Now they are starting to look harder. Hospital officials met privately Thursday with a group of city, county and Grand Traverse Commons representatives and traffic consultants from Wade-Trim Engineering to continue work on an access plan for the medical campus, which includes Munson facilities, the Grand Traverse Pavilions senior housing complex and the Commons property. The meeting comes more than year after Munson formed an advisory committee of neighborhood representatives and local officials to address the issue.
Traffic is the concern.
With the growth of Munson as the region's primary health care facility, its traffic consultants project a 65 percent increase over the next 10 years in the number of vehicles per day in and out of the campus. Munson officials want to develop a primary access route so all of that traffic isn't filtered through the neighborhood streets surrounding the campus. Officials have narrowed numerous suggestions into a handful of potential options, including a main entrance through 11th Street, a southern access route off Silver Lake Road, a northern access from West Front Street and construction of a new road off Division Street south of Eighth Street, which is dubbed the 8 th Street plan. None of those options has been ruled out, nor has one emerged as a primary plan. At the meeting officials decided to further consider Seventh Street.