There’s a great sucking sound in Nashville these days. It’s the sound of Davidson County residents departing for greener pastures in the surrounding counties. And the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) is determined to spend more than $1.2 billion on a road called 840 to speed them on their way.
On a map of Middle Tennessee, State Route 840 doesn’t look like a way out of Nashville; it looks more like an avoidance strategy. Unlike the interstates and major arterials that cut through the heart of the city, 840 doesn’t even make contact with Davidson County. A 185-mile ring road, 840 would encircle the Metro Nashville region with a concrete belt, keeping an average distance of 35 miles from the city’s center. If fully constructed, the highway will connect Interstates 24, 40, and 65 on both the north and south sides of the city—cutting through Dickson, Montgomery, Cheatham, Robertson, Sumner, and Wilson Counties to the north. The southern loop would slice through Rutherford and Williamson Counties.
The estimated cost of 840’s southern loop is $455 million, while the northern half would cost $765 million. “These are just guesstimates,” cautions Tennessee Department of Transportation spokeswoman Luanne Grandinetti, “based on typical costs per mile to construct a road of these dimensions [four lanes with a median and shoulders]. We really don’t have hard figures on what the whole thing will cost.” Given that highways usually tend to cost more, never less, than predicted, Grandinetti’s news is hardly comforting.
She also says that $270 million has been spent or obligated, thus far, for the southern loop, where the section linking I-40 East and I-24 East is open for business and the rest is either under construction or under contract. Right-of-way has been acquired for the southwest section connecting I-65 South with I-40 West, except for a 10-mile stretch near Leiper’s Fork in Williamson County. For the time being, the northern loop is just a line on a TDOT map.
In the Beginning Was the Road
Trucking and road-building interests have virtually dominated Tennessee politics since the late 1950s. In the 1952 gubernatorial primary, incumbent Gordon Browning had the support of the railroad interests. Challenger Frank Clement needed transportation backers of his own, so he made friends with the truckers. When Clement won the primary, and eventually the gubernatorial election, highways became all-important.
Since then, it’s been desirable for any potential TDOT Commissioner to have road-building experience on his résumé. Jimmy Evans paved his way to that position in Ned McWherter’s administration, and Don Sundquist’s current transportation commissioner, Bruce Saltsman, used to be a contractor, specializing in bridges. A 1996 profile in Construction News described Saltsman as “a contractor at heart” and noted that having him in charge of a $1 billion budget “is a great situation for those of us in the construction industry.”
Back during his days as governor, Lamar Alexander had no trouble convincing the 1986 Legislature to increase the state’s gas tax. The stated purpose of the hike was to pay for a 13-year road-building program. The southern half of 840, then called Interstate 840, was part of the package. It was one of a series of Bicentennial Parkways—“bicentennial” because each was supposed to be finished around the time of the state’s 200th birthday in 1996, and “parkway” because, apparently, it just sounded better than “highway.”
When state legislators got their hands on Alexander’s bill, they kept the gas tax and the roads but got rid of the parkway concept. The outdoor-advertising lobby feared that the term “parkway” sounded too green and that environmentalists might assume that a park-like thoroughfare should be protected from unsightly signage. The Legislature was happy to oblige.
Planning for the southern half of 840 began in 1987. Legislation was passed in 1993 to approve construction of 840’s northern half, but no funding sources were, or have yet been, determined. Even though the gas tax went up again during McWherter’s administration, the state coffers probably cannot finance the northern section, where hilly terrain makes construction more expensive. TDOT is following the procedures necessary to make the northern loop eligible for federal funding.
TDOT lumps the state gas tax, the diesel fuel tax, and motor vehicle registration fees together as “highway user fees.” The state uses these fees to pay for highway construction and maintenance. Tennessee’s gas tax is now 21.4 cents on the dollar—the second highest in the Southeast, right behind North Carolina’s 21.8 cents. Anticipated state revenues from highway user fees in 1997 are $571.3 million.
Fuel taxes guarantee eternal life for a state’s highway program. Citizens drive cars, buy gas, and pay the tax—and the state builds more roads. These roads attract more traffic and create more sprawl. As a result, citizens drive more, buy more gas, and pay more taxes—leading the state to build more roads.
