The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department will hold a public meeting Oct. 22 in North Little Rock to discuss its latest plans to widen Interstate 30 through downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock, including replacing the bridge over the Arkansas River.
The meeting, which is styled as an "open house" and features no formal presentations, will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. in the gym of the Friendly Chapel Church of the Nazarene at 116 S. Pine St. in North Little Rock.
The public is invited to visit during the scheduled hours to view maps and exhibits, ask questions and offer comments about the proposed project, which now is estimated to cost $600 million and has been dubbed "30 Crossing."
The meeting will be the first for the public since engineers working to ease congestion through the corridor completed and won federal approval of the project's planning and environmental linkages study that recommended the corridor be widened to 10 lanes.
Two of the new lanes in each direction would be limited to the immediate vicinity of both downtowns with a barrier separating them from the main lanes. The speeds also would be slower to allow safer collection and distribution of traffic entering and exiting the corridor.
The Oct. 22 meeting is part of an environmental review phase of the project that requires engineers to further evaluate the initial recommendation and an alternative, which would limit the widening to eight lanes.
The environmental review also encompasses recommendations for interchange designs and the locations of ramps and interchanges along with their potential impacts to businesses and other interests within the corridor.
The 6.7-mile corridor stretches from Interstate 530 in Little Rock to Interstate 40 in North Little Rock and includes a small section of I-40 between I-30 and U.S. 67/167, also in North Little Rock, going through the heart of the heavily developed downtowns of both cities.
Both the corridor and the bridge, which carry 125,000 vehicles daily, were built 50 years ago.
The project is part of the department's $1.8 billion Connecting Arkansas Program, which is financed in part by a statewide 0.5 percent increase in the statewide sales tax voters approved in 2012. More information about the project can be found at connectingarkansasprogram.com.
Metro on 10/02/2015