Pleasant View Road is little more than a dirt path in places right now. Drive west on Mineral Point Road past Target and it is easy to miss the beginning of Pleasant View’s southern extension, which will connect it to Valley View Road and the city’s burgeoning southwest side.

But stand at the intersection of Pleasant View and Mineral Point at 5 p.m. on any weeknight and look east toward Madison, and it’s easy to see why Pleasant View may become one of the most important new roads in the city. Cars turning left from Mineral Point onto Junction Road (County M) to head south back up nearly to the Beltline at rush hour, and it’s not unusual to have to wait through two light cycles before making a left turn anywhere at the intersection.

And that’s before most of the area west of Junction Road has even been built up, which will bring even more traffic. The majority remains farmland, waiting for the recently approved University Research Park II to be built as one of the city’s largest new economic development projects. Neighborhoods that surround the research park site are still in their infancy, with developers’ signs dotting the landscape for future houses and apartments.

Roads like Pleasant View that will serve these areas, however, do not come cheap. The price tag on Pleasant View Road for 2010 is $8.57 million, with the city paying about $1.9 million after special assessments and federal money are factored in.

West-side improvements don’t stop at Pleasant View, either. Also on the docket in the next five years are improvements to Junction and Mineral Point roads, including a massive upgrade to their intersection. City officials have budgeted $8.7 million, including $4 million of city borrowing, for Junction Road in 2010 alone. Over the next five years, the budget number could reach nearly $51 million total — including funds from the state, county and neighboring municipalities — as what was once a rural county road becomes a major urban thoroughfare.

And that’s just a few projects. All told, Madison’s budget for major road construction and maintenance has more than doubled since 2000, leaping from $27.5 million in 2000 to $59.3 million in 2010. The portion of that coming from city borrowing, not state or federal money, has nearly quintupled, from $6.83 million in 2000 to $34.11 million in 2010.

It’s only been since 2007 that city officials have broken down how much of the road budget is for new or expanded roads versus maintenance, but both have been growing in that time frame. In 2007, the city spent roughly $11.4 million for new roads compared to $34.15 million for maintenance. This year, it will be $22.5 million for new roads and $36.8 million for maintenance.

People who regularly drive on the choked roads are most likely cheering the improvements, but with those kinds of budget increases, some are asking if the city can afford to keep expanding outward.

“We need roads, there’s no doubt about that and we need to maintain those roads, but we need to be more efficient and more visionary about how we construct those roads and what the alternatives are,” says Steve Hiniker, director of the environmental advocacy group 1000 Friends of Wisconsin.

In particular, transit and environmental advocates like Hiniker say road expansions that serve low-density developments on the city’s edge are too costly in the face of increasing construction costs and the fact that state gas tax revenue is leveling off. In 2009, the state collected $1 billion in gas taxes, down from $1.04 billion in 2008.

Hiniker says cities should be studying the efficiency of transportation improvements. In other words, will the cost to expand a road be offset by the development it supports, and is there a less expensive way to support the development, like better mass transit options?

“If you look at roads, what is it going to cost the state to rebuild the Verona Road interchange? It’s going to be in the neighborhood of $130 million, and that’s in one little interchange,” he says. “If you talk about spending $20 million or $30 million on transit, people look at you like you’re crazy. If people really thought about the cost of roads … I think they would look at transit differently.”

Hiniker’s group released a study in 2007 that said more than $1.3 billion in local property taxes statewide went to road building and expansion, a number Hiniker says refutes the common belief that gas taxes completely pay for roads.

With the state needing hundreds of millions for its own highway projects, including several in the Madison area, Hiniker expects local governments to get squeezed further in future years as they pay for roads. The state will have less money to help out cities, he says, because gas tax revenues have stagnated as cars have become more fuel-efficient and because people are driving less in the wake of the gas price surge of 2008.

At the same time, new and improved roads have become more expensive as the cost of materials, particularly the price of petroleum-based pavement, has gone up sharply. The effect of those two factors, Hiniker says, is that cities have begun to borrow more to pay for roads. “We’ve been borrowing more, but this thing is going to come to a screeching halt in the near future.”