Perhaps this logic of self-perpetuation explains why TDOT will spend 27-and-a-half times more on roads than it will spend on mass transit in 1997-98. TDOT director of finance Mike Shinn explains that these proportions are not surprising, since Tennessee is a rural state. “It’s legally possible to spend highway user fees on mass transit, like light rail,” Shinn says. “And if Tennessee were an urban state, we might make that engineering decision.”
However, if TDOT continues to build sprawl-breeders like 840, Tennessee will not remain a rural state; neither will it become truly urban. A recent report by the American Farmland Trust rated the Nashville basin 12th among the nation’s most endangered farming regions. The counties losing the most farmland to development include Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson, and Sumner—all in the path of 840. The spread of suburbia is “accelerating,” Williamson County extension agent Mike Smith told the Nashville Banner. “We’re about to experience 840 coming across parts of Williamson, and that’s going to spur things on.”
The Opposition: South
In January of this year, Nashville activist Gene Teselle called his old friend, songwriter Gene Cotton, and asked him, “What are you guys in Williamson County doing about the impact of 840?” Cotton’s reply was, “I don’t know. I’m just in my studio writing songs.”
Cotton, a self-described recluse living near the tiny community of Leiper’s Fork, surveyed his neighbors and found that no one knew much of anything about the road, except that it was coming through. He then went to the Williamson County Planning Commission and bought a map of the proposed route. “All of a sudden,” Cotton says, “I just saw Atlanta.”
“A vision of wall-to-wall subdivisions all the way to Franklin” caused Cotton to caucus with friends and neighbors in the area and organize a town meeting. Almost 400 people attended, Cotton says, and the Southwest Williamson County Community Association (SWCCA) was born.
Since then, members of the association have spent hours poring over documents from TDOT and other government agencies. “Every page we turned,” says Cotton, “we found another law that had been broken.”
The group retained environmental attorney Joe McCaleb, who has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction halting 840’s progress in Williamson County. The lawsuit claims that TDOT did not hold the proper public hearings on the project and failed to do a proper environmental impact study. A judicial hearing on the suit is scheduled for September.
As cochair of SWCCA, Cotton has gone from hermit to outspoken 840 opponent. “We began just trying to get TDOT to follow the right procedures,” he says. “Now we are out to block the whole thing west of I-65.”
At the suggestion of Cotton’s organization, the Williamson County Commission refused to endorse a resolution of support for 840. Cotton himself has met with Gov. Sundquist. And he has taken to the woods with his video camera, recording the damage done to a stream near Mobley’s Cut Road by TDOT workers core-drilling for soil samples along 840’s path.
State environmental officials subsequently issued a notice of violation to TDOT for the damage. State Rep. Gary Odom, chairman of the House’s environmental subcommittee, has scheduled a hearing on the TDOT violations for Aug. 19.
The Opposition: North
The opponents of the northern loop of 840 have not received as much media attention as their southern counterparts, but they have been in the fight a lot longer, even though construction of the northern loop is much less advanced. Three years ago, concerned Dickson County citizens gathered to discuss what to do about 840. One of the first things they did was retain environmental consultant Barry Sulkin.
Gradually, other groups in other affected counties, especially west of I-65, began talking to each other. In late 1995, Rick Parrish of the Southern Environmental Law Center, based in Charlottesville, Va., agreed to take on the case of 840 north. The NOT 840 Coalition, led by Mike Dysinger of Dickson County, officially formed last summer.
“The main problem I have with 840,” says Jeff Carr, a vice-chancellor at Vanderbilt University and a member of NOT 840’s board of directors, “is that TDOT has avoided focusing on whether the road is really needed and the cost-benefit ratio of it.” Carr points out that the northern loop could drain almost $800 million from state coffers without affecting Middle Tennessee’s real transportation problem, which is getting people in and out of Nashville. He also notes that the only economic impact study of 840, done in 1996 by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, estimates that as many as 4,000 new regional jobs might be attributed to beltway development. Taking TDOT’s minimum 840 price tag of $1.2 billion, that’s roughly $300,000 per job.
If it has done nothing else, NOT 840 has managed to slow down the project. “A year ago we asked for a study of legitimate transportation alternatives and for a fuller economic and environmental impact study,” says the Environmental Law Center’s Parrish. In response, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which must approve a project if it is to qualify for federal funding, requested that TDOT prepare a supplement to its environmental impact study. Lori Cove of the FHWA says the supplement is expected by the end of the year.
