Anchorage Daily News

A $600 million freeway connecting the Glenn and the Seward Highways through Fairview and Midtown is the top priority in the city's long-range transportation plan.

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The state Department of Transportation, along with some other agencies, is moving ahead with studies on whether to build it.

Though there are some pluses to building this freeway connection, it raises serious questions.

Traffic through Fairview and Midtown now encounters a long series of traffic lights. A freeway could relieve traffic jams -- at least for a while.

It could also encourage more traffic and eventually become just as congested as the current highway.

If built right, the freeway could prompt urban renewal in Fairview, a struggling neighborhood which is now divided by two heavily traveled four lane streets, Gambell and Ingra. Fairview Community Council leaders envision a day when Gambell is a quiet street with decent sidewalks and mixed use development such as small businesses with housing on the second story.

But in this vision, the freeway would have to be sunken, with connecting streets built over the top of it. That drives up the cost, and the added traffic would mean residents along the route will breathe more air pollution.

The freeway project could include benefits for public transit, such as park and ride lots, and special lanes for buses, carpools and share-a-ride vans.

Big questions argue against pouring a lot of effort into this idea, though. How would we pay for what is at least a $600 million project? (That was the cost estimate in 2005, and the final bill is sure to be much higher.) Is this freeway worth all that money?

The most federal highway money that Anchorage projects have secured in any recent year is $22 million. Anchorage gets another $20 million of federal money annually for non-highway projects, from trails to major roads, that it could also use, said a city transportation official.

There's no way that adds up to $600 million anytime soon.

Forget about doing many other Anchorage transportation projects if we decide to build the freeway connection. It will take most of the federal highway money, state and local money and any other federal grants our congressional delegation can scrape up.

Is it worth excluding nearly everything else?

Walt Parker, a former state highway commissioner who is now a member of the neighborhood-oriented Anchorage Citizens Coalition, says nobody's proven that a freeway will dramatically improve the traffic situation. He says we should concentrate on smaller roads and on building up public transit instead.

Jim Childers, the state DOT project manager for the highway-to-highway project, says a wide range of alternatives are still under consideration.

There might be other routes besides the freeway through Fairview, Childers said. At one extreme, planners might drop the freeway in favor of major transit improvements to reduce congestion, he said. By March, the state plans to produce a list of proposals that it thinks might work.

Right now, we're skeptical that a mega-freeway project will turn out to be a reasonable choice because the cost is so high. It would eat up a huge share of the city's transportation money at a time when we should be aggressively promoting less-polluting, more energy-efficient mass transit alternatives.

BOTTOM LINE: The hundreds of millions of dollars that would go into a freeway connecting the Glenn and the Seward make it a very iffy project.

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