GRIDLOCK GURU : Building dip means faster trip to work
Posted on Friday, October 10, 2008
The housing slump has improved traffic in Northwest Arkansas, and that’s a wonderful thing for drivers who go north on Interstate 540 into Benton County each morning.
There are no statistics to support this claim.
Yet, The Guru thinks it’s true — with apologies to builders and real estate agents who made a killing building and selling homes, didn’t save their money for a rainy day and now complain about the monsoon.
It’s a narrow window of improvement, though.
I-540 is way better than it used to be at 7: 30 a. m. on weekdays for northbound drivers just north of Elm Springs Road.
Traffic slowed to a crawl so often prior to this year that The Guru started keeping track of how long the delays took as he headed to work in Lowell. Sometimes it took 10-12 minutes to cover the three miles between Elm Springs Road and Wagon Wheel Road before the traffic would work itself out and start moving at a good clip again by the time he neared Arkansas 264.
It wasn’t nearly as bad at 7 a. m.
It was much better by 8 a. m.
But 7: 30 a. m. to 7: 50 a. m. was painful.
The area was at its worst during the school year, and The Guru’s theory was that drivers dropped their children off at schools in Washington County and then headed for the office in Benton County all at about the same time.
It was complicated by Arkansas State Police trooper Dennis Johnson, who parks on the shoulder near Elm Springs Road. He’s always there, watching traffic. The Guru thought motorists hitting their brakes at the sight of Johnson’s car played a role in the delays.
It didn’t, and neither did the surge of parents headed north.
What’s changed is that the dump trucks are gone.
As drivers got to Wagon Wheel Road, a stream of dump trucks poured onto I-540. They’d merge into traffic, wouldn’t get up to highway speed and everyone slowed down. That caused a ripple of delays all the way back to Elm Springs Road.
But it’s all different this year. There’s rarely a delay.
Rear-end accidents that occurred so often in I-540 ’s left lane are infrequent now because everyone keeps moving at a good clip.
“I’ve thought about it quite a bit,” said Johnson, who’s been a state trooper for 30 years in Northwest Arkansas. “The cars just don’t have to stop as much as they used to. What’s different is the dump trucks.”
Tom Vanderbilt, whose fantastic book Traffic recently spent five weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, said The Guru likely has nailed it with his belief that missing dump trucks helped I-540.
“You are right to suspect vehicles with such different characteristics, like dump trucks, can have a large impact on traffic flow — traffic models are always careful to try and figure out the percentage of trucks on a particular facility,” Vanderbilt wrote in an e-mail. “And removing these might indeed improve things.
“ Small changes can produce relatively large effects. Adding a few vehicles can send a system into slowdown, while removing them might make things wholly better.”
Who says I-540 needs to be widened to six lanes ? Robert J. Smith, aka The Guru, writes on traffic issues in Northwest Arkansas each Friday. He can be reached at gridlockguru @arkansasonline. com or www. nwanews. com / gridlockguru.
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