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Encouraging transportation solutions consistent with safety, environmental, and wildlife core values.

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Building More Roads is Like Addressing a Weight Problem by Buying Larger Pants

As seen here in Jackson Hole News & Guide

Guest Shot by Brot Coburn, November 11, 2020

As an older guy I sometimes step back to take a broader look, beyond the time horizon of the daily news cycle. The population of the earth has tripled during my lifetime (I passed this eerie personal milestone on Dec. 5, 2019, by my calculation). The first tertile of that growth took some 500,000 years to unfold. Unconstrained, head-spinning economic expansion, as I’ve witnessed over decades in China and India as well as in the U.S., cannot continue indefinitely.

Perhaps our leaders and citizens can take a moment, too, to ponder the possibilities (and needed sacrifices) of a truly sustainable world and ask at least one pertinent local question: How long can we continue to expand our road network?

Politicians speak nobly about transit, sustainability, the environment, reducing fossil fuel consumption and preserving the character of Jackson Hole.

In a recent survey conducted by Friends of Pathways (“How Do Local Candidates Feel About Pathways?”) the candidates unanimously called for expanding use of alternatives to personal vehicles, and voiced support for the ongoing development of pathways. Yet only Christian Beckwith went on record opposing construction of the Tribal Trails Connector, along with Commissioner Luther Propst.

“One of the most dismaying aspects of serving on the Commission,” Propst wrote, “is the width of the disconnect between the steady stream of aspirational resolutions about climate change, etc., and the real decisions that continue to push our community in the wrong direction.”

What we need are transportation alternatives, not road alternatives. Our abiding task is to address growth, not merely accommodate it or, more typically, build our way out of it.

So what will the community get out of paving a new road at the Tribal Trail Connector, and at what downstream cost?

At the moment it appears to be an expensive, potentially dangerous, environmentally unsound and locally disfavored way to increase the incentive to drive cars more, and ride bikes less. If driving a single-passenger car is easy and enjoyable, why do anything else? Inevitably the connector will be used as a shortcut between south Jackson and Teton Village, through a neighborhood with four schools.

Smarter alternatives exist, and have been proposed by Beckwith and others: congestion pricing, careful transit design (including micro-transit), and smart traffic signals.

When the weather allows, the existing Tribal Trails Pathway has long been my preferred transportation option to south Jackson: I can reach the door of Smith’s grocery from our house in Wilson faster on my e-bike than in a car, even when there’s little vehicle traffic. The pathway allows for this and was a major incentive for me to purchase an e-bike. (Never mind that this travel advantage is thoroughly enjoyable, too — a rather different feeling than I have when driving locally. I do ride responsibly, as we all must.) For half the year e-bikes present a viable alternative to driving for many, and it’s no coincidence that sales are mushrooming.

Once a motorable road connects Highway 22 to Tribal Trail, however, I might as well just drive. In the meantime, I really don’t want to be stuck buying a larger pair of pants.

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Tribal Trail: bad timing for a big price tag

The Tribal Trail Connector – a half-mile segment connecting the existing Tribal Trail Road to Highway 22 in northern South Park – has been steadily working its way through the county’s approval process. As the date for the Board of County Commissioners to decide whether to advance the road process nears (on June 2), so do budget decisions in a fiscal crisis. So far, the projected cost to the county ranges from $2-3M, with a total project cost ranging from $8-17M. Given the controversial process thus far, and the commissioner’s own time, bandwidth, and funding constraints, we asked commissioners to put Tribal Trail on the back burner and not to fund it this year. Not to mention that the future of Tribal Trail is also closely tied to future development plans for northern South Park, which (if now is the time to consider its development) needs full funding for holistic planning.

May 20, 2020

Teton County Board of County Commissioners

RE: Please put the Tribal Trail project on hold

Dear Madam Chair Macker and Commissioners,

Thank you for the extensive time and detailed considerations each of you has made into determining next year’s budget given the COVID-19 funding crisis. We last wrote to you expressing our support for fully funding a neighborhood plan for northern South Park, if you believe now is the time to consider development there. In contrast, please put the Tribal Trail road on the back burner and do not fund it now.

Road building is a costly process, whether in staff time, consultant services, stakeholder facilitation, or construction. The cost to the county alone was last budgeted at $2.4-$3.2 million, and the entire project could reach $8-17M. Of course, you have not yet made a decision on whether or not to build the Tribal Trail road, let alone decided on the design that would determine final costs – so these numbers are rough guesses.

This discussion has long been controversial. We find it extremely significant that most of the stakeholder group asked that the process be halted – and that their request was not honored. A controversial proposal like this places a real burden on our community members to engage meaningfully during an ongoing public health crisis. And it adds a cost to your own decision-making bandwidth when you clearly have higher priorities.

Right now, and in the coming year, our community and our elected leaders should be most focused on core government services that provide for human health – whether that’s public health, human services, water quality planning and management, responsible planning, or conservation. These last few months have repeatedly demonstrated the fundamental value of these services for our mental and physical health. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves, where can this money, whether several thousand for facilitation or many million for a road, be put to better use?

Please focus your limited budget and limited time on more-important, less-controversial projects, and put the unnecessary Tribal Trail project on hold for at least a year or indefinitely.

Sincerely,

Signature Brooke Sausser community planner

Brooke Sausser

Community Planning Manager

Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance

This letter appeared in the JH News and Guide and was reposted on the JH Conservation Alliance website

This letter to the Teton County Commissioners can be download it here.

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No Need for Connector Road

By Geoff Gottlieb

Incredibly, the proposed Tribal Trail Connector (TTC) capital project is still alive, even though for the past four years virtually all the facts and data-based arguments made in relation to the TTC have come from parties who are concerned about its costs versus benefits to the community. 

Those in favor of the TTC have been unwilling or, more likely, unable, to make any such argument, resorting to outdated and unsubstantiated assertions, such as “we need it for safety,” “it will alleviate traffic at the Y”, “we need it to protect our children,“ “we need it in the event of an emergency evacuation,” etc, etc.

County Staff, which is biased in favor of the TTC, even though it relies on the work of no less than three independent consulting firms at a cost to the county of approximately $730,000 this fiscal year alone, has failed to make up for this shortcoming, probably because there are no compelling benefits from the TTC to justify its financial and environmental costs. On this basis alone, the TTC project should be cancelled when the Commissioners meet on June 2 to vote on whether or not to proceed to the next planning phase. 

If the Commissioners vote to proceed, then they should at least address some, if not all, of the reasonable arguments made to date by the parties concerned about the TTC’s impact on our community.

If that is too big an ask, they should at least have the decency to recognize that allocating another $1,000,000 to TTC planning is inappropriate on so many levels. The TTC has been reclassified as “non-essential”, and the expected loss of revenue due to the pandemic has required significant operating and capital budget cuts (which may mean the money is not there). Yet the Commissioners see fit to make this allocation while cutting essential services such as fire/ems. It is ironic that one of the key arguments made in favor of the TTC is safety, specifically redundancy for fire/ems. In addition, the County has yet to fill the open position of regional transportation director, which one would assume is important for the continued implementation of the recently updated ITP.

As published in the Jackson Hole News and Guide on March 20, 2020