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Home - Cover Stories
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Beltway or bust
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Omaha planners and engineers say a major highway encircling the metro is inevitable
by Ben Hankey
Just as Americans take pride in their automobiles, inhabitants of major American cities take pride in their highways. Highly iconic status goes to the Washington, D.C. Beltway, Atlanta’s Perimeter, and Kansas City’s I-435, thought to be the fourth-longest beltway in the world.
In a sprawling metropolis, suburban commuters rarely find open road on multi-hour drives to work. And although Omaha traffic isn’t as congested as L.A., D.C., or Chicago, engineers and city planners are looking ahead.
“Transportation, traffic is a quality of life thing,” said Matt Tondl of HDR Engineering. “Omaha has this going for it … but congestion is and will continue to be a problem.”
How much of a problem? According to a cooperative study, paid for by the Omaha-Council Bluffs Metropolitan Area Planning Agency (MAPA), by the year 2035 (accounting for current transportation projects) average travel speeds will drop by 20 percent. This means that, if no additional highways are built, an average Omahan’s 20-minute commute will take 25 minutes, amounting to a $727 dollars increase in annual travel costs per commuter household.
The Omaha-Council Bluffs Metro Beltway Feasibility Study was released last March. It recommends construction of an “inner loop” beltway to encircle Omaha via Bennington, Elkhorn, Waterloo, and Council Bluffs. It would break ground in 2030, extend about 130 miles, and would cost taxpayers an estimated $700 to $750 million. The study predicts drivers would save nine cents per mile on the average commute. According to Tondl, the beltway “needs to be adopted into [MAPA’s] long-range transportation plan,” a view which seems to be shared by several key players in city planning.
Jay Palu, of the local community action group VOICE, is not sold on the beltway proposal. Palu said the study’s vision “misses other segments about what a city needs.”
“I’m not a traffic expert, but transportation is multi-faceted and it’s not just about travel times.” Palu said. “That the beltway should be built is not a foregone conclusion.”
Beltway planners and HDR engineers disagree.
“We can’t ignore something that we’ll need in the future,” said Paul Mullen of MAPA. “We recognize that the city is going to grow and expand and the beltway will be necessary.”
Planners considered three alternatives to the beltway: radial freeways, one entering Omaha from the Northwest and another from the South; an enhanced arterial network of widened highways and added “corridors,” and a light rail system. The study prioritized the beltway because of its cost and perceived ability to alleviate traffic.
Opponents say the beltway would be a detriment to Omaha.
Marty Shukert of RDG Planning and Design, and former Omaha city planning director, believes a beltway would lessen population density, spreading the city too far West.
“I believe it’s an enormous investment of money, that we don’t have, in a project that will cost us more money in the long run,” he said. “That’s not the direction that we should be going in … People stuck in traffic at a suburban intersection would think that this problem would be solved with a beltway. It would not; it would actually be worse. It doesn’t improve traffic. Look at D.C., Kansas City. [Beltways] never solve the problem because they pull development away from the city which loads the beltway with traffic, relocates problems and makes them worse.”
Kansas City built its monumental beltway in 1986. For years, sections of the road remained on the far outskirts of the city. The city didn’t expand evenly as the beltway encouraged more commercial suburban growth away from downtown.
“For a resident of central Omaha a beltway does absolutely no good,” Shukert said. “It might actually be a detriment because it takes something that is right next door and moves it 10 miles out into the country. In fact, this creates greater inefficiency. It creates more miles to travel.”
Mullen does not dismiss the argument, but defends the beltway project working in tandem with other transportation options. “Density and beltways are not mutually exclusive,” he said. “Boston has beltways … Even in a very dense city, you still have up to 90 percent of your traffic driving vehicles. So we need to be looking at how can you do both. If you build a beltway, or even a partial beltway, you have to make sure that the land use that you have out there is consistent with the land uses that you have in other parts of the metropolitan area and that you don’t encourage existing ‘suburban sprawl’ if you want to use that term.”
Will the beltway encourage Omaha to ‘sprawl’? “Totally,” said Shukert.
The beltway discussion, in many ways, raises questions about effective public transportation. The Beltway Feasibility Study said Omaha’s bus system moves about half of a percent of Omaha traffic. In Portland, that number is around eight percent, in New York City, 10. “Public transportation is a problem now,” said Palu, “and I think it’s a priority to include low-income, working poor people with no cars into the discussion. How would the beltway benefit them?”
At a public discussion held last October, Mullen was asked if poorer neighborhoods, such as North Omaha, were considered in the planning of a beltway. “To be completely honest,” said Mullen “no … That is something that we want to look at, but we want to focus on the growth of the major metropolitan area.”
One positive aspect of investing money in a denser downtown with better public transportation, according to Palu, would be the retention of a young, professional, “creative” class. “A city, especially one that hopes to attract and retain a creative core of young professionals must provide a dynamic urban center,” he said. “ A key is to provide a district that can meet the needs of young professionals for space at prices that free them to focus on pursuing creative endeavors. That is a substantially different set of values from what has produced the suburban neighborhoods of the last few decades.”
Tondl and Mullen agree that public transportation needs to have a future in Omaha. However, both would like to see results of a comprehensive study before moving forward. “We acknowledge that transit makes a difference,” said Mullen. “We’re just saying that sometime, regardless of what we’re going to do out there, we’re going to have a need for a beltway.
Beltway opponents say despite support for public transportation, they are not “anti-car.”
“The point is not to be anti-car, but anti-dispersion,” said Shukert. “Increasing density somewhat would be a good thing. A project like a beltway is fundamentally at odds with Midtown Crossing and development projects in the downtown area.”
Palu also hopes that Omahans don’t become entrenched in pro-car/anti-car labeling, lest the city fall into “old thinking” that would hurt Omaha in the long-term.
The beltway idea has been kicked around MAPA and in various urban planning circles for some 10 years. Mullen said it really took hold when a proposed study was brought to the Douglas County Stakeholders Meeting in 2005 and in 2007. County Engineer Tom Doyle, then pitched it to the Board of Commissioners in order to fund MAPA’s study.
Critics and opponents agree public input is needed before moving forward, especially considering the cost of the project and the perceived lack of funds available from the Nebraska Department of Roads.
“We don’t have the money to build it,” said Mullen. “It’s $750 million that we don’t have. Those are all policy decisions that need to be made. What we go with needs to be unified by the public who say ‘This is what we want to look like, this is what we want our transportation system to be.’”
Officials say the beltway wouldn’t break ground for at least 20 years. Because of its scope, officials in multiple counties in Nebraska and Iowa need to agree on the beltway and its route. VOICE is holding a public forum next month to discuss it, and leaders stress that the public dialogue is far from finished.
“Change is what we’re looking at today,” said Mullen, “and we need to be sure that we’re doing what the community wants.”
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