What do you get when you combine a record busy summer with a series of road and bridge closures and detours of major thoroughfares? The answer is what many locals have called the worst summer of Traverse City gridlock in memory. It’s also a problem that could only worsen in future years as local population and tourism numbers continue to grow – and as the city, county, and state eye projects that would fix -- but jam up -- crucial roads during upcoming summers. And while there are ideas on the table that could speed up traffic flow around town, they likely wouldn’t take hold fast enough to save TC from being called “Traffic City.”

Just how busy has this summer been? In July, Cherry Capital Airport (TVC) saw 112,926 incoming and outgoing airline passengers – not just a record, but 22 percent higher than July 2019, TVC’s previous biggest month ever. July traffic was up more than 200 percent versus last year.

Trevor Tkach, president and CEO of Traverse City Tourism, tells The Ticker hotel numbers are comparable to where they were during summer 2019. At face value, that already means summer 2021 is on par with one of Traverse City’s biggest tourism seasons ever. But Tkach also notes that hotel occupancy alone doesn’t tell the full story: More Airbnb rentals in the area, more travel to surrounding counties, and more people taking day trips to the region are all likely bringing more traffic without being reflected in hotel stays.

While Brad Kluczynski – manager of the Grand Traverse County Road Commission (GTCRC) – doesn’t think this summer’s amount of traffic has seen “a drastic increase over non-COVID years,” he does acknowledge there are factors that are exacerbating traffic flow.

“There is a lot of traffic within the area that's being moved because of all the different construction projects,” Kluczynski says. “For part of the summer, we had Garfield down to one lane. The State of Michigan has M-37 partially closed down, due to major resurfacing and roundabout construction. The City of Traverse City has three bridges under construction. And we have the Hammond roundabout going on. These are all things that, unfortunately, we have to do during the summer. And that has made for localized pockets of extremely high volumes of traffic beyond what we normally experience.”

Kluczynski continues: “Because of the roundabout at Hammond and Four Mile, we have noticed a significant backup to US-31. And then on Three Mile Road approaching US-31, we’ve also noticed a significant backup – sometimes as far back as South Airport. We're also seeing higher traffic volumes on South Airport, as people do what they can to avoid the downtown area. So, the east-west ways through town are just not as easy to use right now as they have been in the previous years.”

One question many locals have been asking is: “Why is this all happening at the same time?”

According to James Lake, the northern Michigan media representative for the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), the big reason for road construction overlaps across MDOT, GTCRC, and the City of Traverse City is that all three have very limited windows to schedule their projects.
“So much of what we do is temperature and weather dependent,” Lake says. “We don't have a lot of choice when it comes to the time of year that we do this work. So while there is coordination between the city, GTCRC, and MDOT when it comes to projects – and while there are times when coordination can alleviate the inconvenience for road users – it’s not always possible to say, ‘Okay, we won't do this project because you're doing that project.’”

There can also be benefits to doing several projects all at once: According to City Engineer Tim Lodge, “the point of bundling the bridges together [and doing those projects simultaneously] was to have a project large enough to attract bridge contractors to bid our project.” With three bridges in the initial project bundle – Park Street, South Cass Street, and Eighth Street – Lodge says the city was able to attract three bids. He adds that doing all three bridges concurrently will actually minimize inconvenience in the long run.

“We are completing the work in the shortest amount of time possible,” Lodge says. “When people ask, ‘Why three bridges [at once]?’, I have to comment that repairing these bridges is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence and completing them in the shortest amount of time is better than over several years.”

The good news is that there are several efforts underway aimed at improving traffic flow. Kluczynski says GTCRC is in the process of “finalizing our SCOOT system, which will hopefully be in place in the next couple of months.” SCOOT, which stands for “Split Cycle Offset Optimization Technique,” is a Siemens Mobility technology described as “a dynamic, online, real-time method of signal control” that “continuously measures traffic demand on all approaches to intersections.” The system then “uses this information to optimize the signal timings at each intersection in order to minimize delays and stops.” GTCRC will launch the system on South Airport Road, and MDOT is already utilizing the technology on several state roadways in town.

GTCRC is also moving forward with a “Boardman River Crossing Study,” picking up the threads of an oft-discussed but long-delayed “bypass” that could eventually bring a new east-west corridor to Traverse City. The project will study a radius from South Airport south to Beitner Road and from US-31/Division Street east to Keystone Road. Through public input, ecological data collection, traffic analysis, and more, the study will examine the potential traffic benefits, environmental impacts, and costs surrounding three potential Boardman River crossings: one linking Hartman and Hammond roads, one extending Birmley Road over the river to Cass Road, and one revamping and expanding the existing Cass Road crossing.

The bad news? There’s no guarantee that a new Boardman River crossing is coming at all. One of the outcomes the study will consider is a “no-build option,” and even if GTCRC decides to build a new crossing, that project will be aimed at addressing Traverse City’s traffic issues a decade or more into the future.

That means locals will have to make do with existing roadways when major construction projects occur during the next few summers. Those projects include additional GTCRC roundabouts at the Cass/Keystone and Keystone/River/Beitner intersections, both planned for next summer; repairs or replacements of three more downtown bridges – West Front Street, North Cass, and South Union – all slated for next year; an MDOT reconstruction of Grand View Parkway, planned for the summer of 2023; and a City of Traverse City renovation of East Front Street, likely in 2022 or 2023. GTCRC is also still mulling potential roundabouts at the Hammond/Three Mile and Hammond/Garfield intersections.

Those projects will lead to more traffic disruptions in future summers, but Lake assures that MDOT, GTCRC, the city, and other players are already discussing ways to minimize inconvenience.

“Unfortunately, the time of year that most people want to come to northern Michigan is the time of year that we must do our road construction,” Lake says. “So that that invariably leads to conflicts, but they're not conflicts that we ignore; they are conflicts that we do our best to overcome.”