Officially, TDOT representatives express confidence that all of 840 will be built. Unofficially, a source inside TDOT says the department has considered a fall-back position—building only the segments of the highway that fall east of I-65.
The Road West
In a can-do country like the United States, there is not much precedent for halting the construction of a major government project. But a nation that increasingly finds itself asking how-can-we-pay-for-it questions is learning how to say no.
The freeway known as the Western Bypass was assumed to be a done deal when a group of citizens gathered to stop it in 1988. Political leaders of Washington County, Ore., were unanimous in their support for the road, which was designed as a bypass around Portland. Opposition arose when it became clear that the bypass would make mass transit into Portland virtually impossible. Residents of Washington County would be left with no alternative except to drive their cars. Development along the bypass would be typical highway sprawl.
Consultants hired by 1000 Friends of Oregon constructed an alternative plan focusing on moderate-density, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods strung along a regional transit network. The study cost less than $500,000. The Friends of Oregon analysis demonstrated that moderately dense commercial and residential development along transit spokes into the city could absorb the predicted population increase and generate the desired economic development. At the same time, it would reduce the average daily miles traveled by car, thus decreasing air pollution. This spring Portland’s regional government voted to kill the bypass.
Unfortunately for the Nashville region, our regional planning body, the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), has offered no alternative to suburban sprawl. And TDOT has done no transporation study that offers an alternative to 840. The transportation department actually insisted that the MPO consider highways as the only option in evaluating the project, and the MPO agreed.
In Middle Tennessee counties where there has been no suburban-growth explosion, county officials are still naively predicting that 840 will work wonders with their balance sheets. Consider the example of Rutherford County, where county executive Nancy Allen confirms that her main governmental problem is paying for the public services required by suburban residential development. “We are gaining 1,000 students a year,” Allen says, noting that 1,000 students could fill an entire new school. “Paying for education in the county is a real challenge,” she says.
Rutherford County relies primarily on property taxes to pay for new schools and suburban infrastructure. Sales-tax revenue—from the Wal-Mart superstore and other retail—is generated within city limits, since businesses locate where the infrastructure—water, sewer, fire, and police protection—is available to meet their needs, Allen says. And the new property taxes generated in the unincorporated areas of Rutherford County do not begin to pay for the services that the new residents require.
Jim Rhody, assistant planning director for Rutherford County, recently did an analysis of “The Public Cost of Growth.” He studied the demands that 100 new single-family homes make on the county—how many students they bring with them and how many miles of road, how many patrol cars and how many ambulances they require. Rhody found that the capital cost to the county for each new single-family home is approximately $19,000. Rhody also estimates that each new single-family home runs the government’s operating costs up by another $9,500.
Sprawling Toward the Apocalypse
Ever since we slipped into the driver’s seats of our automobiles in the years following World War II, the density of our living patterns has been decreasing, and the cost of public services has been expanding. City centers—the downtowns and the areas surrounding old neighborhoods—have been struggling to stay alive on a reduced-revenue diet.
In the 1950s, the desire for a car and an acre lot seemed innocent enough. By the end of that decade, however, the first clouds had appeared on the rosy suburban horizon. Financially strapped cities witnessed the exodus to the suburbs and grew ever more desperate for revenue to provide urban services. Nashville’s remedy was Metro government.
“Metro government was formed to prevent the old city of Nashville from becoming an urban ghetto,” explains Betty Nixon, former Metro Council member and longtime civic activist. Making the city limits bigger did not, however, solve the problems of sprawl; it merely slowed the problems down. Interstates and widened arterials reached beyond county lines, transforming Metro into a metropolitan region. Now a lack of sensible regional planning to reinforce the city center—and that means a road like 840—threatens “to reduce all of Davidson County to quasi-ghetto status,” says Nixon.
Planners who have studied the impact of ring roads nationwide echo Nixon’s fears. “Perimeter ring roads are absolute sprawl producers,” says Walter Kulash, a nationally respected, Florida-based traffic engineer. “They drain vitality from a city.” Kulash points out that “the much-touted economic impact is often not new growth.” Instead, he says, the result is simply moving residents and commerce to new places. “And those who move tend to be the more affluent and stable members of a community, the role models. These are just the people you don’t want to lose from the first ring of older suburbs.”
