TRAVERSE CITY — Planning for the future of South Airport Road could help manage traffic on the busy thoroughfare.
There’s plenty of it: Garfield Township Planner John Sych said the stretch between Cass Road and Park Drive gets more than 50,000 vehicles per day at its busiest. Creating a corridor plan wouldn’t “solve” the traffic issues that prompt some to avoid the east-west corridor.
A corridor plan would take a close look at zoning and land uses along South Airport Road, Sych said. It would also look for ways to make public investments in infrastructure and aesthetic improvements over the long term, and leverage those to spur private investment.
One way to fund those public investments would be to create a corridor improvement authority, Sych said. That body could use tax increment finance — where growth in taxable value over the starting year is diverted from the township’s coffers to the authority’s.
Sych likened the corridor to Traverse City’s downtown, where the Downtown Development Authority used TIF several years ago to make public investments to help a then-struggling district.
He compared that to Garfield, where for years “big-box” retail thrived but now faces increasing uncertainty — Macy’s, for example, is gone.
“So it’s important that we create an attractive corridor, one that functions and is attractive and also incentivizes some additional private investment, which feeds the corridor improvement authority, which allows for those (public) expenditures to happen,” he said.
Access management would be one aspect of such a plan, Sych said. That would determine how redeveloped sites can access South Airport Road, encouraging the elimination or sharing of driveways. It would also require close cooperation with the Grand Traverse County Road Commission.
Garfield Deputy Planning Director Stephen Hannon showed planning commissioners the Truenorth gas station at LaFranier and South Airport roads. Sych explained the gas station used to have two driveways on each road, now down to one since it was completely rebuilt.
“This one happened to be low-hanging fruit because we were reviewing the site plan, they were doing major changes and completely redoing the whole site so it was like, ‘Alright, if you’re redoing the whole site, how can we make this safer,’” Hannon said.
That won’t be possible along the entire corridor, Hannon said. Nor would that be desirable, since there are many thriving businesses on South Airport. But in the instances where property owners do make some improvements, an access management plan could help traffic move more smoothly by eliminating or consolidating driveways, which reduces the number of turning movements.
It could also guide the addition of more sidewalks — Sych noted new sidewalks from Park to Barlow Street, and on Barlow heading north.
Hannon and Sych also showed planning commissioners where two other busy thoroughfares meet in northwest Michigan: U.S. 31 and U.S. 131 in Petoskey. They compared the intersection’s buried utility lines, medians with plantings, traffic signal poles and decorative lighting to where Barlow and LaFranier meet South Airport.
That busy intersection in Garfield is criss-crossed by overhead utilities, the traffic signals hang on cables and the streetlights are plain.
Burying utilities is extremely costly, Sych said, but a long-term plan funded through a corridor improvement authority could help pay for the process, along with other aesthetic upgrades, Sych said.
Garfield Commissioner Molly Agostinelli agreed that burying the overhead utilities would make South Airport look less “trashy,” although that process alone would take extensive planning.
Petoskey’s example had planning commission Vice Chairman John Racine thinking about South Airport’s built environment differently, he said. He echoed Sych in pointing out that just because it’s largely built out, that doesn’t mean it won’t change in the future.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be too cynical about that and maybe there are ways, little steps here and there like the LaFranier and South Airport gas station stuff you just showed us,” he said. “Those little things might start to add up, and it may not be perfect but it may be better than it is now.”
Creating a corridor plan would take roughly three years, Sych told the planning board. The process would look to the public for extensive input on what they would like to see along the roadway.
Sych said he figured the township planning department could tackle the process largely by itself, potentially engaging consultants for smaller parts like a market study, for example.
The township could also incorporate some of the findings from the county road commission’s East-West Corridor Transportation Study, since it involved South Airport and how to improve traffic flows there — with or without a new bridge across the Boardman-Ottaway River linking Hartman and Hammond roads.
While South Airport stretches for six miles from Silver Lake to Three Mile roads, studying a smaller stretch near Logan’s Landing could be one way to kick off such a planning process, Sych said. Garfield planners could engage with property owners and others with a stake in the area, like Traverse Area Recreation and Transportation Trails.
Planning commissioners were receptive to the idea of a corridor plan, and encouraged Sych to take the idea up with township trustees. Racine said he also wanted the planning board to keep discussing it.
“If it’s a three-year-plus plan,” he said, “you’ve got to get started some day.”