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz acknowledges that the city’s roads budget has increased dramatically, but he and other officials say the first thing to remember is that maintenance projects on existing streets make up the lion’s share of the road budget.

Much of the recent spending spike is closely tied to Cieslewicz’s Madison Measures reports, which began in 2007 as a way to numerically evaluate each city department’s performance.

For those in the city’s engineering division, the reports gave them a chance to set goals for improving street conditions as well as a 2014 deadline for achieving them. Since 2007, the division has hit its targets for the conditions of small and medium-sized residential streets, but the more expensive large, arterial streets still need work. Nineteen percent of them are currently rated as being in unsatisfactory condition by the division, and the city aims to drop that to 10 percent by 2014.

“We believe we can do it,” Cieslewicz says. “I think that streets are one of those basic services that speak to people about the general condition of the city. Whether it’s fair or not, if people are driving down a street that’s bumpy or rutted, that creates an impression about how they think the entire city is doing.”

Cieslewicz adds that the condition of the city’s roads not only affects drivers, but also buses, bicyclists and pedestrians, with many road projects — whether they increase capacity or not — including costly pedestrian and bicyclist amenities.

The city has also emphasized doing road repairs in conjunction with sewer and water utility work in recent years — particularly downtown where pipes are smaller than the current standard and date back as far as the 1880s. In those cases, projects that may have started as relatively inexpensive repaving become full-scale reconstructions, adding time and cost.

There have been few complaints about the city’s increased funding for improving existing roads, but road expansions have generated significant debate in city government. In the recent past, several members of the City Council, including Ald. Marsha Rummel and former Ald. Robbie Webber, have sought to put off large capacity projects in the budget process, but with little success; projects in the budget tend to be fully planned and ready to go.

Instead, road building critics say change has to come early in the process — controlling what kinds of development take place in the city.

Hiniker says the solution is denser development that supports transit options rather than the need for expanded roads. While Madison does a generally good job with development, he says, more density will ensure the city is economically successful in the long run. Cities that are doing that, he says, like Minneapolis, Portland and Salt Lake City, are “clobbering” other areas economically. “It ends up, do you want to look like a city in economic decline that continues to build on the fringes, or do you want to start competing with the powerhouses?”

Hiniker compares suburban development patterns to U.S. car companies, which were able to make money selling inefficient cars for years while foreign companies set themselves up for future economies and higher gas prices by building more efficient cars. Similarly, he says, low-density developments in the “exurbs” have suffered the biggest hits to their property values while downtowns and other dense areas have fared the best.

Webber, a “smart transportation” consultant and steering committee member of the group BikeWalk Madison, says that if the city and state continue to pay for road expansions for periphery development, it will keep occurring.

“If we said, we are not going to invest in road expansion … would developers still develop out there? I think we’d see very different development,” Webber says.

She adds, however, that not investing in road expansion is easier said than done in a region where cities compete to get businesses to locate there: Such a position would be “political suicide.” But, Webber says, Madison should be prepared for changes at the state or federal level that could affect what types of road projects can get done here.

In particular, she says Dane County’s occasional bouts with excessive air pollution could prompt stricter requirements on projects that include federal highway or transit funding. The federal government sometimes requires proof that new projects will not result in increased emissions.

“Do we prepare for it now or do we say, ‘We didn’t know this was going to happen?’?” Webber asks.

But Cieslewicz, a former director of 1000 Friends of Wisconsin himself, says those who assume that any development on the city’s periphery is sprawl are taking a simplistic view of things. Cieslewicz’s proposal for the Northeast Neighborhoods, focusing on urban, transit-oriented development for the remaining land on the city’s far northeast side is an example of putting controls on future development. Proposing denser developments out there, however, often still means the need for increased road capacity as roads change from rural to urban thoroughfares.

