URBAN DESIGN POLICY /
BRIEFS

Download pdf file (3.3 mb)

Spaghetti Junction

David Koellein
Development Program Manager, Metro Development and Housing Agency

The D.C. suburbs have the “Mixing Bowl.” In Rochester, the most infamous is the “Can of Worms.” Drivers in other cities employ other derisive nicknames: “Orange Crush,” “Hillside Strangler” and “Malfunction Junction.” These ominous labels evoke the psychological impact caused by the tangled confluences of major highways--interchanges on steroids.

These points on the nation’s interstate web feed vehicles into a dizzying filtration system that spins motorists about on a roller coaster of ramps and through a dicey succession of lane changes, before spitting them out in some new direction. The saving grace for the weak of stomach is the increasing slowness of the bumper-to-bumper traffic that winds through these concrete tilt-a-whirls.

When viewed from the air, the super-interchange is often sculptural in form, an artistic interweaving of pavement that belies its negative attributes. Chief among them is that “interchange art” consumes massive amounts of a limited commodity: urban land.

Nashville boasts several of these bloated interchanges. None is larger--or more confusing--than the convergence of Ellington Parkway, I-24, Main Street, Spring Street, and Dickerson Pike in East Nashville. “Spaghetti Junction”—actually it’s more like lasagna--devours 95 acres of urban property. Nashville’s entire central business district could fit within the confines of its sweeping ramps. If those 95 acres were built out as a medium-density mixed-use neighborhood--as envisioned in the Plan of Nashville--the site that now drains tax dollars for road maintenance would instead generate huge cash flows.

In the Plan’s scenario for this East Nashville site, there would still, of course, be a need for roads, parks, and other public spaces. But approximately 70 acres would remain for private development. The worth of this land today is approximately $15 million, based on the current value of adjacent commercial and industrial properties. That figure could rise to $100 million--or more--as the property becomes increasingly valuable to urban
developers.

“Stick a fork in that road
spaghetti and wind it up!”

Carol Norton, workshop participant

Suppose, as the Plan does, that this land were redeveloped as three and four-story buildings mixing substantial amounts of residential with some office and retail uses--a total of around nine million square feet of space. A rough estimate of the aggregate value of construction would be $1.3 billion in today’s figures.

Annual tax revenues to Metro on the “Spaghetti” site alone would, at current rates, exceed $20 million when built out. And that figure does not take into consideration the financial benefits of all that development money rippling through the economy, or the sales tax revenue generated by new urban residents spending their dollars in the city. The obese interchange is a field of gold waiting to be mined.