Future traffic on Route 161 a growing concern

As growth continues in the southeastern part of Union County, local and state officials have concerns about the future impacts to Route 161.

A group of county, city, township and village officials as well as representatives from the Ohio Department of Transportation met recently for the first time to discuss all that is happening along the Route 161 corridor between Plain City and the City of Dublin. ODOT called the meeting as a way for jurisdictions to get on the same page as independent developments spring up along the route, expanding a road that has seen largely rural land along its corridor.

“There are a lot of large projects, both, obviously, in Union County, Jerome Township and moving west to Plain City and Dublin has acquired some property in Franklin and Madison counties as well so trying to coordinate all that,” said Bill Narducci, the Union County administrator. “The general takeaway is that all these developments are going to significantly increase traffic along the corridor and likely a widening of 161 to multiple, additional lanes is going to be required and how do we coordinate that as individual jurisdictions.”

Two major projects are planning to locate diagonally from one another across Route 161, which could bring traffic onto the roadway. On the north side of the corridor will be the Jerome Township Innovation District, which will sit under a nearly 800-acre zoning overlay between the CSX rail line near Kileville and Industrial Parkway. Just southwest of that in Madison County will be the Madison Gateway project, which would see a mixture of development options including residential and commercial spaces on 250 acres of land.

Those two developments alone could bring hundreds, if not thousands of new drivers onto the roadway in the coming years.

There are a number of other projects along the corridor in varying stages of progress, including the planned passenger rail stop west of Dublin. The city is also working through its West Innovation District, which is adding a mixture of office, research, laboratory and clean manufacturing uses on 1,100 acres of land between Avery Road, Houchard Road, Shier-Rings Road and Route 161/Post Road, according to information from Dublin.

“(Development) really has the potential to affect the roundabout at Cosgray Road, the new (U.S. 33/Route 161) interchange project that is still being built, so you’re talking about adding a lot of traffic,” Narducci said.

ODOT pulled together officials from the City of Dublin, Union County, City of Marysville, Franklin County, Madison County, Plain City, Darby Township (Madison County) and Jerome Township. The department has also hired a consultant to look at long-term planning for the corridor.

“Nothing’s been determined yet, it’s more of a planning effort, like a long-range corridor planning effort and with all the developments they’ve seen, they thought, and can basically see, there’s not a lot of coordination,” Narducci said. “And that’s inherent, you know, when you have all these different jurisdictions and these different developments.”

Narducci said two concerns that pop up as a result deal with the timing of projects and cost. Since the projects are proposed and worked out per the developer, they would be coming online at different times.

“We have the innovation district that’s well on its way and we have some projects in Madison County that are really in their infancy, they’re almost in their planning stages,” he said. “But, again, obviously these infrastructure projects take a long time to plan and build so we want to make sure we’re doing it once and getting it right.”

Additionally, as the projects come in, there will have to be consideration for how funding is collected to pay for those infrastructure upgrades. The Madison Gateway project, for example, was pitched by Madison County and its developer, Schottenstein Real Estate Group (SREG), as having a 30-year, 100% tax increment financing (TIF) agreement. While the agreement would make the Jonathan Alder school district whole, board of educations members were concerned about where those diverted funds would go and how they would be used.

“What I had imparted on the group was that these funds needed to be directed toward the improvements that we were talking about in that meeting, not toward improvements that only develop the developer’s project,” Narducci said.

Looking forward, Union County will have one of the first major projects to go in the area, which is extending Houchard Road north from its intersection with Route 161 to Warner Road just west of Industrial Parkway. With that, Narducci said, the county is concerned about timing. If that crossing is made into a new intersection, then whatever turn lanes or roundabout lanes are installed have to empty out into the correct lane count – right now Route 161 is a two-lane road but a widening would change the intersection configuration.

Narducci said those are the kinds of issues that need to be on everyone’s mind as they make decisions about projects.

While there is no official plan to hold reoccurring meetings, he said there is an interest to keep this conversation going until some more formal processes are figured out.