“When you’re looking at University Research Park II, you’re talking about retaining jobs in the central urban service area in a pretty compact and contiguous development: University Park II is denser than University Park I,” he says, referring to the area southeast of the intersection of Mineral Point Road and Whitney Way. “I think if you look at that on a regional scale, this is exactly what we should be doing.”

Carole Schaeffer, who heads up the development lobbying group Smart Growth Greater Madison, says that while most advocates of denser development genuinely believe that infill development is needed for transit and environmental benefits, it’s not always easy to get in the city. From the Edgewater Hotel downtown to Sequoya Commons on Midvale Boulevard, dense developments tend to be controversial projects that need special zoning. In order to get better development, then, she says the city’s zoning code, which is now being rewritten, needs to make those kinds of projects relatively easy for developers.

“Anecdotally, I’ve been talking to people who are doing the development in office parks and they say, ‘We’d love to do a project downtown, but at this point in time, there is no way if you look at the lengthy and difficult process,’” she says. “If you have the underlying zoning that enables the project, the length of the fight is shorter.”

Matt Mikolajewski, who works in the city’s Office of Business Resources, adds that the city actively promotes infill development projects. In particular, he says officials have been working on marketing the East Washington Avenue corridor for its proximity to the Capitol, the university, Dane County Regional Airport and a potential new high-speed rail line. He says getting plans with neighborhood support will help ease the way for denser development.

“Absolutely, wherever possible we desire to see infill development, in part because infill development does take advantage of existing infrastructure,” he says.

So how are debates about future developments likely to play out? For some city officials, the mounting costs of maintaining and expanding current roads are one reason to take a closer look at the city’s return on developments going forward.

“It’s good to have a mix” of housing and development types, says Ald. Chris Schmidt, who sits on the board of the Madison Metropolitan Planning Organization, which distributes federal transportation dollars to Madison and the surrounding area. “But we can’t forget that it comes with a cost and there’s a balance that needs to be struck because the costs of infrastructure for supporting low-density areas are greater and not always offset by what’s there.”

In particular, Schmidt says the city should focus on keeping employment and commercial areas dense and looking for infill opportunities, such as at Westgate Mall on the near-west side, an area that was once on the city’s periphery. Even on the city’s current edges, there are places to encourage infill, such as a closed Circuit City store near the Mineral Point-Junction Road intersection. Ultimately, creating denser commercial development and concentrating employment centers will make current and future transit options more successful.

“When we see opportunities to bring things into the downtown, we should capitalize on them. It’s great that we have a hotel that wants to build downtown,” Schmidt says, referring to the proposed Edgewater expansion, but he adds that the city should set its sights on bigger targets, too. “We need businesses bringing their headquarters there.”

But there is a range of views on the council and the city’s Plan Commission. Ald. Paul Skidmore argues that despite the impression among some that his far west side district is sprawling, it brings in property taxes far greater than its low-density population would suggest. The district includes West Towne Mall and the Mineral Point-Junction roads intersection.

Still, Skidmore doesn’t disagree with Schmidt’s wish for greater downtown development, noting that doing so would take the pressure off the city’s outward expansion.

“Would I like to see the west side develop? Absolutely. But would I also like to see downtown development? Absolutely,” Skidmore says. “It’s win-win. It’s not us against them.”

While increasing density in the city may be slow-going, Cieslewicz says he expects the city’s current focus on transit-oriented development and regional transit will lead to more efficient development, less sprawl and less pressure on the city’s infrastructure in the future. In particular, Cieslewicz and other advocates of the area’s newly formed regional transit authority have promoted express buses, increased regular bus service and a possible $250 million commuter rail line from Middleton through Madison and almost to Sun Prairie as ways to foster development that isn’t based on road capacity.

“In the long run, what we need to do is have a better transportation mix so we have people using mass transit throughout the county, not just in the city,” Cieslewicz says. “That should take some pressure off streets — it’s not going to excuse us from the necessity of trying to rebuild streets, but increased investment in mass transit will result in more dense, more contiguous development and less sprawl.”
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