Funding next issue for I-70 improvements

Fifty years after construction began in Missouri on Interstate 70, a state senator has come up with a plan for doubling its width, separating car and truck lanes and paying the bill with revenue from a penny sales-tax hike.

Sen. Bill Stouffer’s plan for widening the nation’s first official interstate highway to eight lanes, with the blessing of the Missouri Department of Transportation director, would fall within the footprint used in the City of Columbia’s study of the project’s economic consequences.

The 2005 study estimated that acquisition of 45 parcels of land would result in the displacement of 51 businesses in Columbia. The study was based on the construction of six lanes between Route Z and Rocheport but with a footprint for a future expansion to eight lanes.

It took nine years to build Interstate 70 through Missouri, an event commemorated with a ceremony at Parkade Plaza in Columbia Sept. 19, 1965. MODOT estimates it would take about nine years to finish the widening as well.

During a seminar in Columbia in July, MODOT Director Pete Rahn advocated separating trucks from cars in order to curb accidents and improve the interstate driving experience in Missouri. He said the eight-lane expan-sion’s cost would be in the ballpark of the current $3.5 billion estimate for the I-70 improvements across the state, although he cannot say for certain until MODOT conducts an engineering study of the proposal.

Having in recent years chosen to upgrade the existing corridor and to not pursue a bypass, MODOT has its environmental impact study in hand, which was the next major step in the process.

“We’ve identified a strategy; we’ve done all the environmental assessment throughout the corridor and have identified a footprint where future improvements could be constructed,” said Bob Brendel, MODOT’s outreach coordinator for program delivery. “Now we have to identify funding.”

Stouffer, the sales tax advocate, said traffic on I-70 is way over its planned capacity and that accidents close the roadway two or three times a week. Stouffer’s proposal would put four lanes of trucks in the middle, with two lanes in each direction, separated by a concrete barrier. There would be 30-foot medians separating the four middle truck lanes from the two outer sets of two-lane roadways for cars. The Republican from Napton’s proposal would dedicate a one-cent state sales tax for 10 years only for the improvement of Interstates 70 and 44. He said he decided a sales tax would be best because higher user fees and tolls would drive the trucking industry out of Missouri.

“We’ve got to do something, and there’s certainly no money in the MODOT stream right now that will do that,” he said.

As accidents have multiplied in recent years, the interstate has gained a reputation for dangerous driving.

“It’s just unacceptable the number of people we’re killing and maiming on this highway,” Stouffer said. “To me, it’s an investment in the future. If the roof starts leaking, you can only go so far, and sooner or later, you have to fix the roof. I think this is a fix, not a patch.”

The base of the I-70 roadway is totally worn out and needs to be rebuilt from scratch, Stouffer said, built to last 50 years instead of 20 years, as the original planners did.

Originally designed for 10 percent truck usage with maximum weights of 56,000 pounds, the road carries 40 percent trucks today with a weight of 80,000 pounds. If it builds four separate lanes for trucks, the state could save money by using lighter pavement for the four car lanes, Rahn said.

Stouffer said that adding more lanes would be a good investment.

“It’s the right thing to do to build in the extra capacity,” Stouffer said. “From an economic point of view, Missouri is in the center of the country. We’ve got two great rivers. Kansas City is the sec-ond-largest railhead in the country, and St. Louis is third or fourth, depending on the year. If you fix I-44, you’ve got St. Louis hooked up with NAFTA and the Southwest. Kansas City is already there, and then you hook the two cities together with I-70. And then we’ve got two great airports, so we could have the potential to become the central distribution point for the entire country.”

A quarter of Missouri’s commercial businesses are located within three miles of I-70, he said, and building the two extra lanes will only add 10 to 12 percent to the total cost of the project.

“I-70 is a major link to the east-west movement of commerce,” said Charlie Nemmers, director of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Transportation Infrastructure Center. “Really, it goes all the way to Los Angeles because the real commodity flow comes out on Interstate 10, up Interstate 15 and then across on 70. But in terms of big cities, we’re right on the middle of the link from Denver to Baltimore.”

Improving I-70 in such a manner would position Columbia for the next 30 to 50 years as a major spot on the nation’s most important east-west commerce corridor, Nemmers said, similar to what I-35/I-29 corridor through Kansas City is for the north-south NAFTA trade. At some point, the north-south traffic has to go east- west, he said, and if Missouri doesn’t upgrade its east-west conduit, Iowa or Arkansas will take that commerce instead.

Nemmers said Texas has decided to put itself ahead of the growth curve by investing in eight to 10 lanes of traffic for I-35 from Laredo to the Oklahoma state line with a median for other purposes such as rail traffic, and Missouri ought to do the same. “We ought to be having discussions on how we can grow the economy of Missouri looking at the vital role that it plays in transportation,” he said.

Although he had not studied Stouffer’s plan yet, Nemmers said the senator was “on the right track” in proposing eight to 10 lanes. He said that the only other place in the country he knows of that is using such an eight-lane system that separates cars and trucks is the New Jersey turnpike from Princeton to New Brunswick.

According to Brendel, work has begun on the final 51 miles of U.S. Highway 36 from Macon to Hannibal. When the work is complete, estimated in 2010, the highway will be four-lane all the way across the state. Brendel said traffic models used in the I-70 environmental studies assumed that U.S. Highways 36 and 50 would be four-lane facilities by the year 2030 and would draw 10 percent of the traffic off of I-70.

If they have not been augmented to four lanes by then, I-70 congestion will get worse faster.

If his department were to follow its usual project delivery process, Brendel said, construction on a new I-70 would begin five years after MODOT and the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission commit to funding the improvements. Although the process could be speeded up through the use of innovative project delivery methods, the entire 200-mile corridor could be rebuilt in nine years.

“It is important to note that the project as envisioned in the Improve I-70 studies is not an all-or-nothing project,” Brendel said. “It could be implemented in phases. Also, with the study now completed, it can guide MODOT as it plans other projects. For instance, when bridges across the interstate need to be replaced, they can be planned to span the ultimate facility.”

Although former Columbia city manager Ray Beck has suggested that an I-70 bypass might still happen in the distant future, Brendel said that if it ever happens, it will be many years down the road, sometime after 2030, the date upon which the current MODOT plans for improvement are based.

“The bypass does not solve the problem on I-70,” Brendel said. “It does not draw enough traffic to eliminate the need for improvements on the existing corridor, and to put it at a location that would draw enough traffic off would create such impacts that the community wouldn’t be able to stand it.”

Stouffer wants Missouri to be the nation’s transportation leader again.

“Missouri was the first; we jumped out and were the first to build the interstate system,” Stouffer said. “I’m 59. When I was a kid, Missouri was No. 3 in the country in condition of highways. We kind of sat on our laurels. We built a highway that had a 20year life and used it for 50 years. It’s now time to step up and retake that lead.”