People are still talking about the Interstate 30 project in central Arkansas.
The state Highway and Transportation Department has received more than 50 comments since the sixth public meeting it held last week on the $631.7 million Interstate 30 project through downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock.
They include the first comments the department has received through its website for the 30 Crossing, the name the department has given the project.
The agency developed the online portal to make it easier for people to submit their comments, observations or objections about the project. Until last week, public comment for all projects required people to fill out a paper form and submit it at the meeting or mail it later.
As of Friday afternoon, the department had received 28 comment forms turned in at Tuesday’s meeting and 16 comment forms submitted through the website, 30Crossing.com, said Danny Straessle, an agency spokesman.
The department has received four comments submitted through its online form at the Connecting Arkansas Program website. The I-30 project is part of the $1.8 billion Connecting Arkansas Program, which is using a statewide 0.5 percent sales tax to build regionally significant projects around the state.
It received another four comments by email sent to different accounts, one prewritten letter turned in at the meeting and one mailed comment, Straessle said.
The public has until June 10 to submit comments on the latest alternatives.
Those will be on top of the more than 1,000 formal comments submitted on the project so far, which have produced changes that even opponents of the project say have made the latest proposal better than the original.
“The conversations Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department personnel and project engineers are having with neighborhood groups, merchant associations, business owners, advocacy groups, citizens, and elected and appointed leaders — hundreds to date — have made an indelible impression on potential project design,” Frank Scott Jr., a member of the Arkansas Highway Commission from Little Rock, said in an essay submitted last week for publication in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Once the latest comments are received, processed and considered, engineers and other consultants will spend the summer focusing on completing a draft of the environmental-impact statement for the project, which “should identify the preferred alternative,” Straessle said.
The draft environmental-impact statement will be forwarded to the Federal Highway Administration for review before it’s unveiled at the next public meeting in the fall, with an invitation for more comments, Straessle said.
The preferred alternative likely will be some variation of the four options the department unveiled at Tuesday’s public meeting.
The department is considering two basic alternatives as part of the project to ease congestion and improve safety on the 6.7-mile corridor between Interstate 530 in Little Rock and Interstate 40 in North Little Rock. The project also includes a small section of I-40 between John F. Kennedy Boulevard and U.S. 67/167 in North Little Rock as well as the bridge over the Arkansas River.
One alternative has six through lanes with two additional lanes in each direction, called collector-distributor lanes, segregated for local traffic to get into and out of downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock on either side of the river bridge. It used to be called the 10-lane alternative, but department officials said the new name —“six-lane with collector/distributor lanes” — more accurately describes the design.
The other alternative has eight through lanes.
Both alternatives are being considered with two proposals for the Cantrell Road interchange through which much of downtown Little Rock traffic is funneled now.
One option is to replace the cloverleaf design in place now with a new design known as the single-point urban interchange. But Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola and others, concerned about the increase in vehicle traffic in the pedestrian-friendly River Market entertainment district, urged the department to consider shifting the interchange to a point farther south and take advantage of the downtown street grid to disperse traffic.
The department’s consulting engineers came up with an interchange that feeds traffic through Fourth and Sixth streets as well as Capitol Avenue in a design called the split-diamond interchange, split because it serves more than one cross street.
Early reviews from downtown entities prefer the sixthrough-lane with collector-distributor lanes using the split-diamond interchange.
Ahead of last week’s meeting, Skip Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service in downtown Little Rock, said in a social media post that “apparent winners” with that alternative included the Clinton Presidential Park, the River Market District, North Little Rock and commuters.
Nate Coulter, the new head of the Central Arkansas Library System, which has its main library in the River Market District, issued a statement supporting the alternative before the meeting started.
The Downtown Little Rock Partnership and the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce issued statements in the days after the meeting supporting the same alternative.
“While we had concerns about the preliminary design of the project, the most recent ‘split diamond’ plan shows the planners listened to the [downtown partnership] and other stakeholders and made changes to accommodate,” Gabe Holmstrom, the organization’s executive director, said in a letter to Scott Bennett, the Highway Department director. “The executive committee supports the plan.”
“We believe this new configuration represents a transformative approach that will reshape the way that both vehicles and pedestrians utilize and navigate downtown Little Rock,” Graham Cobb, the chief operating officer for the chamber, said in a statement. “The plan is holistic — addressing not only the long-term need for increased vehicular capacity and improved safety, but also our desire for a more pedestrian friendly downtown and an improved quality of life and place.
“With the creation of approximately 14 acres of permanent green space and the shift of vehicular routes away from Clinton Avenue, our River Market District becomes even more of a showpiece than it is today.”
Stodola has indicated he, too, likes the alternative but said he wants to wait for consultants retained by the city to do their own work.
Not everyone is on board. The Improve 30 Crossing Facebook page, which has more than 1,400 members, has featured a plethora of comments, too, virtually all opposed to the project.
They continue to prefer replacing the bridge and leaving in place the current six lanes, or possibly converting the corridor through downtown Little Rock into a boulevard and possibly building a new Arkansas River bridge at Chester Street to help funnel more traffic on the noninterstate network of major roads.
They continue to cite the research of their own consultant, Smart Mobility Inc.of Vermont, which used advanced traffic modeling that suggested widening the corridor to 10 lanes would increase congestion because of the phenomenon known as “induced demand” in which motorists using other roadways or avoiding driving during peak hours would now use a newly widened interstate.
“Take the time to get this right,” Kathy Wells, president of the Coalition of Greater Little Rock Neighborhoods, said in a letter to the Metroplan board of directors after the department’s public meeting last week. “Getting it wrong would be a disaster for all of us.”