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Driving Forward OK

Started by Scott5114, October 29, 2015, 09:49:28 PM

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Scott5114

The Oklahoma Turnpike Authority has released plans for a $892 million turnpike package called Driving Forward OK. The turnpikes will be funded by OTA revenue bonds and will not require any expenditures from the state budget.

Included in the package are:

  • A new north-south toll road in eastern Oklahoma County, connecting the Turner Turnpike (I-44) with I-40 between Midwest City and Shawnee.
  • An extension of the Kilpatrick Turnpike to SH-152 between Mustang and Will Rogers Airport.
  • Construction of SH-12, completing the Gilcrease loop around west Tulsa.
  • Reconstruction of 9½ miles of the Muskogee Turnpike (SH-351) between the Creek Turnpike (SH-364) and SH-51 near Coweta.
  • Reconstruction of 22 miles of I-44 between SH-48 near Bristow and SH-364 in Sapulpa.
  • Reconstruction of 7½ miles of the H.E. Bailey Turnpike between Bridge Creek and Newcastle.

Construction is expected to begin third quarter of 2016, which seems frankly insane, especially since no ROW has been acquired nor EISes filed, but I guess they mean that that's when they can start the reconstruction projects. I have doubts that they can have work starting on the new-terrain stuff by this time next year...

http://www.drivingforwardok.com/
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Ned Weasel

Have any alignments been selected for the new stretches of roadway?  It will be extremely difficult to squeeze in a Kilpatrick Turnpike extension, and even the I-44-to-I-40 turnpike on the east side of OKC looks like a tough problem unless it's pushed pretty far to the east.
"I was raised by a cup of coffee." - Strong Bad imitating Homsar

Disclaimer: Views I express are my own and don't reflect any employer or associated entity.

Scott5114

Not as far as I know. The Oklahoma County control section map book has showed a Projected & Surveyed control section for the Kilpatrick extension for a few years, but the I-44-to-I-40 turnpike is an idea that I've never heard of until today. Fortunately, the eastern part of Oklahoma County has a fairly low population density, so it shouldn't be terribly hard to come up with an alignment. Tooling around on Google Maps, looks like the Peebly Road corridor might make a decent option.

These two projects make it look like OTA really wants to make an Oklahoma City beltway happen eventually.
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Pete from Boston

I was expecting this thread title to refer to an inexplicable sign legend.   

TXtoNJ

I wonder if they're going to arrange the new 40 to 44 turnpike as an extension of 240, as, along with the Kilpatrick extension, this would complete the beltway around OKC.

SteveG1988

"Driving Backwards Inferior"
Roads Clinched

I55,I82,I84(E&W)I88(W),I87(N),I81,I64,I74(W),I72,I57,I24,I65,I59,I12,I71,I77,I76(E&W),I70,I79,I85,I86(W),I27,I16,I97,I96,I43,I41,

corco


rte66man

Quote from: Scott5114 on October 30, 2015, 05:06:49 AM
Not as far as I know. The Oklahoma County control section map book has showed a Projected & Surveyed control section for the Kilpatrick extension for a few years, but the I-44-to-I-40 turnpike is an idea that I've never heard of until today. Fortunately, the eastern part of Oklahoma County has a fairly low population density, so it shouldn't be terribly hard to come up with an alignment. Tooling around on Google Maps, looks like the Peebly Road corridor might make a decent option.

According to the site, no routes have been chosen for the 3 new pikes.  There's really no other route for OK12 other than the one that has been on maps since the 60's.  The Kilpatrick west extension will be interesting.  There is no chance it will hook into OK152 at a point that would be convenient to continue south on OK4 to the Bailey. 
When you come to a fork in the road... TAKE IT.

                                                               -Yogi Berra

Bobby5280

#8
Apologies in advance for such a long post. Hopefully it won't be TL;DR for too many here.

Quote from: drivingforwardok.comIncluded in the package are:

- A new north-south toll road in eastern Oklahoma County, connecting the Turner Turnpike (I-44) with I-40 between Midwest City and Shawnee.
- An extension of the Kilpatrick Turnpike to SH-152 between Mustang and Will Rogers Airport.
- Construction of SH-12, completing the Gilcrease loop around west Tulsa.
- Reconstruction of 9½ miles of the Muskogee Turnpike (SH-351) between the Creek Turnpike (SH-364) and SH-51 near Coweta.
- Reconstruction of 22 miles of I-44 between SH-48 near Bristow and SH-364 in Sapulpa.
- Reconstruction of 7½ miles of the H.E. Bailey Turnpike between Bridge Creek and Newcastle.

The Oklahoma Turnpike Authority says these projects should start by the 3rd Quarter of 2016. That may seem fast, but some projects were already in the works for years. The new terrain routes seem ambitious, but at the same time I'm very pessimistic about them having any chance of being built due to the very stupid, short-sighted methods ODOT and OTA have been using to plan and build new turnpikes or freeways.

