Well things are starting to get real. There are now somewhat detailed drawings showing where the new US 169 Buck O'Neil Bridge might go unlike the bubble renderings completed during the larger I-70/US 169 study. MoDOT has created a narrated online public meeting. It provides some explanation of what all is going on and you can watch it at your convenience. To avoid skewing or imparting personal bias, I'm just going to lay out the slides. I will say that this is probably the most complex project MoDOT has undertaken in the past twenty-five years because of the complexity of the Missouri River, a functioning and busy airport, a transcontinental railroad river crossing, three separate railroads with geometric constraints, historical area of the origin of Kansas City, commuter and through traffic, and urban connectivity. There's no easy answer otherwise it would have been done earlier.
In all of these slides, the Charles Wheeler Downtown Airport is above the top of the aerial, I-70 goes from left to right, and the I-35 west freeway loop is in the lower left hand corner. The options get more expensive the further west the bridge goes because of the geometry of the three railroads and limited places to put bridge piers.
First option is the "No Build" Alternative. Federal process requires establishing a baseline condition to show what happens if nothing is done.
For the "Build" alternatives, the exhibits are color coded. The dark blue denotes long span bridges. Long span bridges like the span over the main channel can be 300-450 feet long but the girders have to be steel and are like 12-20' feet tall. The light green denotes short span bridges. These can be 20-150 or so feet long and can be concrete or steel. This is your typical overpass bridge like the one we are building at Old Tiffany Springs Road over I-29. The yellow denotes pavement on existing grade or built on with retaining walls. The light blue denotes the I-35 direct connect flyovers. In all the alternatives, the new bridge will have three lanes northbound for merging as crossing the river and one of the lanes will function as an exit only lane for the ramp to the Downtown Airport exit because there's no way to widen US 169 north of the airport because of the River and railroad yard.
The West Alternative is the most expensive because of the geometry of the three railroads creates a very limited places to put bridge piers hence more dark blue.
The Central Alternative is a little cheaper than the West because there's more room to place bridge piers so the bridge spans are shorter (and consequently cheaper). It has less dark blue and more light blue which leads to a lower cost.
The consultant team did a rough exhibit to show what the I-35 direct connect flyovers would look like because the urban design and impact of this project is important to understand.
The Adjacent Alternative builds the shortest bridge possible but adds some additional turn lanes to push more cars through the 6th and Broadway traffic signals.
The Adjacent Alternative has the option to add I-35 direct connection flyovers later which is shown below.
There isn't planned to be much change to the highway north of the Missouri River. The left hand ramps will go away and Richards Road will be slightly adjusted to the west to make the right-in, right-out ramps up to proper standards for high speed merging. These changes will require approval from the Federal Aviation Administration which adds another level of complexity to figuring all of this out.
Lastly, since the Trump Administration announced the 2019 INFRA grants and Missouri received $81M to build a new Rocheport I-70 Bridge, that triggers Governor Parson's $300M bridge bonding program. For details on that, check out Fox4's Dave D'Marko's story last month.
Now that you've read all this, watch the online public meeting.
You are now up to speed on the project. Here's the key part. During the I-70/US 169 study that started all of this, over 2700 of you participated with the online surveys. The response was from all over the metro as shown in this zip code heat map.
Let's duplicate that response and make sure you share the presentation and survey with your friends.
Here is the official MoDOT US 169 Buck O'Neil Bridge online public meeting page.
Here is the survey. Make sure you do this as soon as you can. I created a FB page event to remind you if you want to click here and add it to your calendar. Don't pass up the opportunity to help influence decisions that will impact the greater Kansas City metro area for the next 75 years.
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