From the Roundtable: Will Dudley stick with campaign position on West Broadway?

Pick any day of the week, and at 4 p.m. you can watch the traffic jams start forming on Providence Road north of the intersection with Stadium Boulevard. An hour later, fuming and fussing drivers are likely to find it stop-and-go as far north as Stewart Road.
This state-maintained artery named after Columbia’s original Missouri River portside village was originally dubbed “The Inner Loop.” Improvements to Providence Road south of Stadium began about 40 years ago and led to the predictable commercial and residential development of the fields and forests of southern Boone County.
For years, anyone watching Columbia push its boundaries outward saw the nettlesome situation of State Route K get worse and worse. The width of Providence Road was fixed in the 1950s. The Missouri Department of Transportation owns and maintains this arterial highway, which is so frustratingly out of date that the prospects for improvement seem to be very limited at best.
Predictably, there have been ongoing studies, hearings and other opportunities for interaction. Just as predictable, the ultimate solution could end up being a rather ugly one.
A week ago or so, the city’s supervising traffic engineer presented a handful of plans to address the Providence-Stadium traffic jams. Each plan, with a center median and different configurations of turn lanes and alternate routes, keeps the existing curb lines rather than widening the road.
Providence Road hardly exists in a vacuum; other principal arteries can be just as frustrating to use.
Our City Fathers want us to believe that they have finally come up with the solution for West Broadway, a street that can be just as aggravating to deal with at certain times of the day as South Providence Road. Their “solution” is to retain the street’s narrowness, add a median and some turnouts plus other calcifying measures.
It will be amusing in the coming years to watch a sort of “Opéra Comique” play out in multiple acts once this “historic” avenue is tied up with local traffic and both inward and outbound travelers gum up alternate routes including Stewart Road, West Ash Street, West Worley Street and, yes, South Providence Road.
I’ll bet there are already many drivers who’d prefer to use West Broadway but are taking alternate routes. They prefer a route with four lanes all the way rather than one taking drivers single-file on a bottlenecked section of Broadway. Even with the backups, it seems faster and perhaps a trifle safer. One wonders if the West Broadway consultants conducted an actual on-site analysis to determine each driver’s destination? It would be a huge flaw if they hadn’t.
Maybe there’s still time to throw a wrench in the slowly moving machinery to “fix” West Broadway.
The closest thing Columbia has to a true people’s candidate now represents the 4th Ward, which happens to abut a lengthy stretch of West Broadway.
Councilman Daryl Dudley certainly has the keenest ear to monitor how drivers feel about the east-west commute because he manages the Hy-Vee convenience store on West Broadway. Dudley said during the campaign that one of his strengths is that he listens to hundreds of customers every day. He also said that he favored widening West Broadway.
Dudley’s perspective and daily constituent interaction trumps the coffee house klatches espoused by other City Council members.
What if some of those constituents initiate a petition drive, along the lines of the successful safety camera initiative, that would throw the West Broadway widening issue open for consideration by the voters.
I’d bet during a period of two weeks, a petition mounted in a single location such as a well-frequented convenience store on West Broadway could gather the requisite number of valid signatures to put this on the ballot for all of use to consider.