Mahatma: Here's a random thought. Install signs on Interstate 40 between North Little Rock and Conway that say TRUCKS USE RIGHT 2 LANES. -- Pat
Dear Pat: Your thought ignited another thought in our brain. Didn't we once ask if trucks would be restricted to the right two lanes when the I-40 project between North Little Rock and Conway was finished? We did, and the answer from the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department was something like ... don't know yet.
Now we know. Unlike some other interstate stretches, trucks won't be restricted on this particular part of I-40. Those stretches include parts of Interstate 40 east of Little Rock and sections of Interstates 30 and 440. Maybe the best known is I-30 between Benton and Little Rock.
To determine that North Little Rock to Conway didn't require a truck restriction, the Highway Department did a count in 2013. It found that I-40, between Interstate 430 and Arkansas 365 in Pulaski County, averaged 66,000 vehicles a day, of which 9,900 were trucks. That's 15 percent of traffic.
Compare to a traffic count done in 2007 on portions of I-30. Those portions were east of 65th Street, east of Alexander Road, and between I-430 and Baseline Road. Average traffic counts were 76,000, 79,500 and 73,600, respectively. Average truck traffic was 35,720, 34,185, and 30,912, or 47 percent, 43 percent and 42 percent.
That seems like, as mathematicians say, "a lot." Certainly a lot more than I-40 in North Little Rock.
The I-40 construction project in question, which expands the roadway from four lanes to six over 5.5 miles, nears completion. The Highway Department's iDrive Arkansas website pegs mid-2016 as the end date, thus completing the whole thing.
Footnote: In the course of gathering information to answer this question, The Mahatma invoked the state's Freedom of Information Act. This makes him feel like a real newspaper reporter, rather than some guy who mostly drinks coffee and cranks out 500 words a week for this column.
Our readers are smarter than we are, which is no great hurdle. One of those readers disagrees with last week's column about riding in the bed of a pickup. It was said here that doing so is a no-no, quoting section (a) of Arkansas Code Annotated 27-35-104.
He quoted section (b): "This section shall not apply to any employees engaged in the necessary discharge of a duty or to persons riding within bodies of trucks in space intended for merchandise."
Argued our reader: "I believe the bed of a pickup is the body of a truck and that it is designed for merchandise, such as mulch, lumber, peat moss or any number of things that pickups regularly carry."
Readers?
In conclusion, we have looked in the archives and discovered this column first appeared on April 7, 2007.
Nine years? This must be some kind of practical joke.
Mahatma@arkansasonline.com
Metro on 04/09/2016