If someone backed up a dump truck full of cash and plopped a small pile of it on your driveway and offered to let you keep it on the condition you spent it on your house, how would you put it to use?
Some of us might add a bedroom and a screened porch overlooking our new swimming pool. But some of us might replace our roof, add some double-pane windows and update the siding.
In other words, our choices might pit our desire to expand the footprint of our home against maintaining what we have for the long haul.
When you stop to think about it, the Missouri Department of Transportation is posing this same kind of question in a series of 16 “Missouri on the Move” meetings around the state. The last of three St. Louis meetings was held last week at the Unigroup headquarters in Fenton.
Essentially, the 40 participants at last week’s meeting were asked to prioritize carving up transportation funding, assuming either the addition of a $600 million a year to make a total budget of $2 billion (dump truck full of cash) or the status quo of roughly $1.4 billion. It was a hypothetical discussion, of course.
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MoDOT now spends about $600 million on highway maintenance, or roughly 42 percent of the budget. Highway upgrades set the state back about $375 million a year, or roughly 25 percent. City and county roads get about $379 million a year, roughly 25 percent. Other modes get the remaining $69 million.
“One of the things that you will quickly see as we run through our two scenarios tonight is that it becomes about trade-offs,” said moderator Jeff Glenn. “No matter what we do. No matter how much funding we get. There’s never going to be enough to do everything that’s been identified.”
MoDOT is required to hold these “community engagement” sessions while it formulates its long-range spending priorities. In this case, those priorities stretch out 20 years.
“Missouri needs a strong and safe transportation system,” said Ed Hassinger, MoDOT’s St. Louis district engineer. “But the tough reality is that there is not enough funding for us to do those things that we hear about.”
Missouri has the seventh-largest highway system in the country with 33,000 miles of road, he said. There are 213 bridges that measure more than 1,000 feet long. There are 14 public ports on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The country’s second- and third-largest rail hubs are in Missouri.
Rich McClure, president of Unigroup and CEO of United Van Lines and Mayflower Transit, said his company relies on a robust transportation system “every day, thousands of times a day” to move people’s belongings when they relocate. But so does the region.
“It gets us to work, it gets our kids to school, it takes our families home to be together safely, it takes us to churches and synagogues and shopping,” he said. “It goes beyond that. And it’s more than trucking systems and barge systems. You have to think about bridges, and the airport and the river. Bike paths and walking paths. All of the things that make our quality of life here in the region what it is.”
MoDOT officials say these Missouri on the Move meetings are independent of the debate that is now going on about putting a statewide transportation sales tax increase in front of voters.
Maybe.
If you listen really close, you can hear someone trying to turn the ignition switch to the dump truck.
MID RIVERS RAMPS TO CLOSE
The Missouri Department of Transportation is expected to temporarily close two heavily used onramps tying Mid Rivers Mall Drive to Interstate 70 beginning on Monday.
The closure will affect the loop ramps tying northbound Mid Rivers to westbound I-70 and southbound Mid Rivers to eastbound I-70.
MoDOT and its contractor, Millstone Bangert, will build a temporary exit ramp to handle westbound I-70 traffic bound for Mid Rivers. It will require using the north service road as a single-direction outer road from the temporary ramp to Mid Rivers. Work on the temporary ramp has begun and it is expected to open this week, said MoDOT’s St. Charles County Area Engineer, Tom Evers.
Expect the ramps to remain closed through October. MoDOT urges drivers to detour around the construction zone using Salt River Road to Highway 79 to westbound I-70. Southbound motorists going east on I-70 will now have to make a left turn requiring them to sit through a traffic signal.
In cooperation with the city of St. Peters and St. Charles County, Missouri is building a diverging-diamond interchange. In addition, MoDOT is adding a westbound lane on I-70 between Mid Rivers and Highway 79.
The projects are expected to cost $13.4 million.
Once built, the new interchange will operate similar to the one built at Interstate 270 and Dorsett Road in Maryland Heights. The configuration permits left turns without crossing oncoming traffic and improved signal timing.
Ken Leiser is the transportation writer at the Post-Dispatch. Read his Along for the Ride column online and every Sunday in the newspaper.
