Traffic Bottleneck a Hindrance

In a January 7 column in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., Leland Conway insisted that the “growth issue” be at the top of the city’s agenda for 2007. Accompanying the article was a picture of rush-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic on the part of Hwy. 27 that connects Lexington and Nicholasville. The traffic problem is compounded often when traffic is backed up for miles as the result of an accident.

To make matters worse, that section of highway has been in the process of commercial development for years and is now the location of far too many traffic lights. A good analogy is the same highway in its Somerset location (also four-lane), with almost 30 traffic lights (count ’em) in that town of only 12,000 citizens. Finally, a bypass (which is what the original #27 road was supposed to be) has been built around the east side of the town. Such a bypass is not possible for the Lexington-Nicholasville mess.

The column actually was about planning, something often discussed perhaps justifiably, but there are agencies in place, particularly planning/zoning, to take care of that – supposedly. The PDA program, a needless tax-collected giveaway (bribe) to people far beyond the service area for not developing their land, comes to mind, also. People owning nearly all properties contiguous to the service area have not availed themselves of PDA, for obvious reasons.

It seems apparent that no agency will be able to solve the transit problem on either #27 or #68, which turns into the South Broadway bottleneck. A child of the 1930s, I seem to remember a sort of trolley line that ran between Nicholasville and Lexington. It was so close to the highway that it could be seen from the highway occasionally. It was a feeder of sorts, like the rail systems commuters use in the largest cities, parking their cars in the suburbs and taking the train into the city. One wonders if such a line could not be fashioned again.

The Norfolk Southern Railway runs through the business sections of both Nicholasville and Lexington. In fact, it abuts the west side of the malls on Nicholasville Road and crosses South Broadway at Scott Street, practically adjacent to the UK campus. It’s single track between Nicholasville and Fayette Mall, but there might be enough roadway for a private track if the railroad would be willing to consider a commuter project. Railroads do not want passenger service, and such service would be impossible where single track is in place (about 40-50 freight trains a day through Lexington), but it might be worth a try.

It might be worth considering such a line away from the railroad. Commuters from Nicholasville, Wilmore, Danville, and places farther south (and there are many such commuters using both highways) could park at Nicholasville – parking areas part of the project, of course – and take the train. As it stands, the traffic problem, especially with the bottlenecks created by multi-lanes being squeezed into four-lane and two-lane streets is as much a consideration for orderly growth as where to locate entities anywhere in the county.

This may all have been examined before, but maybe a new look is in order now.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark