Greater Cincinnati has been hearing about the need for an update to the Brent Spence Bridge and its surrounding highway corridor for decades. Leaders say the planned companion bridge and the reworking of the highway around it will be a boon for the region’s economy and quality of life.
But citing environmental and other issues, some people have big concerns about creating a second bridge to expand capacity for the Brent Spence, at least as it is currently suggested.
Amy Townsend-Small lives in Covington and commutes across the river to her job as a professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Environment and Sustainability.
During a panel discussion on the bridge project March 27, she cited goals scientists have set to minimize climate change and said expanding traffic capacity is a move in the wrong direction long-term.
“All of the cars and trucks on our freeways, that’s our biggest problem in terms of greenhouse gas emissions as a country,” she said. “We need to get to zero by 2050. It’s 2024, so transportation emissions are going exactly the wrong way. They’re going up. Not good.”
Current plans would create a ten-lane second bridge to carry the interstates over the Ohio River. The existing Brent Spence would go from eight lanes to six.
There’s plenty of support for the companion bridge, especially from local officials. In a video promoting the project, OKI Regional Council of Governments Chief Executive Officer Mark Policinski says cars spend about 4 million cumulative hours a year idling on the bridge. The companion span will reduce that.
“Think about all the pollutants going into the air as you sit there and idle for four million hours,” he said. “The particulates that our children breathe in every day. So when it comes to impact, this is not just a project that is steel and concrete. This is a project that is going to affect our environment, our health, our safety, our economics. Which means it’s going to affect our quality of life.”
Proponents say the bridge is a major economic thoroughfare — freight across it affects roughly 3% of the nation's GDP each year — and that current congestion is slowing down the region's economy. And the way the bridge is set up currently makes wrecks on it crippling and dangerous. Crews converted emergency lanes into two extra lanes for traffic in 1985 to expand capacity.
The bridge closed for six weeks in 2020 due to a fiery semi-truck crash, and other crashes have at least partially shut down the bridge for shorter periods of time, including one last week.
Critics aren't optimistic the companion bridge will be an improvement, though.
Matt Butler runs the Devou Good Foundation. He says there are other ways to reduce congestion and increase safety. Those include offering alternative transportation options like public transit that don’t require cars and by limiting demand via things like congestion fees during busy times of day.
He points to Census tracts like those in Covington’s Peaselburg neighborhood where large percentages of people don’t own cars.
“So what’s in it for them, right? We should be building things that are good for everybody here and not just truckers and people who are flying through on the interstate and aren’t even going to stop in our city.”
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There’s also the question of how long the companion span will reduce congestion, or whether it’s even necessary.
Traffic counts from the Ohio Department of Transportation show traffic on the bridge peaking in 2014 at about 175,000 cars a day. That figure nosedived the year after to about 134,000 cars a day, then rose again and has been relatively steady at about 150,000 to 155,000 cars a day since. One notable exception — traffic dipped considerably in 2020, the year of widespread shutdowns due to the COVID pandemic.
While data shows traffic on the bridge isn't exactly exploding, it's still well above the 80,000 cars a day the bridge was designed to handle, or the 120,000 it's able to handle with the two extra lanes added in 1985.
Townsend-Small says she avoids the Brent Spence Bridge during her commute because of traffic, and thinks a lot of other people do, too.
She says when its capacity is expanded, many more people will have an incentive to take that route. That, Townsend-Small and other bridge critics say, could put the region right back in the same situation it was in with traffic congestion a few years from now.
“This is not going to be a long-term solution to our problem,” she says.
It’s a concept called induced demand, which critics often cite as a reason they oppose highway expansion projects. Studies have found this dynamic does happen after some highway expansions, including some in Texas and California. It’s not clear how it would play out in the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor Project.
But traffic growth eventually outpaced past capacity expansions. According to data from the Ohio Department of Transportation, about 95,000 cars a day crossed the bridge in 1986, the year after crews took the bridge from six lanes to eight by removing all but one foot of road shoulder on each side. Four years later, in 1990, traffic had jumped to almost 116,000 cars a day.
There are other concerns.
Some opponents cite the fact part of the project will encroach on habitat for endangered bats and mussels.
State transportation officials say they’ll address that by only removing trees when the bats have migrated out of the area and making habitats for the mussels elsewhere. Those efforts will be made to comply with federal regulations.
Critics like Butler and Townsend-Smalls acknowledge it might not be possible to stop the expansion, but they’d like to make sure it’s at least somewhat responsive to environmental and equity concerns.
“We looked at this and we’re like, ‘why wouldn’t we want to get involved, and try to at least make it better, get leaders to think about other ways of getting around,' ” Butler says.
The bridge design process is ongoing. State transportation officials say they’ve heard many of these concerns at public input sessions they held last month.
Those input sessions were related to a federal environmental impact study completed for the bridge. They say they take the feedback seriously and will release responses to objections and questions soon.