Speculation: What About Lidding?
In a recent conversations the topic of lidding / capping interstates has come up. This is a topic which comes up occasionally, and was last [AFAIK] semi-seriously discussed during the development of the Michigan St Corridor Plan.
Aside: the first essay form posts on this site was 👉Getting Around & The Michigan St Plan👈 in March of 2015
So let's take a quick - this is napkin math! - look at lidding the MDOT I-196 car sewer between College Ave & the end of the bluff. This would be a lid of ~2,718ft x ~272ft; or ~16 acres. 16 more acres of UZA! [UZA: UrbaniZed Area, finally an acronym which is fun to say. 😎]. This is an idea it is difficult not to be excited about.
But wait for it. 😑
Searching around on the interwebs for sites about real-world highway lidding turns up a per-square-foot cost of $2,000 - $3,500. If a lid is built into the highway's design initially it can, theoretically, be as low as $500sq/ft. Adding a lid to an existing highway designed without provisions for lidding is much more expensive.
At $2k - $3k sq/ft the cost of lidding that particular section of MDOT's car sewer is an astonishing $1,478,592,000 - $2,587,536,000. 😮
But, you say, those 16 new acres of UZA!
Property in & around downtown Grand Rapids has a value of ~$2M/acre. This 16 acres would have a value somewhere around $32,000,000. That is an entire set of zeros short of the cost of lidding. 😞
Of course there may be other factors. Lidding would certainly increase the value of the properties adjacent to the lid - effectively no more car sewer! Yet that value would be difficult to realize due to Michigan property tax law; and only the properties on the north side of the lid would be likely to materialize the appreciation. The south side of the lid is already intensely developed . . . and worse it has been intensely development by non-profits [however you feel about them, they don't pay real taxes].
I do not believe this should rule out the idea. MDOT wastes billions of dollars every single year on projects which realize no economic benefit. There would be at least a $32M benefit to the lid, which is infinitely more than the nothing produced by most transportation projects in Michigan.