Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Rolling along in Fayetteville
Transportation bond projects moving ahead with designs, negotiation.
FAYETTEVILLE — The city is rolling on a few more transportation bond projects.
The City Council has approved a pair of design contracts with engineering firm Garver.
One was for $402,650 to design an extension of Rolling Hills Drive connecting to Appleby Road and Plainview Drive with a roundabout at the Fiesta Square shopping center. The other for $238,920 is to redesign Archibald Yell Boulevard from the intersection with Rock Street and College Avenue south to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
The council tabled two items June 4 pertaining to new railroad crossings on Gregg Avenue, one at Shiloh Drive north of the Fulbright Expressway and another at Futrall Drive, south of the expressway.
The city requested agreements with Arkansas and Missouri Railroad in anticipation of future development at empty land west of Gregg Avenue.
The agreements as written cover construction, maintenance and easements. Each one has a total estimated project cost of $750,000.
All four items stem from the $70 million transportation bond issue voters approved a year ago.
ROLLING HILLS
Rolling Hills Drive will extend west into the Fiesta Square shopping center. Close to the middle of the parking lot will be a roundabout.
Appleby Road will connect to the roundabout from the south side, and Plainview Drive will connect to it from the north side. Farther north, Longview Street running east-west will connect to Plainview.
The idea is to create a route parallel to College Avenue that could divert some of the traffic, City Engineer Chris Brown said. Drivers traveling from Appleby could go through Fiesta Square onto Plainview and over to Millsap Road or the shopping center with Whole Foods, for instance.
“That section between Rolling Hills and the flyover is our most congested area,” he said. “There are a lot of accidents. It’s really kind of blown up since Whole Foods has come in, and the congestion increased.”
The Planning Commission approved plans for the College Marketplace shopping center at College Avenue and Masonic Drive in 2014. The traffic signal was installed in 2015, and Whole Foods opened in March 2016. The City Council, Chamber of Commerce and Mayor Lioneld Jordan supported the store’s opening with the traffic signal at the time, acknowledging the likely increase in traffic flow but touting the benefits of sales tax revenue and the draw of people to the city Whole Foods would bring.
The transportation bond program has $3.5 million allocated to build the roundabout and connecting streets. It should take about a year to design, Brown said.
The city hopes to hire a contractor and get ground moving by middle to late next year. Construction should take another year, so the project possibly could wrap sometime in the middle of 2022, he said.
Mathias Properties in Springdale owns Fiesta Square and all the buildings, including those leased by Chuck E. Cheese, AMC Fiesta Square 12 and Big Lots, but not the Harps Food Store. The company has been looking at redevelopment opportunities for a number of years and is excited about the benefits the new street connections could bring, said Arthur Thurman, president and chief operating officer of Mathias.
The large parking lot leaves a lot of space to work with, he said. There’s a potential to put buildings along the new streets, and access to the shopping center will be improved, he said.
“We think that’s going to be beneficial to the customers, the tenants and the neighborhood and the residents in that area in Fayetteville,” he said.
A project separate from the Fiesta Square roundabout and street connections will put some type of permanent bike lane along Rolling Hills Drive, Brown said.
ARCHIBALD YELL
Garver will redesign the intersection at Archibald Yell Boulevard, Rock Street and College Avenue based on a concept developed during the U.S. 71B corridor study. The concept shows traffic lanes clearly defined with medians and green space extensions at the corners.
The plan is to reduce Archibald Yell from four to three lanes, Brown said. Reducing the lanes will add about 13 feet of right of way, and the designers will work on what best to do with it, he said. About 16,000 cars travel
down Archibald Yell Boulevard per day, according to an Arkansas Department of Transportation traffic count map.
The hope is to make it safer for pedestrians to cross Archibald Yell. It’s easier for people to cross one traffic lane at a time, with the middle lane serving as a refuge island, Brown said. There also will be a traffic light at South Street, giving pedestrians an opportunity to cross safely, he said.