This income redistribution is already happening in Nashville, even without 840. According to Tony Eff, an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University and the number cruncher for MTSU’s Center for Business and Economic Research, “People who are moving out of Davidson County have higher incomes than the people moving in.” Eff studied the movement of income from county to county in Middle Tennessee for the years 1994 and 1995, the most recent period for which data was available from the Internal Revenue Service. He found that while the aggregate personal income rose in the counties surrounding Nashville during that period, Davidson County’s dropped.
Eff notes that Davidson County’s aggregate personal income is falling, in spite of the fact that the county’s population as a whole is increasing. “I found, when I studied the national data, that for people moving to Middle Tennessee from other parts of the country, Davidson County is the destination county,” Eff says. “But people already here are migrating to the surrounding counties.” In other words, once people have had a chance to scope out lifestyle issues such as taxes, housing, and schools, they are fine-tuning their choice and moving to counties other than Davidson.
Eff was not surprised by his findings. “Leakage from the core city is a typical pattern in most major metropolitan regions,” he says. Eff has made no study to show whether cities such as Portland, Ore., have managed to reverse, or at least decrease, this trend with aggressive tactics such as efficient mass transit and land-use planning. One thing, however, is clear: Strategies to stem the leakage are not even being considered for Middle Tennessee.
Instead, Tennessee state government is building a road that will increase outward flow. TDOT is looking through rosy-colored glasses at a decades-old blueprint for a ring road. At the same time, it is turning a blind eye to the more recent history of cities like Atlanta.
Not-So-Hotlanta
Los Angeles may have invented the freeway and the endless subdivision, but Atlanta is today’s poster child of urban sprawl. The city that came alive as a railroad crossing in the 19th century has expanded like a malignant tumor in the late 20th century along an intricate network of ever-widening highways. The Atlanta Constitution now employs a reporter just to cover the “sprawl beat.”
Almost 30 years ago the Georgia Department of Transportation built I-285, a ring road 15 miles from Atlanta’s center. The road was originally meant to serve as a bypass for through traffic. But according to Richard Courtney, the head of the land-use division of the Atlanta Regional Commission, “Development at the interchanges has transformed the road into a destination facility” rather than a bypass. “And traffic volumes and congestion have vastly exceeded predictions.”
Courtney also says Atlanta’s extensive highways have led to “more scattered employment and activity centers that economically drain the ones we already had.” In addition, he says, it costs more, in infrastructure, schools, fire, and police, “to serve sprawl than to serve more dense development.”
What Courtney ruefully calls “the finest surface transportation system in the country” has not produced shorter or faster commutes. Since the 1970s there has been a steady increase in the number of miles driven daily by Atlanta-area residents. Today Atlanta leads the nation for vehicular miles traveled in cities with population over 500,000. Nashville already ranks third in the United States—and that’s without 840.
Not surprisingly, Atlanta’s longer commutes have produced steadily increasing air pollution. Currently, the region’s air quality is “severely” in violation of current EPA standards. Atlanta must develop a plan to improve its air quality by the end of the year, says Courtney, “or no more federal transportation funds.”
As an alternative to longer commutes and air-quality deterioration, Atlanta has constructed a system of light rail and buses. Mass transit, however, has not reduced the number of miles driven or cut back on air pollution. That’s because GDOT has also continued to build and widen roads. Parts of the I-285 loop are now 14 lanes wide. “We have a good mass transit system,” says the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce’s Jeff Rader, “but we have a better and more extensive highway system. So people are still driving.”
In a masterstroke of illogic, GDOT now wants to use 25-year-old plans to build a highway called the Outer Perimeter Loop. Atlanta’s Outer Loop would encircle the region at an average distance of 35 miles from the city center. GDOT’s estimate for Atlanta’s Outer Loop of 200 miles is $2.5 billion. TDOT’s “guesstimate” for the 185 miles of 840 is $1.2 billion. Only time will tell which transportation department is the better guesser.
Unlike Nashville’s civic leaders, Atlanta’s power structure is skeptical about the Outer Loop. But advocates of Atlanta as the Capital of the New-New-South have been around the ring road before. Atlanta’s government is outspokenly opposed to the construction of the Outer Perimeter Loop, and even business boosters have begun to question the Outer Loop.
