Widening Hurstbourne Road won’t help
November 14, 2006A just-released traffic study is recommending, among other things, widening sections of Hurstbourne Road south of Shelbyville Road. It just seems like that’s not going to really help, it will only mean the road can have larger traffic jams than it already does. Widening Hurstbourne won’t mean the intersections can handle more traffic, and that’s the real bottleneck on Hurstbourne.
Both Taylorsville and Shelbyville are major intersections, as is the I-64 ramp. Plus all the shopping centers, especially the big Wal-Mart and the Lowe’s. Instead of trying to find ways of holding more cars they should spend more effort seeing if they can’t remove cars from the area with mass transit.
That’s the one part that seems promising about this plan, adding a TARC circulator that would serve all the commercial districts in the area. So you could get around the malls and major shopping centers without having to drive to each one. The key though is whether they can make the circulator run often enough so that people are willing to ride it. If it’s every half-hour that’s just not going to cut it, it has to be like every ten minutes or else ridership will be negligible.