The plan also is to have another outside lane where Archibald Yell becomes South School Avenue. So at the South School Avenue/Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard intersection, there would be two southbound lanes, a middle lane for southbound cars to turn left, and a northbound lane. That way, cars passing through Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard could continue straight, and ones turning west onto Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard would have their own turn lane, Brown said.
The designers will have access to traffic data and software that will help guide them. They’ll be able to model different changes and see their effect, Brown said. Different models will get an A-F grade, which will help determine the final configuration, he said.
The project has garnered a significant amount of attention from residents, Brown said.
“A lot of people are saying well, that’ll never work and other people are saying yeah it’ll be fine,” he said. “I think the data and having the traffic study to say this is what it really is going to look like will be helpful.”
Local historian Jerry Hogan wrote a letter to the City Council arguing the intersection needs a redesign. Archibald Yell Boulevard was built in the early 1950s as a way for commercial trucks to bypass the narrow, congested streets through and around the downtown square. It continues to be the fastest, most efficient way to get through the downtown area to South School Avenue and the roads beyond, he said.
Other than redesigning the intersection and possibly installing pedestrian lights and markers at South Street and School Avenue, Archibald Yell should be left alone, Hogan said.
“I believe this would resolve most of the issues about pedestrian traffic and safety,” he said.
The grade on Archibald Yell runs between a 5% and 8% grade, said Jonathan Ely, development and construction manager for the city. The Fire Department starts to ask for additional accommodations for trucks in new developments that have streets or drives steeper than 10%, he said.
“That’s not that steep in Fayetteville terms,” Ely said. “We’ve certainly got a lot of steeper roads than that.”
Restriping the lanes is easy enough, Brown said. If the adjustments don’t work, more lanes can be added, he said. For now, the city is proposing adjusting the lanes on Archibald Yell.
Future phases may include the addition of medians or street trees or elevated bike lanes, Brown said.
Design should take about eight months, and construction about six months, Brown said. It’s possible the project could wrap by the end of next year, he said.
A separate project will have South School Avenue south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard reduced to three lanes, keeping the number of through-traffic lanes continuous with the northern portion. Brown said the city is negotiating a design contract on the work. Traffic drops to about 13,000 cars per day on School Avenue past Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, according to the state.
RAILROAD CROSSINGS
The council tabled indefinitely two items to put new railroad crossings on Gregg Avenue at Shiloh and Futrall drives, north and south of the North Fulbright Expressway.
Under the agreement, the city would close two crossings at other parts of the city to add the two new ones. The two crossings being considered for removal are at South University Avenue and at an access road south of Township Street, west of Gregg Avenue.
The one south of Township Street is used by Ridout Lumber and Arkansas Self-Storage to get onto Gregg Avenue. There’s another crossing about one block to the north at the Township intersection the businesses could still use.
The City Council’s Transportation Committee expressed some hesitancy about closing the University Avenue crossing, north of the Walmart Neighborhood Market. The committee recommended tabling the agreements to allow time for Brown to negotiate with Arkansas and Missouri Railroad about looking at other possibilities.
The railroad asked for the crossing to close. Both are used infrequently by cars compared to other crossings in the city, Brown said.
“These railroad crossings are not central to their mission of moving freight. They can be detrimental to their operations because the trains have to drive slower and it can be a safety issue,” he said. “New crossings are kind of a big deal to them from a liability standpoint. We’re appreciative of them even working with us.”
New crossings at Gregg Avenue near the North Fulbright Expressway would serve planned street extensions at Shiloh and Futrall drives.
The land west of Gregg Avenue near the expressway is undeveloped. It’s only a matter of time before someone builds there, and the city wants to be prepared to handle traffic flow, Brown said.
“At the moment, there are no development plans submitted that would need the access. We’ve had some pre-development meetings, and we’ve had some discussions,” he said. “We know there are some ideas out there.”