Monona Drive Update

The city council and the Ad Hoc Monona Drive Committee met at 7 a.m. this morning to review a variety of cost-saving measures for this project. (I am no longer on the ad hoc committee, but did serve on it for the first several years as the project progressed through its development.)

I'm going to take a shot at summarizing the project status and some of the numbers. First, the entire Monona Drive project is planned for three phases and will extend from Broadway to Cottage Grove Road. The first phase is planned for 2009 construction and extends from Broadway to just south of the Nichols/Pflaum intersection. The roadway cross-section will include 2 lanes in each direction with bike lanes, sidewalks and a 16'-wide median. The median will also have protected left-turn bays. Traffic lights will be added at Owen Road.

Why do the project? The Monona Drive pavement is shot; it's over 40 years old and is beyond its useful life. The roadway is unsafe. Monona Drive has a crash rate about 3 times the statewide average for an urban roadway. The underlying utilities are in poor to fair condition.

The protected left-turn bays will reduce congestion and improve safety by allowing left-turning vehicles to get out of traffic, which will reduce rear-end crashes and the impulse to hurry-up-and-turn that leads to a lot of right-angle crashes.

Think Monona Drive is busy now? You're right it is - it carried almost 26,000 annual average daily traffic (AADT) in 2006 as you can see on the Madison Traffic counts web page. BTW, converting raw traffic counts to average annualized numbers is part science, part art form - look at the WisDOT traffic page for Monona and you see that DOT showed about 20,000 AADT for Monona Drive. The Monona Drive engineers from Strand Associates did their own count and found 26,000 vehicles per day just south of Walgreen's.

An interesting aspect of both sets of counts, however, is that Monona Drive traffic has remained fairly stable since at least 2001. Strand used a demand model to project Monona Drive will carry between 29,000 and 53,000 AADT in 2030 depending on what is done on USH 51 (Stoughton Road). I personally suspect the growth may be slower than the model projects and it will never reach 53,000 because things will simply break down before then and something else will happen. Nonetheless, 33,000 vehicles per day is a reasonable expectation by 2030 (that may seem like a long time away but highway engineers typically use 20 years in the future as the 'design year').

Interestingly, traffic volumes on Monona Drive neared 30,000 AADT in 1996 (this was using using the lower DOT averages) - the last time major construction was done on USH 51.

Costs

The cost to Monona is currently projected at about $8.3 million. Cost saving measures under consideration will reduce the cost by estimated $1,155,000 to bring Monona's cost to about $7.2 million (these figures include utility work). These costs will probably be paid by a combination of utility ratepayers, TIF funds, and local property taxpayers. The mix has not been determined yet.

The committee generally supported those changes. About $500,000 in savings come from reduced real estate costs and another $600,000 in 'construction' changes (most of these are actually changes in aesthetics, although $100,000 will be saved by shortening the project about 100'.)

The council will also be considering whether to further shorten the project to either Acacia or Tompkins. At this point I do not favor that change because construction cost inflation is outstripping generally inflation and far more than increases in federal-aid.

The committee also discussed a simple remove-and-replace, i.e. just tear up the pavement and put down new concrete. This idea has been bandied about around town a bit (I always wonder just how many people are really talking about this stuff.) Simply replacing the roadway 'as is' will cost us nearly as much money and leave us with an unsafe road with inadequate capacity. Somewhat surprisingly this approach would only reduce the cost to Monona by between $600,000 to $1,000,000. Only limited utility work could be done, so we would be putting a new roadway on top of old sewer and water pipes.

We all tend to focus on costs because they are fairly easy to quantify, but we should also be looking at the benefits, which can also be quantified with a bit more difficulty. If you just rebuild the road 'as is', you do not get any safety improvement.

Aside from the terrible human toll that result from auto crashes, those crashes have a real and measurable economic cost. According to the NHTSA, roadway crashes imposed $3.8 billion in cost in Wisconsin alone in 2000. One fatality on average imposes nearly $4 million in social economic costs. Injury crashes can easily average nearly $200,000 (see below for more detail). The safety improvements on Monona Drive are projected to substantially reduce injury crashes and will yield significant social economic benefits - aside from saving a family from a tragic loss.

(For insight into the human and economic costs of severe crashes watch the HBO documentary Coma. )

The project will also reduce traffic delays due to congestion, which also yields economic benefits. As the Level of Service deteriorates, congestion goes up and so do the costs. The planned improvements will put Monona Drive at LOS B rather than its current LOS D. The rebuild 'as is' will leave us at LOS D.

We need to do this project and we need to do it right.



More on Crash Costs

In 1994, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued a Technical Advisory that assigned the following dollar costs to crashes:

K Fatal $2,600,000
A Incapacitating $180,000
B Evident $36,000
C Possible $19,000
PDO Property Damage Only $2,000

These are in 1994 dollars.

North Carolina DOT issued their own 2005 Standardized Crash Cost Estimates

K Fatal $3,500,000

A Incapacitating $174,000

B Evident $45,000

C Possible $21,000

PDO Property Damage Only $4,500

a) Medical includes hospital, physician, rehabilitation, prescription and related cost.
b) Public Service include police, fire, ambulance and helicopter services.
c) Victim Work Loss includes wages, fringe benefits and household work.
d) Employer Cost values time, the extra work and distractions for supervisors and coworkers that injuries cause.
e) Travel Delay values the time lost in traffic jams caused by crashes.
f) Property Damage is the cost to repair or replace damaged vehicles and property.
g) Quality of Life values the pain, suffering and quality of life that the family loses because of a death or injury.