Needed: A New Mississippi River Bridge
Will the much-needed Illinois-Missouri bridge ever be built? Only if Missouri finds a way around antiquated state funding laws.

by Ruth W. Stidger, Editor-in-Chief

Missouri and Illinois Department of Transportation officials explained funding challenges for the desperately needed new Mississippi River Bridge at last fall’s Public-Private Transportation seminar, held in St. Louis. But the problem of too many vehicles for too few bridge lanes reaches back many years — and continues to grow.

Why is the need for a new bridge so important? In the 1960s, 22 bridge lanes connected St. Louis, Missouri and the Metro East Illinois area. Today there are only 16 bridge lanes, even as traffic volumes have climbed rapidly. And, many of those 16 lanes are not easily accessible to those who don’t know the area. Highways I-55, I-64, and I-70, for example, dump vehicles onto the overworked Poplar Street Bridge.

During heavy traffic times, it can take an hour or more to make what should be a 10- or 15-minute drive.

Increasing commuter traffic and constant streams of large trucks exacerbate the problem.

Early planning

Design work on the new bridge started more than a decade ago.

Designs considered ranged from $250 to $700 million at that time, with the 222-foot-wide, cable-stayed design chosen falling somewhere in the middle of the cost range.

Today, though, that bridge with its three planes of cables and two single-pylon towers would cost $1.6 billion to build.

The eight-lane design came from a team headed by Modjeski and Masters and the 2,000-foot-long main span would be the longest in the Western hemisphere.

Design life of the planned bridge would be 150 years.

The money problem

With threats of 90-minute rush hours growing to three hours, why isn’t construction of the bridge already underway?

Naturally, the answer is a lack of money.

During the Public-Private Partnership seminar, Illinois’ Secretary of Transportation Tim Martin said Illinois has its funding ready.

Missouri Department of Transportation Director Pete Rahn reported that not only does Missouri not have the money; legislation prevents the state from pursuing obvious answers such as tolls and funds diverted from other projects. Not only is a legislative blessing required for a toll bridge; a public referendum must also take place and be passed.

In August of last year, the DOTs began re-evaluating the project to see where costs could be trimmed. IDOT and MoDOT hired the URS Corporation to carry out that re-evaluation, which should be completed this spring.

Improving the traffic flow between Illinois and Missouri lies behind the intent of the study.

If funding problems are solved, the new bridge could open to traffic by 2015, the DOTs report.

In the meantime, the traffic flow will reach failure by 2020, if not sooner.

Alternatives

Engineering rendering shows details of the cable-stayed design.

While both IDOT and MoDOT see no way to use current bridges as a long-term solution to growing traffic, some short-term alternatives exist.

If voter approval could be won in Missouri, the Poplar Street Bridge could be turned into a toll bridge, encouraging drivers to move to the less convenient Eads, Martin Luther King, or MacArthur Bridges. Greatly improved signage would be needed to help guide non-local drivers to the bridges and then move them back to their Interstate route. Current signs indicating alternatives are next to non-existent.

The volume of truck traffic makes up a large portion of the Poplar Street Bridge crunch. The DOTs could require all trucks to use one or two of the alternate bridges, leaving the Poplar Street Bridge for cars.

While these short-term solutions might prove unpopular with some, they could extend the time frame of non-failure while MoDOT works to obtain federal funding and/or state legislature and public referendum approval.

Reprinted from Better Roads Magazine
February 2006

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