Nashville has lovely residential districts. But when commerce enters the picture, charm disappears. With the exception of Hillsboro Village, the suburban places devoted to our consumer culture are a cacophony of competing signs, webs of utility wires, architectural mediocrity and asphalt badlands that serve largely as the locus for road rage.

Metro's Planning Department has a scenario to bring visual and functional discipline to one of these unlovely territories. It's a mouthful—the Harding Town Center Urban Design Overlay—and it's intended to manage new development and the traffic it will bring in the quadrants surrounding the intersection of Harding and White Bridge roads. Critics see the transportation component as a windfall for developers and a blueprint for sending more cars hurtling along Woodlawn Avenue.

The land around the Harding/White Bridge intersection is already some of the most valuable commercial real estate in Tennessee, surrounded as it is by affluent suburbs. But the area is notably lacking in high-end retail. One thing that's not lacking, however, is cars.

Anyone who's crawled through this intersection during the ever-lengthening rush hours has experienced firsthand the all-American automotive inferno. Through traffic on Harding Road stutters through closely spaced signals from Bosley Springs Road to the Belle Meade Plaza strip mall. These unfortunates compete for green lights with long queues of cars southbound on White Bridge Road heading for St. Thomas Hospital, the Dominican campus, Montgomery Bell Academy and the Ensworth School. Not to mention the long-term residents of turn lanes desperately seeking the Walgreen's, the One Hour Moto-Photo, the Taco Bell, the BP station, etc. Traversed by an average of 63,000 cars a day, this traffic hell ranks fifth on Public Works' 2003 dishonor roll of Metro's "busiest" intersections.

About two years ago, Metro's planners and area Metro Council member John Summers realized that this scenario was about to get worse—exponentially. "H.G. Hill Realty and St. Thomas announced plans to redevelop property they own in the northeast quadrant," Summers says. "They can build approximately 800,000 square feet of new development without any change in zoning." Then Tony Giarratana said he was going to redevelop the Belle Meade Theater complex in the southeast quadrant, where zoning permits another 172,000 square feet of commercial space, plus 50 residential units. "If you count all four quadrants, zoning would allow a total of over 2 million square feet of additional development," Summers says.

The normal scenario for build-outs of these scales is that the developers involved would be responsible for traffic studies for their projects. Each hires a transportation planner to determine the existing level of traffic and how it flows on the infrastructure surrounding the proposed development, estimate how much new traffic the development will generate, and then figure out how to mitigate the impact. Strategies include adding turn lanes or signals, widening roads or building new ones.

But Metro's planners had a more comprehensive idea. Hill Realty's Jimmy Granbery recalls that planning chief Rick Bernhardt suggested "it might be a good idea to get all the commercial stakeholders—the May family (Belle Meade Plaza and Office Park), Tony, St. Thomas and me—together to look at the area as a whole. Clearly traffic was going to be the biggest issue."

Commercial property owners were invited to collaborate with the community at large on a plan to manage the changes that were about to ensue.

"The development was going to happen anyway, and if the transportation issues were addressed piecemeal it would be a bigger mess than if done holistically," Summers explains. "The idea was not that we could solve all the traffic problems, but that we'd try to keep them from getting much worse."

To analyze the traffic issues, the Planning Department hired Atlanta-based Day Wilburn Associates. Of their $97,500 fee, Metro paid $20,000 and Tony Giarratana $5,000, with $36,250 each from St. Thomas and Hill Realty. Jack May declined to contribute.

Planning's design studio then launched the public process with a five-day community charrette, a series of workshops in which participants were asked what they liked and disliked about the study area and what they hoped would happen with redevelopment. Tops on the public's list of dislikes were all the traffic and acres of parking lots, an environment hostile to pedestrians. What the public wanted were sidewalks, bike paths and new development in the form of a mixed-use village or town center. Armed with this information, designers and traffic engineers sketched out a concept plan and presented it back to the citizens for further comment. During subsequent months, after additional public meetings, the plan was refined and modified.

In October, the Planning Department presented its final draft for the Harding Town Center. The plan takes the form of an urban design overlay (UDO), a zoning tool that establishes specific design standards for a designated area—unlike the laissez-faire typical of commerce in the suburbs.

The UDO—which now covers only the northeast and southeast quadrants—calls for a six-story height limit, except for buildings near the center of the St. Thomas campus. Mixed-use zoning encourages buildings with office and residential over retail. To avoid the long, monotonous structures typical of big box retail, facades must shift—advance or recede—every 30 feet. Entrances are to be clearly marked and geared to pedestrians. Minimum setbacks and lots of glass at street level, as well as landscaped sidewalks, animate the streetscape. Parking is to the rear or side of buildings, with the emphasis on shared garages rather than surface lots. Lighting is of a pedestrian scale.

The element of the UDO that has received the most criticism is the transportation plan that accompanies it. Day Wilburn predicts that if the land in the four quadrants is developed to the maximum zoning allows, it will generate a whopping 26,700 new trips per day, with 19,000 of those trips fostered in the northeast (H.G. Hill and St. Thomas) quadrant.

