“He’s got an interstate running through his front yard and, you know, he thinks he’s got it so good.”—John Mellencamp in the rock song “Pink Houses.”
Motor-vehicle drivers and just about everyone else in Little Rock and North Little Rock may be unaware of what is about to happen to them.
Or, shall we say, for them.
An obsessive home-remodeler told me once that you have to make a mess to make it better.
Government is getting ready to spend between a half-billion and three quarters of a billion dollars on a five-year project, from 2018 through 2022, to reconstruct the freeway through downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock. That will include the Interstate 30 Bridge over the Arkansas River.
We’ll get a wider bridge and a wider adjoining freeway—10 lanes, five each way—and an entirely different configuration for entrance and exit ramps.
You voted for this—whether you knew it or not—when you approved a $1.82 billion 10-year sales-tax increase of a half-cent in a constitutional amendment in 2012.
The Highway Department has dedicated $427 million of that tax money for widening Interstate 30 from the north interchange of Interstates 30 and 40 and U.S. 67-167 southward to the interchange with Interstates 530 and 440.
That’s more than three times the cost of the Big Rock flyover project recently completed in western Little Rock.
The Highway Department intends to seek augmenting financing from federal bridge-replacement funds and other federal sources. I’ve heard estimates that the eventual cost of the entire project could go to $750 million.
The project also happens to defy the operative long-term plan designed by Metroplan, which is an association of local government representatives tasked by the federal government with making and constantly updating a binding plan for the metropolitan region.
The latest plan, intended to apply to 2040, calls for capping local interstate highways at six lanes, forcing motorists to seek other choices, beefing up secondary regional arterials as alternatives to freeways, encouraging higher-density living and moving toward greater reliance on mass transit with buses and other high-occupancy vehicles, even light rail systems.
Before the federal government will release money, the Highway Department will need for the Metroplan board of directors to amend that plan to provide an exception so it can widen Interstate 30 through Little Rock and North Little Rock beyond six lanes to 10.
That exception probably will be granted easily enough, because Metroplan wouldn’t want to stand in the way of progress—or, if not progress, necessarily, then temporarily easier traffic flow.
But minutes published online from a recent meeting of Metroplan’s regional planning advisory council reveal frustrations with the Highway Department.
The gist of the discussion was that the Highway Department, as usual, was paying scant attention to that plan and its forward-thinking concepts and was determined instead simply to do what it always does—which is lay more pavement for more vehicles.
Scott Bennett, the director of the Highway Department, said he’s sensitive to those concerns but that, at present, the metropolitan area’s population is entirely too spread out—and its transportation habits entirely too entrenched—to justify mass-transit investments. He said the Highway Department’s job is not to change development and population patterns or personal habits, but to meet the needs of those that exist.
But Bennett added: This big project will take just about all the available space for widening. If growth continues as expected, re-congestion by 2040 would need to be addressed by something else—new routes, new modes, different lifestyles, different habits—and someone else.
Jim McKenzie, longtime head of Metroplan, is a bit more worried about the short-term. He believes merging a 10-lane Interstate 30 with a six-lane Interstate 630 would necessitate widening the adjoining section of 630, which would require another, and perhaps harder-achieved, exemption from the Metroplan board.
Bennett told me such a widening of 630 would not be an immediate need, though it could become one by 2040, when traffic projections suggest a bottleneck.
I guess that amounts to a bridge to cross when we come to it.
McKenzie stressed that Metroplan supports this improvement project for Interstate 30 through downtown, deeming it vital, but is concerned about whether the current plan is altogether the right one.
And that’s especially so considering that the Highway Department is rushing the job because it wants it completed by the time the tax program expires in 2023.
There’s one other concern: The Highway Department proposes to use a so-called design-build process on this project, one not previously used in Arkansas. What that means is that an opening segment of the entire project would be formalized in a binding plan, but that the contractor would have some flexibility after that to adapt the project, kind of on the fly, both to save money and time.
The minutes of the Metroplan advisory council reflect that some members were saying the community needed to be made better aware of this project so that a worthy dialogue could take place.
I think that’s sound advice.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.