Cantrell project to close Little Rock road

Pleasant Valley Farm Road won’t reopen, agency says

A map showing the location of Pleasant Valley Farm Rd.
A map showing the location of Pleasant Valley Farm Rd.

A project to widen a section of Cantrell Road in west Little Rock that now has a price tag of $81 million will require permanently closing a local road starting Monday, the Arkansas Department of Transportation said.

Pleasant Valley Farm Road, which runs for a short distance parallel to Cantrell on the south side east from North Rodney Parham Road to Interstate 430, will be closed to allow for utility and construction work in preparation for larger construction activities, which are scheduled to begin June 8 and take about three years.

The road serves an office building complex at the southeast corner of Cantrell and Rodney Parham. Tenants include Windstream. Tenants will be able to access the area by using Anderson Drive, the department said. Traffic will be controlled by traffic barrels, signs and concrete barricades.

The project involves widening Cantrell, also called Arkansas 10, between Pleasant Valley Drive and Pleasant Ridge Road. The section, which crosses I-430, carries up to 54,000 vehicles daily, making it the busiest non-interstate road in Arkansas.

Kiewit Infrastructure South of Omaha, Neb., was selected as the contractor for the project, which is the first to employ the construction manager/general contractor delivery method.

Kiewit was selected by the Transportation Department in February 2018 and worked with the agency during the project design, providing insight into identifying risks, risk mitigation, and design innovation and optimization. The department accepted Keiwit's bid price, and a contract was executed in March, the department said in a news release.

The contract amount is $81,049,325, according to Randy Ort, a top department official. The project is estimated to be completed in mid-2023.

Typically, the department designs projects and contractors submit bids based on their estimated costs of doing the work, with the lowest bidder being awarded the contract.

But the construction manager/general contractor delivery method, which is common on complex projects in other states, is designed to complete projects in a timely manner while managing traffic throughout the work.

Another element of the construction manager/general contractor method involves arriving at the price and who will build it.

Kiewit wasn't guaranteed to win the job, but under the arrangement it had the first opportunity to submit a bid. That bid was compared with independent cost estimators, including one that developed a blind cost estimate to which neither the department nor Kiewit have access.

Once Kiewit submitted its bid, it was compared with the other cost estimates and fell within 10% of those estimates. If Kiewit's bid was too high, the project would have gone through the regular bidding process. Kiewit would have been able to participate in that had it been necessary.

The project is centered on a single-point urban interchange design in which the section of Cantrell, widened to six lanes from four, will use a ramp to carry traffic over the North Rodney Parham Road intersection rather than through it, as Cantrell does now.

The elevated roadway is similar to the ramp that carries traffic on Interstate 630 over South Shackleford Road in the Interstate 430/Interstate 630 interchange.

The "single point" in the interchange design would be underneath Cantrell at North Rodney Parham. One traffic signal would control traffic moving onto or off Cantrell, which would allow motorists going east and west on Cantrell to avoid stopping at a light to accommodate North Rodney Parham traffic, a feature that planners identified as a source of much of the congestion in the corridor.

The design also includes a feature known as a "Texas turnaround," which will allow drivers traveling south on I-430 to turn east on Cantrell. Motorists actually would travel west for a short distance, then make what amounts to a U-turn back to the east underneath the Cantrell Road ramp.

The Texas turnaround would replace a loop ramp that traffic now uses to go from southbound I-430 to eastbound Cantrell, and would eliminate an element that has the southbound I-430 traffic merging into the same lane used by eastbound Cantrell traffic to access northbound I-430.

A Texas turnaround on the west side of the interchange will allow some motorists exiting the Pleasant Ridge shopping center to go west on Cantrell as well as allow westbound motorists access to Trinity Assembly of God Church on the north side of Cantrell.

Metro on 05/31/2020

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