Re: Speaking of Hwy 95

["Sam Scripter" <MoscowSam@moscow.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Mayme Trumble <maymet@moscow.com>
To: vision2020@uidaho.edu <vision2020@uidaho.edu>
Date: Friday, February 19, 1999 6:41 AM
Subject: Re: Speaking of Hwy 95


>I want to know who's stupid idea these couplets were anyway?
>I have never seen a small town so torn up in my life and I have lived in a
>lot of places. Why don't we have a "truck by-pass" like so many other towns
>our size??  I am not against cars driving through the middle of our town to
>get to places, but the double trucks and trucks filled with logs are
>unmanagable.

Well, there was a time when all those trucks went in both directions, up and down Main Street, smack-dab through
the core of downtown.

That was before we had trees planted there, before Friendship Square.

Back then, Third and Main still was the "100%" corner of highest retail activity in this city.

Back then, we had JC Penny Co on Main St, The Spruce, the Knobby, GTE, WWP, David's Dept Store (maybe still going),
and so on, many that I no longer remember.

Downtown was still a viable retail and service center and business women and men in the core wanted the truck
traffic off of Main because of the negative atmosphere it created for their customers and clients.

Jackson and Washington as a one-way-couplet seemed to be the only financially and neighborhood-environmentally
feasible solution.

Even today, there are no other existing north-south streets feasible for "through traffic" alternatives.  Other
streets were not feasible back then, and are not today, because they would require considerably greater mileage of
construction/re-construction and concomitantly greater expense than the relatively very short distances enacted on
south-bound Jackson and north-bound Washington.  Further, any existing streets would have cut through residential
neighborhoods and or the UI campus, which would have caused public uproar, even without consideration of the costs.

A total bypass, compatible with existing development, always seems to be expensive beyond serious consideration,
and surely beyond any real action plans.

Idaho, Latah County, and Moscow, cannot fund meaningful traffic infrastructure over any realistically useful short
time frame.

My definition of meaningful means to install it before land uses incompatible with highway bypasses have already
occured.  My definition means to put the highway bypasses in place such that they foster and guide compatible land
uses before they occur rather than as stop-gap responses to what already are dismal landuse incongruities.

SamIam
MoscowSam@moscow.com

>We should go on strike until they get those kinds of vehicles out of
>downtown. We could be like tree huggers and become road huggers, blocking
>the road.  Don't we as the people who live in this town have any say in how
>our roads are routed?  Why can't we have a by-pass? Surely the trucking
>industry can't like this system.
>
>Mayme Trumble
>maymet@moscow.com
>
>The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
>
>