Metro OKC is growing pretty rapidly. Check out the historical imagery slider in Google Earth. Mustang, Yukon, Moore and other suburban areas are developing out pretty fast. The pace of this development will easily over-shoot the painfully slow process of getting new terrain superhighways built.

If the OTA and ODOT actually want to have any chance of completing new beltways around the OKC and Tulsa metro areas they're going to have to use a lot of that bond money to acquire right of way as soon as freaking possible. Unfortunately there's bunch of places where the prospective ROW is already developed. OTA and ODOT is just going to have to buy up those homes, businesses, churches, etc. that are already in the way in some of these corridors.

Several years ago some idiot allowed a developer to build a housing addition directly in the way of the current Southwest end of the Kilpatrick Turnpike. Now most of those houses will have to be razed for any Kilpatrick extension to happen, whether it goes to Airport Road for a very mediocre extension or where it should have went 15 years ago: along OK-4 and OK-9 to I-35 in Norman.

I realize a lot of Oklahomans don't want to copy any ideas used by Texas. Unfortunately it's painfully stupid not to be copying how Texas has reserved freeway/tollway corridors over the past few decades. They just build a divided, surface level street with a huge median. That doesn't cost nearly as much as building an entirely new freeway or toll road. But it gets the property reserved for the long haul. Oklahoma City and its suburbs should have already been copying this approach for 30 years or longer.

They should have built freeway wide divided surface streets for OK-4 and OK-9 South of Oklahoma City. The same goes for OK-74 going North into Edmond and perhaps curving East to I-35. ODOT and OTA may still have to do that to give any of these new turnpikes or turnpike extensions any chance of becoming a reality.

I think it's going to take most of that bond money just buying up property and securing ROW. If they don't start that process in earnest they're going to be spending billions getting these things done in the future.

Some thoughts on the H.E. Bailey Turnpike part of this project:

I don't quite understand just what the drivingforwardok web site is describing with H.E. Bailey Turnpike improvements. They're talking about "toll plaza modernization" in N. Meridian Ave. at I-44 near Newcastle. The trouble is there's no toll plaza there. The one toll plaza on that section of the turnpike is 10 miles Southwest, and that plaza is already somewhat modernized. It has single, high speed PikePass lanes that bypass to the outside of the plaza. Maybe that plaza could use two high speed PikePass lanes in each direction.

Meanwhile the two other toll plazas on the H.E. Bailey Turnpike, one South of Chickasha and the other at the OK-5 exit near Walters, both BADLY need to be replaced. Those two toll plazas have minimal capacity. Worse yet: PikePass customers have a single inside left lane that requires the driver to slow down to 20mph or 30mph. They need to rebuild these plazas with two thru PikePass high speed lanes in both directions. It doesn't matter to me if the PikePass lanes are built in the center or flank the outsides of the toll plaza.

I heard of one plan that said the Chickasha plaza would be replaced with a modern plaza in 2016. The Walters toll plaza is more complicated since the existing one is built under the OK-5 bridge in a cloverleaf exit. I don't know the plans for the new Walters toll plaza, but if I had to guess I think OTA would build a new plaza just South of the OK-5 exit, re-build the OK-5 bridge over I-44 and then install Pike Pass readers on the ramps to/from OK-5. That project isn't supposed to happen until 2018.

A few miles of I-44 South of Newcastle does need to be rebuilt. The road isn't in good shape. Making matters worse, there are large curbs right on the left edge of the left lane. Those curbs need to be removed. It's one thing to do a "curb check" in a residential neighborhood or parking lot. It's another thing entirely at 80mph!

rte66man

Quote from: Bobby5280 on October 31, 2015, 11:43:12 AM
Apologies in advance for such a long post. Hopefully it won't be TL;DR for too many here.

Quote from: drivingforwardok.comIncluded in the package are:

- A new north-south toll road in eastern Oklahoma County, connecting the Turner Turnpike (I-44) with I-40 between Midwest City and Shawnee.
- An extension of the Kilpatrick Turnpike to SH-152 between Mustang and Will Rogers Airport.
- Construction of SH-12, completing the Gilcrease loop around west Tulsa.
- Reconstruction of 9½ miles of the Muskogee Turnpike (SH-351) between the Creek Turnpike (SH-364) and SH-51 near Coweta.
- Reconstruction of 22 miles of I-44 between SH-48 near Bristow and SH-364 in Sapulpa.
- Reconstruction of 7½ miles of the H.E. Bailey Turnpike between Bridge Creek and Newcastle.

Some thoughts on the H.E. Bailey Turnpike part of this project:
<snipped>
I heard of one plan that said the Chickasha plaza would be replaced with a modern plaza in 2016.......

