The M-99 Road Diet is Good for Hillsdale
Dear Boss,
Below is an op-ed that has also been published in The Hillsdalian, a relatively new Substack that provides relevant news regarding the City and County of Hillsdale. I recommend giving them a follow!
Opinion: The M-99 Road Diet is Good for Hillsdale
The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) has proposed placing the section of the M-99 highway that runs through residential and downtown Hillsdale on a road diet, shrinking it from four lanes to two. The extra space allowed by the diet would be given to a dedicated central turn lane and two bike lanes. As one would expect with any public issue, there are many differing opinions about this plan. I’m writing to offer mine: the proposed road diet is a good plan (even if it might not be the best) and would greatly benefit the City of Hillsdale.
Today, M-99 slices the throat of downtown Hillsdale. Hillsdale’s downtown straddles M-99, and businesses on the west side of the street are relatively stranded. M-99 is an inhibition to foot traffic, and its presence generally offends anyone on the west side of downtown. Its design encourages high speeds and harms the viability of businesses on the west side of the street. Narrowing the road via the road diet would naturally slow down traffic, contributing to a more pleasant experience of downtown Hillsdale and would create more visibility for downtown businesses. Downtown districts are not meant to be throughways. Downtowns exist to serve as centers for business and living, and good city planning should prioritize that end above mere traffic capacity.
Slowing traffic through downtown offers several beneficial outcomes. A slower pace of traffic, combined with fewer lanes of traffic to worry about, would encourage pedestrians to use more of downtown. It would be easier to utilize all the available public parking in downtown without the hassle or worry about crossing a four-lane highway to reach your destination. Additionally, slower traffic would result in less road noise. Many of us have been walking through downtown Hillsdale, talking to a friend in person or over the phone, and had our conversations interrupted by a truck driving by at a high rate of speed. Having lived in downtown Hillsdale, I can attest that excessive engine noise often pierces through downtown’s residences.
The road diet wouldn’t just benefit pedestrians and residents; it would also benefit cars. The road diet would increase safety for vehicles parked downtown. Late last year, a Hillsdale County Road Commission truck with a snow blade hit three vehicles parked on Broad Street. This truck had been pushed outside of its lane by a semi in the adjacent lane. The proposed road diet, if it had already been implemented, would have prevented this problem. The semi would not have been positioned to move any vehicle to the side of the road, and any vehicle that did swerve would swerve into a bike lane, not into a parked car.
Life in Hillsdale bears out the fact that four lanes are not necessary in this area. Most of the traffic stays in the center two lanes, with some traffic bleeding out onto the outside lanes. Our own use patterns imply that we mainly use M-99 as a two-lane road, despite the extra lanes. The road diet might even make getting through town easier, as traffic will not have to weave around people trying to make a left turn. People turning left will be contained in a dedicated turn lane, rather than trying to do so in the most active driving lane. This will reduce complication for those trying to drive through town and make it safer for people trying to turn left.
There has been some consternation about the inclusion of bike lanes in the road diet plans. It is argued that these bike lanes are unnecessary, as not that many people get around via bicycles in Hillsdale. Whether or not that is true, viewing the lanes as simply bike lanes misses the greater benefit. When someone parks on Broad Street today, they must worry that their car will be sideswiped by oncoming traffic. They also must be exceedingly careful as they open their car doors. The proposed bike lanes would be better understood as lanes in which individuals can safely enter and exit their vehicles. This is doubly important for mothers, who may have a child in a car seat on the driver’s side of the car. Fiddling with a child or a car seat as traffic drives within inches of you cannot be a pleasant experience.
Road diets have been conducted elsewhere in Michigan and across the country, and they work. My own hometown of Fargo, ND, passed a road diet in the downtown district several years ago. Before the road diet, most of downtown was crisscrossed by one-way streets which were installed for a more efficient flow of traffic. Fargo moved to turn these one-way streets into two-way streets, despite a heavy amount of public opposition. Not long after the road diet went into effect, downtown Fargo began to thrive. The diet slowed down traffic and made it easier to park and walk around downtown. Streets that couldn’t support businesses soon featured bustling restaurants and boutiques. Rather than a place to simply drive through, downtown became a destination. In Michigan, road diets have been implemented in Tecumseh, Coldwater, and many other towns across the state. Traffic continues to flow smoothly through these towns, despite the fact that they also have highways cutting through them.
From a city government’s perspective, downtown districts are the largest tax revenue generator for the entire town. The tax dollars per square foot in a downtown district are higher than in any other district, and the expenses to maintain infrastructure are lower than in any other district. In a downtown district, the city benefits from having dozens of tax-producing buildings built right next to each other. This creates a scenario in which tax revenue is produced for relatively low expense. To illustrate, in a purely residential area of Hillsdale, the city might have to lay 100 or more feet of sewer pipe in order to provide essential services to a single building. Downtown, that same length of pipe benefits dozens of businesses and residential units. This creates a scenario in which tax revenue exceeds expenses, and infrastructure investment is easily sustained.
For a concrete example of this, I will offer my own business. Hillsdale Renaissance is the second-highest property tax payer in all of Hillsdale, behind Meijer. Our summer tax assessment was $102,000, Meijer’s was $115,000. Despite this, I own substantially less square feet of property than Meijer. Estimating with Google Earth, downtown Hillsdale takes up approximately 34 acres of space. Meijer’s building and parking lot sits on approximately 45 acres. My tax bill rivals Meijer’s, even though I own only a subset of downtown property. There are dozens more buildings in downtown Hillsdale contributing to the tax roll than the ones that I own, leading to a safe assumption that the total tax generated by downtown Hillsdale is significantly higher than the tax paid by Meijer, despite occupying a significantly smaller total space.
(Meijer’s campus in Hillsdale)
Because tax revenue per square foot is quite high and city expenses are relatively low in downtown Hillsdale, tax dollars can be used to benefit other areas of the city. Everyone knows that Hillsdale is struggling to rebuild its road network without placing additional tax burdens on our citizens. A thriving downtown can help this problem as surplus tax dollars generated downtown can be used throughout town to fix the roads. If we want to fix our roads, it would be wise to increase the taxable value of downtown Hillsdale and then dedicate that surplus revenue to Hillsdale’s roads more generally.
No traffic plan will be perfect, but we can certainly improve upon what we already have. The proposed road diet is good, maybe even great. The road diet will improve the quality of life and perceived value of downtown Hillsdale. That will increase the taxable value of the district generating the most revenue for the City at the lowest cost. Consequently, the surplus revenue can be used to benefit our entire community. For these reasons, we should approve the M-99 road diet.
I think regarding "bike lanes" as "buffer zones" is the right way to regard them for a city like Hillsdale, especially if there really AREN'T that many bikers. If you do have an active bike population, they're arguably an even bigger hazard for people getting into and out of cars, because they're harder to see.
Most cities could benefit from such a "road diet." We've forgotten that many little towns once thrived on the traffic that wandered in on one of these highways, was forced to slow down to pass through town, and took the opportunity to stop for food or sundries. Once the federal highway system went through, a lot of those small towns suffered.
I'd argue that you can see this in the difference between Hillsdale and Coldwater - where the highway IS, and where it is not. Although whether the forest of minimalls right off the highway in Coldwater is a net "good" or not is probably debatable, it's likely that Coldwater sees greater income from that highway exit than Hillsdale sees from M99.