NEWS - Ports & Transportation

By Ted Carter
SBJ Staff

Savannah has made some sweet music over the years, but the homegrown sound City Manager Michael Brown wants to hear will come from jackhammers breaking up the concrete of the Interstate-16 exit flyover.

“I’d like us to start talking about the tools to take this thing down,” Brown said to a capacity crowd on hand at the Con-Ed Center last Weds. night for the kick off the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard-Montgomery Street Charrette and Expo.

Removing the 35-year-old flyover presents an opportunity to “restore the fabric of our city,” said Brown, who expects a study to be completed by fall on demolition and traffic routing strategies for that area.

The “I-16 Exit Ramp Removal Study” will be managed by the Savannah-Chatham County Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC), conducted by the Columbia, S.C., consulting firm Wilbur Smith Associates, and assisted by the Savannah urban design firm Sottile & Sottile.

The study will address the civic implications of removing the exit ramp, economic implications, impact on real estate values and a transportation analysis.

This new study, being funded by Special Local Option Sales Tax money, will build on a 2008 Georgia Department of Transportation study that looked at a trio of traffic scenarios that would result by removal of the flyover. Each scenario found that traffic would be improved, according to Ellen Harris, a historic preservation officer with the MPC who will also assist with the forthcoming ramp removal study.

“That sort of gave us a green light to look at it further,” Harris said.

The new study’s civic element will identify roads and avenues cut off by the exit ramp and ways in which its removal would restore connectivity to downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.

The economic analysis portion is expected to show that without the obstacle of a freeway ramp, the areas just to the south and west of MLK Jr. Boulevard would see some of the economic resurgence enjoyed in recent years by Montgomery Street and other neighborhoods north of the ramp, planners say.

At Wednesday’s presentation, design consultant Christian Sottile cited the rise in residential and commercial values that followed the replacement of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway heavily damaged in a 1989 earthquake. The freeway ran along the city’s waterfront. Replacing it with a street level boulevard led to property value increases of 50 percent, according to Sottile, who called the removal of the I-16 exit ramp “an incredibly important part of revitalization” of the entire MLK Jr. Boulevard corridor.

He believes that the construction of the ramp in Savannah caused the demolition of “entire neighborhoods,” and said Savannah is among a select group of U.S. cities that has conceded they made poor transportation choices in the post and are now ready to make up for them.

The real estate analysis portion of the study, to be performed largely by the Savannah firm of Gilbert & Lattimore, is expected to give insights into the value of the nine acres now occupied by the flyover under various development scenarios.

Harris said public comments gathered during the charette and in the weeks that follow will help guide proposals for redevelopment of the flyover land. She said planners envision green space, recreation areas and dense, but non-intensive, commercial development.

The transportation analysis will look at options for exiting and assessing I-16 and will evaluate different scenarios for the extension of the existing grid pattern. Further, it will provide an analysis of traffic redistribution and road alignments.

Harris said the study that will go to the City Council will not address funding sources other than the Georgia Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration. “They’ll have to look at how to pay for it,” she said.

She expects a 6- to 8-year timeframe for tearing down the ramp and replacing it with new a new road network, though she noted that is an optimistic estimate.

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