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GR Planning Commission Asks State To Consider Options For US-131 & I-96

Posted at 6:50 PM, Apr 01, 2014
and last updated 2014-04-01 19:26:04-04

It’s a study that would cost several million dollars to conduct, an idea that the city’s planning director, Suzanne Schulz, said is decades into the future and one she said should not be in focus due to the amount of issues regarding West Michigan roads.

“I know I just put $800 into my car because of potholes and so there’s this real crisis that we have with road funding that is more pressing,” Schulz said.

In the past year, there’s been a lot of talk about possible changes to the S-Curve, the elevated section of US-131 between I-196 and Franklin Street. It’s a stretch of road used by more that 100,000 travels every day.

Just last spring, Friends of Grand Rapids Parks had their own ideas, which included getting rid of the S-Curve by creating a boulevard or a tunnel for traffic to travel beneath the city. But, Schulz said members of the planning commission are getting decades ahead of themselves.

“In some ways it’s kind of going down a path that we really don’t need to go down at this point because of the funding issues that we’re all facing,” she said. “There are a lot of other pressing issues that we’re facing right now, particularly road funding and road conditions…potholes everyone’s experiencing those and that’s really where we want the attention to be on the current state of our road system.”