops in the inside lanes by drivers wanting to turn left. It also will eliminate collisions that result when well-intentioned drivers in the northbound lane, for example, yield to someone entering from a side street only to have that driver slammed by someone headed south, they argue.

“We have a very old road, with four-foot sidewalks on either side, with traffic moving very fast immediately adjacent to you,” said Mark Butler, another North Star council member. “It’s dangerous as hell.” Just south of Benson, Debbie Hinchey owns a restaurant called Pho Lena and is looking forward to the road-splitting median Blaine’s owner Haag is worried about.

“I think it will help Spenard,” she said. “If people feel safer, they’re going to come here more.”

BATTLE BREWING?

A group of Spenard-area business owners incorporated as the North Star Business Association successfully blocked a similar three-lane realignment for Fireweed Lane a few years ago, the North Star council’s Johnson said.

Bob Bell, a Fireweed business owner, former Assemblyman and association president, is happy to take credit for that. “We managed to get them shut down,” he said.

Signs of such resistance dot some sidewalks and store windows in the blocks around Spenard: “Spenard works,” said one in an Arctic Road glass shop. “Leave it alone.”

Planners say three-lane configurations are not only safer but popular in other cities and in other parts of Anchorage — 15th Avenue, for example, and the southern end of Spenard Road a few blocks before International Airport Road. In Seattle, business owners have sought such changes, Kniefel said.

Bell argues that circumstances in Spenard are different. The three-lane stretch of 15th from Cordova west is mostly residential, he said.

“That worked pretty good,” Bell said. “But … if you drive down Spenard, you’re going to see a driveway going into a business every 30 feet.” Cutting back to one lane in each direction will back up traffic, he said. WHAT’S NEXT?

The city hopes to get going on the least controversial part of the makeover next year — redoing the lane that runs downhill from Hillcrest Drive to Westchester Lagoon. There are no businesses there, and the changes would add a pedestrian bridge and a bike path connection to the Chester Creek greenbelt.

But before that the whole project must return to the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, as well as its Urban Design Commission.

The city has about 65 percent of a design in hand but no money for construction. The Anchorage Assembly may be asked to include some $5 million for it in a roads bond package this spring, and the Legislature could be asked to pony up another $8 million or so.

Already, however, the Assembly gave the go-ahead for an $850,000 buyout of one business owner on the east side of Spenard at 27th Avenue. The city plans to demolish that building next summer, Assemblywoman Harriett Drummond said, and straighten a dangerous intersection: 27th enters Spenard at a slightly different spot on both sides of the road, enticing some drivers to try a dangerous, zig-zag crossing.

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