Rush hour snarls draw attention
The anecdotal piece of the Arkansas Department of Transportation planning study considering improvements to four King Expressway interchanges and a busy stretch of Central Avenue concluded this week.
Comments offered by local officials and the public will be among the many data points used to model potential solutions to congestion and safety issues along the expressway corridor from the Albert Pike Road and Central Avenue interchanges and Central Avenue from the expressway to Higdon Ferry Road.
The comments help the transportation department and its consultants understand traffic problems along both corridors. Chief among them is the queue that extends onto the westbound shoulder of the expressway at the Airport Road interchange during rush hour.
Traffic waiting to turn left onto Airport Road spills into the expressway. The congestion is compounded by Airport Road traffic waiting to turning left onto the expressway, as it blocks expressway traffic from turning west onto Airport Road.
With a growing percentage of Garland County’s populace
living along the Airport Road corridor west of the Lake Hamilton bridge, the problem promises to grow worse.
Long queues that form in the shared east and westbound turn lane of Higdon Ferry were also noted. Several of the comments explained how vehicles waiting to enter the turn lane impede traffic on the inside lanes, effectively squeezing four travel lanes to two in the area where it intersects the expressway.
Hot Springs Public Works Director Denny McPhate told transportation department consultants that the rush hour snarl is a function of Higdon Ferry’s traffic volume. He said a study of the city’s traffic timing plan revealed that Higdon Ferry absorbs half of the Central Avenue traffic entering the city from the south.
City and county officials also noted traffic backups at the Central Avenue interchange caused by the lack of a right turn lane for northbound traffic turning onto Pakis Road, the expressway access point for eastbound traffic.
“Today we’re looking for the public’s input on challenges in this area,” Clint Jumper, an engineer with Alliance Transportation Group, the consulting firm the state hired to conduct the study, said Tuesday at Transportation Depot. “We’ll take that as well as the data we get and do some analysis to determine potential improvements to these areas and also the costs.”
A solutions model geared toward alternatives that lower crash rates and reduce congestion will be tested against a model that assimilates traffic counts, signal turns, crash data and existing local plans to simulate actual traffic conditions.
“We’ll create an existing model calibrated to real world conditions so that it accurately reflects how traffic is operating today,” said Travis Brooks, a transportation department engineer. “Then we come up with different solutions. Then we model those. And based on the existing conditions, we can see if the changes are going to work. We’re testing our solutions against real world conditions.”
Jesse Jones, the transportation department’s division head for planning and policy, said it’s possible that the planning study could result in no recommendations. If the study does develop alternatives, they’ll become part of the planning guide for a future State Transportation Improvement Program.
A project advances to the STIP when it receives funding. Jones said a planning study doesn’t guarantee a project will be funded.
A two-year backlog required the state to enlist a consulting firm to study the expressway and Central Avenue corridors, Jones said. Hot Springs and Garland County each contributed $50,000 to the study from their population-based shares of the $54,695,000 bond issue voters approved in a June 2016 special election.
“In order to accelerate the project, we had to give it to a consultant,” Jones said. “Money from the city and county helped make that a reality a lot faster.”