The Atlanta Chamber of Commerce has called for the road’s postponement, explaining that Atlanta must decide where it’s going before it builds the roads to get there. Before major bucks are spent on highways or other transit modes, the Atlanta Chamber has called for a comprehensive regional plan that includes land-use goals and the cost of public services and infrastructure required by that land use.
In Nashville, however, Mayor Bredesen, federal planners, and the Chamber of Commerce alike have all endorsed the 840 project. And they have done so in spite of the fact that no cost-benefit ratio study has been done and no alternative transportation modes have been considered. What’s more, they have no regional land-use plan to help determine just what kind of transportation system will better serve the future. The Nashville region seems doomed to reinvent the wheel that has driven Atlanta to such a unpretty pass.
Meanwhile, thoughtful analyses of recent road building in other parts of the country show that highways induce more traffic and more congestion. Case in point: two reports from the Institute of Transportation Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. In both studies professor Mark Hansen, in mind-numbing detail, analyzed the effect of state-funded road construction in California’s metropolitan regions from 1973 to 1990. Hansen found that new traffic—traffic that previously did not exist but has been induced by new road capacity—consumed 91 percent of the entire capacity of the new road within five years. “With so much induced traffic,” Hansen concluded, “adding road capacity does little to reduce congestion.” Hansen’s studies show that new road capacity simply generates new traffic.
The Silence That Passeth Understanding
Mention the numbers “8-4-0” to opponents of the highway, and you can’t get them to stop talking. Also voluble, on the opposite side, are the better-business-through-roads types among the region’s politicians and in the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile, others speak more warily about the proposed highway, if they speak about it at all.
TDOT bureaucrats, who once proudly described their concrete visions of 840, now choose their words on the highway with obvious care. Many of the professional planners in the counties surrounding Nashville—when asked to comment on 840—will say nothing on the record. Off the record they speak mostly in negatives.
Among Metro officials, the politically charged ring road is treated with silence. “Of course, 840 is a horrible thing for Davidson County,” whispers a Metro staffer who deals with planning and policy issues, and who would speak only with a promise of anonymity. “But we don’t want to get into a big fight with our neighbors, and they want it. Besides, it’s not Metro money.”
Jeff Browning, executive director of the Metro Planning Commission, finds it “difficult under the circumstances” to give his professional opinion of 840. “The Planning Commission has discussed it but has not officially taken a position,” he says.
Browning points out that the construction of 840 is “not setting a trend, merely continuing one” set by Interstates 65, 40, and 24. Browning admits that 840 will probably “lead to increased decentralization,” and that the trend to build more and bigger roads will probably not persist “as long as we might like. It will not continue to be affordable.”
As mayor, Bredesen has had next-to-nothing to say on the subject of 840. When he was a candidate for governor, however, Bredesen endorsed the project. “840 had already been approved by the Legislature, and the debate was mostly about the road’s alignment,” Bredesen explains now. “I felt comfortable going ahead with it.”
TDOT—and the road builders, suburban real-estate developers, petroleum-industry representatives, and truckers who relentlessly lobby the transportation department—have consistently touted 840 as the yellow brick road to a rainbow of economic development in the rural counties. And in 1994, Candidate Bredesen was trying to modify his image as an urban sophisticate with little knowledge of, or feeling for, rural issues. It didn’t work, and he’s still our mayor. Nevertheless, Bredesen sees “no reason to change” his mind, and he admits, “I know nothing more [about 840] than I did three years ago.”
Maybe Bredesen didn’t know much about 840 to start with—or maybe he still has statewide political ambitions. “I see 840 as so far over the horizon, so far out there, that it’s not really a Davidson County issue,” he says. “I don’t see it as increasing the level of sprawl significantly.” He even says 840 “will enhance the ability to get downtown” because it will connect directly to the interstates.
Our existing interstates are already packed to capacity during rush hours. And road-crazy regions such as Atlanta demonstrate that far-flung highways create sprawl, detract from existing commerce, and increase air pollution. America’s highways have compiled an ominous track record in the years since 840 was conceived. The continuing optimism of TDOT bureaucrats seems disingenuous, and the hopes of Middle Tennessee governments seem naive. But, even worse, Metro’s silence seems cowardly. Maybe the lobbyists have slipped a sleeping potion into the mayor’s water supply. That’s best explanation available at this time.
