Fayetteville, state work to design I-49 crossings

FAYETTEVILLE -- Officials in Fayetteville are working with the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department to come up with the best way for pedestrians to cross Interstate 49 at three interchanges that are being redesigned.

"When you look at Interstate 49 right now, it really divides our city -- whether you're a pedestrian or on a bike or in a car," Alderman Matthew Petty, chairman of the City Council's Transportation Committee, said last week. "Getting back and forth across I-49 is a hassle for everybody."

That's why Petty, some west Fayetteville residents and City Engineer Chris Brown are concerned about the building of new interchanges at Garland Avenue, Wedington Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

"It's really critical as these interchange projects come through that we get that [pedestrian] connectivity across the highway," Brown said. "This is essentially our one opportunity, in our generation anyway, to get this done."

The highway department's initial concept for the Garland Avenue interchange showed two additional lanes of traffic on a widened bridge over I-49.

Six-foot-wide sidewalks were planned on either side of the bridge, with bike lanes between lanes of traffic and the sidewalks.

"In a situation like that, with five lanes of traffic and everything that's going on across a busy bridge, we just didn't feel like the bike lanes would be utilized or appropriate," Brown told the City Council last week.

City officials instead suggested removing the bike lanes and building a 12-foot-wide trail -- or "side path" -- on the west side of the bridge.

Brown said the side path is important because it's supposed to be a key link in the city's trail system.

It would connect the Shiloh Trail, which will eventually run along the west side of the interstate, to the Clabber Creek Trail, a section of which will run north on Garland Avenue to Van Asche Drive.

City officials also plan to build another trail on the east side of I-49, connecting to the Meadow Valley Trail.

Highway department officials last month agreed to build the side path at the city's expense.

But their design didn't include any type of barrier between the trail and street traffic -- just a 5-foot paved buffer.

"The plans that we got back aren't safe," Petty said. "A lane departure there would be deadly when you have a 2-ton vehicle crashing into someone on a 20-pound bike."

City officials requested a concrete parapet wall between pedestrians and cars. But the highway department wasn't amenable to the idea.

Brown said a wall could increase project cost, especially if the bridge has to be widened farther. Trinity Smith, head of the highway department's Roadway Design Division, said the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' guide for developing bicycle facilities only recommends physical barriers or railings when there isn't at least 5 feet of separation between a pedestrian path and a roadway.

"The proposed bridge cross-section provides the minimum 5 feet," Smith said by email Friday.

According to Brown, highway department officials recommended another type of barrier -- planter boxes or bollards, for instance -- but nothing had been decided by Friday.

Brown and Petty said they'd be OK with the planters or bollards. They just want a plan in place before the city commits $170,000 for the side path.

"[The highway department] hears us," Brown said.

"They're listening. What they keep saying is any additional cost beyond what they would typically do, it's going to be the city's responsibility."

While city and state officials near a solution for the Garland Avenue overpass, plans for the Wedington Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard interchanges are unclear.

The highway department is more than a year away from finalizing designs for those two interchanges, which see approximately 60,000 vehicle trips combined per day, according to 2013 traffic counts.

Smith said he expects final designs for the Martin Luther King Jr. and Wedington Drive interchanges to be complete by the end of 2016. No construction timeline has been set. A bid letting for the Garland Avenue interchange is scheduled in May.

All three interchange projects are part of a multiyear plan to widen I-49 and rebuild nine interchanges from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fayetteville to East Central Avenue in Bentonville.

The undertaking is being paid for with a combination of Arkansas' half-percent sales tax for street projects, local matches, bonds that voters approved in 2011 for highway repairs and Federal Transportation Improvement Program dollars.

Brown estimated the city's contribution for the Garland Avenue interchange is about $4.2 million.

The $50 million to $65 million total price tag for the project includes a third lane in both directions on 2.5 miles of I-49, from Porter Road to just north of the Fulbright Expressway, as well as widening Garland to four lanes between Drake Street and Truckers Drive.

The work is expected to take three-and-a-half to four years to complete.

Metro on 07/20/2015

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