More than two years after first announcing that it was studying the potential widening of I-475 in West Toledo and neighboring Sylvania Township, the Ohio Department of Transportation is embarking on more detailed planning for such a project.
Mannik & Smith, a Toledo engineering firm, holds an $8 million state contract to take a deeper look at the roughly four-mile section between U.S. 23 and Douglas Road that has daily traffic counts ranging from 53,550 to 79,404.
Built in the 1960s and significantly repaired in 1994 and 1995, the freeway is due for reconstruction regardless of whether it is expanded. The traffic now using part of it meets a federal standard for adding a third lane in each direction to the two I-475 now has west of Monroe Street to the U.S. 23 junction, said Kacey Young, the capital programs administrator at ODOT’s Bowling Green district office.
“It’s in our best interest, and in the traveling public’s safety interest, to do the improvements,” which also would include widening the freeway’s left shoulders from their current four feet to 10, Ms. Young said.
But to Peggy Daly-Masternak, who lives within a few hundred feet of I-475 near Douglas, the occasion to rebuild I-475 warrants deeper thinking than what she considers to be an outdated assumption that adding lanes constitutes an improvement.
Homes near the freeway already are burdened with traffic noise and pollution that will only get worse if adding lanes induces more cars and trucks to use it, and in any case will shift some vehicles up to 18 feet closer to those properties, Ms. Daly-Masternak said Friday.
With money available from the recent federal infrastructure law, she said, state planners should instead be looking at ways to reconnect the neighborhoods through which Toledo’s freeways sliced during their construction half a century or so ago, as is being done in other cities like Pittsburgh.
There’s a difference between “slapping down two more lanes” and placing caps over the freeways that can be redeveloped to enhance those neighborhoods, she said.
A report prepared under the banner of Concerned Citizens of Toledo, for which Ms. Daly-Masternak was listed as a coordinator when the group organized two years ago in opposition to I-475 widening, also contends that many people displaced when I-75 was built through central Toledo now live in neighborhoods near I-475.
Those people or their descendants, many of whom are racial minorities, now bear a disproportionate burden from Toledo’s freeway traffic, the report argues, including both quality of life issues and health problems.
In her interview, Ms. Daly-Masternak also accused ODOT of drawing its planning process back out of public view after opposition surfaced during online meetings in 2020, although Ms. Young attributed the absence of public involvement since then to the slow nature of corridor planning, not any attempt at secrecy.
“There is a full-fledged public involvement plan with this contract,” Ms. Young said in reference to the work Mannik & Smith is about to start, with “the first of many public meetings” likely next summer as well as more immediate outreach to “more than 40 groups” identified as stakeholders.
The east-west leg of Toledo’s I-475 was built with three lanes each way between I-75 and Monroe Street and two lanes each way west of Monroe to U.S. 23. As part of rebuilding the I-75 junction during the mid-2010s, a fourth lane was added between I-75 and Douglas.
The remainder of the east-west leg was last overhauled during the mid-1990s, when its concrete pavement was patched and then overlaid with a layer of asphalt, and a tall concrete wall replaced once-traditional guardrail in the median.
Ms. Young said the soonest any major work is plausible west of Douglas is in 2027, and that assumes that planning is fast-paced and construction funding is allocated – “if all the stars and moons aligned.”
So far, ODOT’s Transportation Review Advisory Council, which prioritizes funding for new highways and major expansions or overhauls, has set aside funds only for the current planning work, although the Bowling Green office has a request pending for detailed-design money.
It is likely that construction, if approved, will occur in several phases, Ms. Young said, possibly starting with replacement of overpasses that don’t have room underneath for freeway widening.
Among those structures is a bridge on Woodley Road that ODOT redecked in 2016 and one on Monroe similarly overhauled the following year. Nearby bridges carrying Bowen Road and Rushland Avenue over I-475 also were redecked in 2017 and 2016, respectively, but it’s less definite those would need replacement.
Rebuilding the freeway itself could easily be split at Talmadge Road, Ms. Young said.
Although the ODOT administrator said the third-lane concept is driven by current traffic demand, not future projections, only the piece east of Talmadge now has enough traffic to meet a federal standard she cited.
The Highway Capacity Manual published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board specifies that three lanes in each direction are appropriate for expressways used by 68,000 or more vehicles per day, Ms. Young said.
According to ODOT traffic counts from last year, I-475’s average daily traffic was 79,404 between Douglas and Monroe, 71,086 between Monroe and Secor, and 73,284 between Secor and Talmadge.
But it tailed off to 53,550 vehicles per day between Talmadge and Corey Road and 63,542 between Corey and U.S. 23. The public presentation in August, 2020 stated that 72,000 vehicles per day was the traffic volume for the entire stretch from Douglas to U.S. 23.
Ms. Daly-Masternak said widening I-475 is also unsupported by a federal list of highway congestion that significantly affects truck traffic. That list from 2020, she noted, included in its Top 100 only one Toledo area Interstate, I-75 between I-475 and South Avenue, and that was in 100th place and attributable to the reconstruction project underway there at the time.
During the initial feasibility study released in 2020, DGL Consulting Engineers also investigated adding ramps at Talmadge to convert the current half-interchange there to a full set, but ruled that out on the grounds that the traffic benefit would not justify condemning dozens of nearby homes.
Ms. Young said that while the current roadway is narrow, the right-of-way is wide enough that widening the left shoulders and adding a third lane would require only “strip takes” from certain properties next to the freeway, particularly near its interchanges. Such widening would also involve extensive retaining-wall construction to squeeze more roadway within the existing right-of-way, she said.
Any widening project would also include construction of noise walls where they don’t already exist, Ms. Young said.
Ms. Daly-Masternak argued noise walls are a waste of money, in that while they may marginally help residents right next to the roadway, they amplify noise heard by others living in the surrounding neighborhood.
She said she hopes the information in her group’s report will prompt Toledo City Council to once again take up a resolution opposing I-475 widening that it considered two years ago without taking action.
“But it’s only a resolution,” Ms. Daly-Masternak said, asserting that the time has come for the Ohio legislature and other state-level leaders “to rethink how we look at highways and transportation.”
First Published December 10, 2022, 11:01 p.m.