Day Wilburn's key strategy to handle this additional traffic is a new three-lane connector street branching east off White Bridge, to pull traffic off the road into the northeast quadrant before it reaches the intersection with Harding. The connector is intended to make a "main street" through the village development before crossing Harding to the south, and then linking to Ridgefield Drive by cutting a new path between the Belle Meade Theater and Jamie. The Kenner Avenue traffic light is relocated to serve the connector's intersection with Harding Road. A two-lane cross street north of Harding provides access to the St. Thomas campus and reinforces the existing link—a private easement rather than a public street—under White Bridge to Belle Meade Plaza. Harding Road between St. Thomas and Belle Meade Plaza is widened to seven lanes to provide more capacity for through traffic.

Transportation plan skeptics question the location of the new connector, saying that this street will supply the properties of Hill Realty and St. Thomas—the largest financial contributors to the study—with valuable new frontage. "That street will cost $7 million to $8 million, and the public will pay for it," says Woodlawn resident John Cooper. Others suggest that widening Harding Road runs counter to the concept of a more pedestrian-friendly atmosphere. Keith Covington, the manager of planning's design studio, explains that a wider Harding is part of the current long-range street plan, and that the Tennessee Department of Transportation and Metro Public Works requested that this widening be respected in the plan for the Harding Town Center. Covington says that if Harding is widened, a central median will be added as a "pedestrian refuge."

Some residents of Woodlawn Avenue and representatives of the Ensworth School express concern that the connector will funnel more traffic onto Woodlawn. "The [Day Wilburn] study didn't consider the impact on Woodlawn, so there was no attempt in the plan to mitigate that impact," Cooper says. "It'll be like forcing a six-inch main into a one-inch pipe. And because there are no sidewalks on the streets south of Harding, how many pedestrians are going to cross Harding to the 'village?' This is a development access plan, not a transportation plan. It doesn't provide a solution to the additional load of traffic that development will bring."

Critics of the Day Wilburn plan, such as Cooper and Jack May, commissioned a review by the local firm of Ragan Smith Associates (RSA)—tit for tat traffic engineering. RSA suggests that, because St. Thomas is a major regional destination, the new connector should run directly to the hospital's garage rather than through a new town center. Their alternative plan also uses Bosley Springs Road rather than a new connector for access to Harding Road from the northeast quadrant. The RSA report says that because the "widening of Harding Road seems inevitable under any scenario...most likely it should extend from I-440 to Belle Meade Boulevard." RSA's ultimate conclusion is that further studies of transportation infrastructure are needed because "there was insufficient understanding of travel patterns, not only on Harding Road but also on Woodlawn Drive, Woodmont Boulevard and Kenner Avenue. These roads are residential but carry significant traffic volumes which originate outside their limits." Covington responds that the measures RSA advocates won't contribute to the pedestrian-friendly town center the community says it wants. RSA's findings were presented at yet another community meeting earlier this week. In the meantime, the Metro Council has approved the UDO on the second of three readings, but Summers has deferred the plan indefinitely until some of the Woodlawn issues are resolved. He can bring the plan back for final approval at any time.

Adding two lanes to West End/Harding Road all the way from I-440 to Belle Meade Boulevard is politically problematic, because of the wealth and influence of those who live on it. And many transportation studies have shown that adding capacity to major roadways just induces more drivers to use it, ultimately delivering even more congestion.

But more traffic on Woodlawn Avenue is a legitimate concern for those who live on or near the street. Unfortunately, the cars will come, because new development will come, whether or not the UDO happens. Woodlawn experiences so much cut-through traffic because it's one of the few links between the major arterials of 21st Avenue/Hillsboro Road and Harding Road. What the street needs is a strategy to make that traffic go more slowly, and a redesign of the street to encourage other modes of travel: sidewalks for pedestrians and bike lanes for cyclists.

Because of Woodlawn's role in the traffic scheme of things, however, Metro has designated it a "collector" street. And the current Public Works policy for collectors, as well as minor arterials such as Woodmont Boulevard, is that such streets are ineligible for traffic calming because "by definition these roadways are meant to handle larger amounts of traffic at higher speeds," according to transportation manager Bob Weithofer. Summers says he's trying to get Public Works to "be more flexible in its policy [for collectors and arterials] that go through residential neighborhoods."

"Woodlawn Avenue was never a country lane," says Frances Lumbard, a nearby resident who was born in the neighborhood in 1941. "The traffic is here, and it's not going to go away. And more development is coming. But the neighborhood is full of people who, at any given hour, are out walking their dogs, out jogging. So you might as well make the new development accessible by some way other than cars."

The bottom line is that Harding and White Bridge roads will have congestion, and the surrounding neighborhoods will continue to see cut-through traffic, for the foreseeable future. That unpalatable truth is in part due to the almost complete dependence on the car for transportation, and to street patterns that feed those cars from smaller streets onto larger ones—unlike a grid system that disperses rather than concentrates traffic. And it is difficult for some residents and property owners to believe that the area can be retrofitted to function in a more urban and pedestrian-friendly fashion, because at this point in Nashville's history we have no examples of this phenomenon. But the Harding Town Center plan is a start, and one worth taking.