Anchorage Press: Branding a Megaproject

Don Young’s Way, the proposed bridge across Knik Arm, gets more headlines, but unlike the bridge, the highway-to-highway interconnect (branded “H2H” by project planners) is actually making headway. The $600 million project—the official cost is $581 million in “2005 dollars”—will provide a freeway interconnect between the Seward Highway and the Glenn Highway. So they’ve remodeled a building on 15th Avenue and hung a sign with their new “H2H” brand. The logo is grayish-green, yellow and blocky, with a black numeral 2 standing in for the word “to” in “Highway-to-Highway”—it looks like a graphic from a late-1980s pop record. Like something that’s sort of popular, but wants to be hip.

And it’s almost hip in Fairview to support the H2H. The Fairview Community Council supports the project, albeit with some reservations. Even if some Alaskans are a bit freaked when they sense the marketing effort involved—why is the government passing out free ballpoint pens? 

“The one plan that we support, conditionally, is the thing that’s called ‘cut-and-cover,’” says Fairview Council President Sharon Chamard.

A cut-and-cover freeway would take a path through Fairview along the bottom of a giant trench. There would be blocks-long bridge decks up top, to reconnect Fairview’s existing grid without the stoplights required by the current pass-though traffic on Gambell and Ingra Streets. The end result on the surface level might look more like the Fairview of the 1960s, with all that pesky South Anchorage traffic passing into downtown without ever stopping at a red light in the neighborhood.

“The thing I think the community council would oppose is a road that divides the community, like a surface street. I think another thing we would certainly oppose is an elevated freeway,” Chamard says. “There are plenty of examples in the Lower 48 of elevated freeways dividing neighborhoods.”

The new H2H headquarters will serve as a joint office for a klatch of state, federal and municipal employees assigned to the project. At least five government agencies will be on board. The H2H headquarters will also have permanent desks for some of the projects consulting contractors.

Flashlight figures Don Young’s Way—a brand the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority so far seems hesitant to use—and H2H are the first projects in Alaska to get their own brands. Jim Childer, the Alaska Department of Transportation project manager assigned to H2H, says it’s important enough to warrant its own brand.

“We wanted to brand the project so that it wasn’t just DOT’s, or just the city’s, or just a federal project—they all have spaces here,” says Childer. “It’s important enough to Anchorage. It’s also potentially controversial and it’s impactful enough [to warrant its own brand.]”

Childer vacated his office at DOT to move to the H2H digs in Fairview, one of the neighborhoods expected to shudder (but hopefully not shutter) under the “impactful” presence of H2H. Moutain View and the east end of downtown can also expect some dramatic changes.

People and businesses will have to move to make room for the freeway. Childer explained briefly how the government intends to navigate that problem. He says government can provide comparable land in exchange as H2H acquires right-of-way. Naturally, Childer doesn’t like the word “taking” to describe such things. He says in some cases, renters might have their rent paid in advance when forced to move.

At the moment, no route has been chosen to connect the highways. There are still lines on maps at H2H that suggest a freeway around the city on the east side, but that’s an unlikely scenario. Almost all of the cars on the Seward Highway are heading to-and-from downtown or Midtown. Glenn Highway traffic is the same. Only about 10 percent of the vehicles are heading through Anchorage, so a multi-million dollar eastside bypass wouldn’t serve many people. There just isn’t a huge demand for the Seward-to-Glennallen drive.

Childer says the environmental study, which includes studying effects on neighborhoods and culture, will eliminate some routes within a few months. He wants that to go quickly, because all the properties under the various lines on maps at H2H are under a cloud. “It puts every one of these households that is under one of these lines into consternation,” he says. “Nobody wants to live under that sort of cloud for six or seven years.”

  

The people of Fairview don’t seem overly anxious about the project, but they are paying attention. Some were eager to talk about it a community picnic last weekend.

“The outcome is going to be something,” Michael Howard said Saturday at a community picnic in Fairview. “Highway-to-highway will be the biggest urban road project in the history of Alaska.”

Howard serves as Fairview Community Council’s secretary. He’s also a board member of Anchorage Citizens Coalition, an organization that focuses on land-use planning around the city. He grew up in a neighborhood in Anchorage in the U-Med district and settled in Fairview after moving back home from Portland, Oregon in 2008. He works at a land-planning consultant firm. The title on his business card says “assistant” above the words “community development.”

Howard spent much of the picnic at the grill, flipping burgers and turning hotdogs for a line of people toting paper plates—classic community organizer chores.  He says big highways have a tendency to encourage driving. He wants Anchorage to focus on planning neighborhoods that don’t require so much driving. “The citizen coalition says ‘give land use a chance,’—develop a land use alternative and seriously consider it,” he says.

Traffic planners predict the urban streets that connect the two highways now are destined for gridlock. Howard figures the current traffic is hardly in crisis, not by most standards. “I say, ‘What congestion?’ and if you’ve looked at any other city, you would laugh at the idea,” he says, pointing out that highway traffic through Fairview is only thick twice a day. Besides, he says, freeways invite more of the same. “What (H2H) will do is draw more traffic. It will increase the convenience and necessity to drive,” Howard says.

Planning alternatives are available. Some are mapped out in the city’s long-term plan called “Anchorage 2020.” The citizens’ coalition supports the planning vision described in Anchorage 2020, which includes town centers away from downtown. That sort of planning might spread jobs and shopping across the Anchorage bowl, creating a city where highway traffic might not be destined for gridlock. People would simply make shorter trips.

Howard says the community council and citizens coalition are not so far apart in their thinking. “I don’t think our visions are that much different,” he says. They both want more modes of transportation. Both want a vital urban neighborhood in the wake of whatever project the H2H engineers eventually build. “We all agree, mostly, on what should become of Fairview,” he says.

Chamard says the H2H is an opportunity to give streets back to her neighborhood. Over decades of adding lanes to Gambell and Ingra Streets, Alaska DOT has created a north-south couplet that already divides the neighborhood. “The streets that used to be the commercial center of this neighborhood have been given up to this regional traffic,” she says. “Did you know that there’s not one place in Fairview where you can go inside and sit and have a cup of coffee? We don’t have one coffee shop.”