Spa City, county feel road-job sticker shock
Initial cost of project put at $15M
HOT SPRINGS — Proposals presented earlier this week to reconfigure the King Expressway-Airport Road interchange could be too costly for Hot Springs and Garland County to participate in, County Judge Rick Davis said.
The Arkansas Department of Transportation and its contract consultants told local officials Tuesday that the cost of the project will be up to $15 million, twice the amount estimated by the area’s transportation policy board.
The Transportation Department and consultants with Michael Baker International and Alliance Transportation Group stressed that the $12 million to $15 million is a preliminary, planning-level estimate. They said the project would have to advance to the design phase before a more definite cost is known.
“For some reason, we came up with a $7.5 million figure,” Davis said, referring to the Tri-Lakes Metropolitan Transportation 2040 Plan that was adopted in September of 2015. “I don’t know where we got it, but that’s what we thought these intersections would cost,” he said.
An interlocal agreement obligating Garland Coun-
ty and Hot Springs to share costs with the state was based on the 2040 plan’s roughly $7 million estimate. The city and county would each contribute $1.925 million from their population-based shares of the $54.6 million bond issue that voters approved in a June 2016 special election.
The county and city received $12.3 million and $7.3 million, respectively, in bond proceeds. The former has committed about $2 million to overlay and bridge improvement projects on county roads, and the latter has spent about $1 million overlaying city streets.
They also contributed $50,000 each to the planning study that the Transportation Department contracted with Alliance Transportation Group to conduct. Proposals for the Airport and Albert Pike road interchanges were presented Tuesday and are part of the study’s first phase.
The next phase is focused on improvements to the Higdon Ferry Road and Central Avenue-expressway interchanges. The Transportation Department said the planning study will include cost estimates for improvements to all four interchanges.
The Airport interchange is not listed on the draft 201922 Statewide Transportation Improvement Program that the Arkansas State Highway Commission is expected to adopt later this year. The interlocal agreement releases the city and county from sharing costs on the project if the state hasn’t committed to it by July of 2022.
County and city officials said it’s unlikely their bond shares are sufficient given the proposals that were presented Tuesday.
“I don’t think we’d be able to do half of the cost share,” Davis said of the $12 million to $15 million estimate. “I think it would knock us out of the ballpark.”
Byron Lawrence, a project manager for Michael Baker International, said not all of the elements presented Tuesday have to be implemented. For instance, pedestrian and bike paths are two components that could be removed, he said.
“When you start messing with interchanges, you start jumping up in costs pretty quickly,” he said. “There’s parts you can take out of the whole plan. The design mostly just has to follow what the future plan is. When it comes to design, you don’t have to implement the entire plan at once. That’s rarely done.”
A diverging diamond interchange that would eliminate left turns against the flow of traffic for vehicles entering and exiting the ex- pressway was one of the proposals presented Tuesday. It relies on directing motorists on the right side of the road to the left as they negotiate the interchange.
“You take the through lanes and cross them over to where you do British-style backwards driving,” Lawrence told local officials. “It removes all the conflict of the ramp traffic cutting across the through traffic. This type of interchange is good for places where you have a huge amount of off- and on-ramp traffic but not quite as much through traffic.”
Striping and raised nontraversable medians channel traffic through the interchange, easing misgivings that motorists may have about driving on the left side of the road.
“You want them to enter the system and not really be aware that they’re going the wrong way against traffic,” Lawrence said. “They just follow the lights and stay in the lanes. When you look at these plans from the top, they look much more complicated than they are when you’re driving through them.”
The consultants and local officials said the counterintuitive concept would require less coordination of traffic signals and a smaller footprint than the standard diamond configuration also presented Tuesday. It increases the distance between the expressway and on- and offramps, allowing more room for vehicles entering the expressway to get in line.
“We moved the terminals out so we could have more space,” said Travis Brooks, a department engineer.
Both proposals moves Lakeshore Drive’s Airport Road intersection farther west, which Brooks said will reduce congestion. Adding a second exit lane off the expressway for westbound traffic and a third left turn lane onto Airport Road are also features the proposals share. The third lane becomes a right-only turn lane onto Weston Road.
“Widening out the two intersections puts enough space so we don’t get people stacking in between,” Lawrence said. “Right now you have a problem with people stacking up on the queue left out to the through lanes. It creates a lot of backup in both directions. That’s what the spacing kind of fixes.”
Local officials said the standard configuration would require more right of way and extensive excavation of a hillside to accommodate the eastbound exit ramp.
The proposals are posted on the department’s website, http://www.arkansashighways.com, under the recent public meetings section.