Elsmere City Council unanimously voted Monday night to oppose a reconfiguration of Dixie Highway proposed by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.
The vote came at a special meeting that was called late in the day on Friday, two days after officials from Elsmere, Erlanger, Florence and the General Assembly learned about the reconfiguration in a meeting with KYTC.
“We are not supportive of it,” Elsmere Mayor Marty Lenoff said at the beginning of the meeting.
Dixie Highway, or US-25, is a federal road maintained by the commonwealth, which runs through through multiple states. The area in question falls between the intersections at Turfway Road and Commonwealth Avenue. The proposed reconfiguration affects three cities through which it runs, Florence, Erlanger and Elsmere, and the road serves as a primary thoroughfare through those cities.
The proposed reconfiguration would turn the road’s current structure of four lanes – two in each direction separated by yellow lines – to three lanes: one in each direction with a shared turn lane in the middle. Configurations like this have been dubbed road diets and are purportedly safer than older four-lane configurations. Some versions of road diets that appear in KYTC literature also contain bike and multi-use paths.
Officials took to social media shortly after last week’s meeting to express their frustration with and opposition to the project. Florence Mayor Julie Metzger Aubuchon has already announced the city’s engineer will perform an independent investigation into the traffic and accident patterns on the affected areas in her city (as a sort of second opinion on the cabinet’s numbers), and Erlanger Mayor Jessica Fette has invited residents to come out to Tuesday night’s Erlanger caucus meeting to learn more.
LINK nky has reached out KYTC to learn more heard back prior to Monday’s meeting, likely because of the President’s Day holiday. A representative from the cabinet did not attend Monday’s meeting. However, the city council had been given packets from the cabinet laying out its data and traffic analysis, its rationale for the project, as well as some renderings of the proposed changes. A well-known local contractor has purportedly already been awarded the contract, but LINK nky has not yet confirmed this.
Safety was the primary talking point in KYTC’s reasoning, and it even presented examples of local projects where similar road diets had been instituted. One example was US-27 in Campbell County and Euclid Avenue in Covington, which have seen 58 percent and 56 percent reductions in accidents, respectively, according to the cabinet’s analysis.
Officials, as well as residents who filled the council chambers, were perturbed that such a significant change had somehow gotten so far along seemingly without anyone outside of the cabinet knowing about it.
“We had not idea this was going on,” said Elsmere Police Chief Russell Wood.
Fire Chief Paul LaFontaine and Public Works Director Chris Zerhusen affirmed this. The department heads, council members and mayor all agreed the reconfiguration was more likely to exacerbate the problems the cabinet wanted to address, namely safety and traffic.
“What they’re going to do is just going to compound issues and make accidents worse,” Wood said, “and I think it’s going to be a detriment to our emergency services.”
“This is absolutely the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Council Member Gloria Grubbs. “And I’ve seen a lot of plans over the years that I’ve served on council, and this one–I just, for the life me, I don’t understand how they ever came up with this. We need more lanes, not less lanes, for us to travel through.”
“We have a lot more questions than answers,” Wood said.
Officials encouraged the residents to contact their state representatives, and the city had even put on its Facebook page contact information for the governor and several local legislators so people could reach out.
The meeting in Erlanger will happen Tuesday night at 7 p.m. at the Erlanger City Building on Commonwealth Avenue. It is open to public, and LINK nky has been informed that a representative from the cabinet is planning to attend.
View and download some more detailed renderings submitted to the Elsmere City Council below. We recommend downloading and rotating the file so it can be properly viewed.