It's my understanding that OTA will move the toll plaza a little farther west to accommodate the long-awaited US 81 Chickasha bypass. 
When you come to a fork in the road... TAKE IT.

                                                               -Yogi Berra

Bobby5280

I didn't know anything about proposed US-81 bypasses of Chickasha, Minco, Union City, etc.

Being in Lawton, I can't help but say it would piss me off a good bit if Chickasha got what looks like in the ODOT PDF a limited access bypass loop while Lawton has no such plans, but is badly in need of serious improvements and some key opportunities are currently available. Lawton is a much bigger city than Chickasha. Hell, Norman doesn't even have an Interstate quality loop. On top of that US-81 approaching I-44 from the South already has freaking frontage roads!

For the sake of moving traffic efficiently on I-44, OTA needs to make those toll booth upgrades at Chickasha and Walters a priority.

ODOT needs to look at the Rogers Lane corridor in Lawton. US-62 is routed on it now. Thankfully they did some upgrades to the Fort Sill Blvd and Sheridan Road interchanges to make them far less dangerous. But they really need to upgrade that corridor into a full blown Interstate quality facility. Development out on Lawton's West side is going to put a bunch more traffic on that glorified street, which doesn't even have any shoulders. There's plenty of empty space on the North side of Roger's Lane to expand that road. But it's not going to be there forever. ODOT, the US DOT and the DOD need to have some conversations about this.

Lawton has a committee of civic leaders looking at options to expand Cache Road (Lawton's "main street") to accommodate growth. But there's just no room at all for any expansion of that six lane street. The emphasis needs to be put on upgrading Rogers Lane. I also think they could build a Southern bypass around Lawton to I-44, but just start it out as a surface street with enough reserved ROW for the future. That kind of thing will get tougher to build as more housing additions dot up in various places on Lawton's SW side.

rte66man

Quote from: Bobby5280 on November 01, 2015, 07:07:15 PM
I didn't know anything about proposed US-81 bypasses of Chickasha, Minco, Union City, etc.

Being in Lawton, I can't help but say it would piss me off a good bit if Chickasha got what looks like in the ODOT PDF a limited access bypass loop while Lawton has no such plans, but is badly in need of serious improvements and some key opportunities are currently available. Lawton is a much bigger city than Chickasha. Hell, Norman doesn't even have an Interstate quality loop. On top of that US-81 approaching I-44 from the South already has freaking frontage roads!

The current configuration of US81 was built in the early 60's.  There was a pattern of doing limited frontage roads on 81 (see near Twin Oaks golf course in Duncan).  At least ODOT knew enough to do that to prevent the huge # of accidents that would have resulted without them.

If you look at 81 just SE of the OK 19 junction, you will see how the road was built for the future bypass:
   https://goo.gl/maps/PdFSpXiorDT2
That bypass has been on the books for over 50 years and is truly needed.  I'm also glad to see it will be limited access.

While I can't deny the need for Rogers Lane improvements, they shouldn't come at the expense of other, long delayed projects.  As to a south Lawton bypass, I don't believe there is much of a demand for it.  If I lived in Altus and needed to go to Wichita Falls, I would drop down to 287 rather than going through Lawton.
When you come to a fork in the road... TAKE IT.

                                                               -Yogi Berra

Scott5114

Quote from: Bobby5280 on November 06, 2015, 11:57:21 PM
Oklahoma is still a very "red" state politically. When I was a kid I thought "red" equaled communist; I'm not sure exactly when that changed. Anyway, Oklahoma is politically "red" and pretty redneck across much of the state. A lot Oklahomans look at efforts to make cities and towns more walk-able, efforts to build bike paths and efforts to build up alternative modes of transportation as a socialist conspiracy. Or it's at the very least a tree-hugging pansy thing to do. It's tough to convince most Oklahomans about the value of things like sidewalks and bike paths. There's no convincing a lot of those people even if one brings up the fact big businesses use things like walk-ability to evaluate cities and towns on whether or not they'll build a new location there.

There's actually been some push toward more walkability in the OKC urban core lately (that is, the loop bounded by I-44, I-235, and I-40). Midtown OKC, which falls in this loop, is the "cool" place to live now. There have been some projects to make the central business district in particular more pedestrian friendly; look up "Project 180" if you're interested in that. (This has also given us strange horizontal stoplights in a city otherwise uniformly vertical, but other than that it seems okay.)
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kkt

Quote from: Bobby5280 on November 06, 2015, 11:57:21 PM
Oklahoma is still a very "red" state politically. When I was a kid I thought "red" equaled communist; I'm not sure exactly when that changed.

In danger of answering a question nobody asked: red for parties of the political left goes back to the French revolution, when red was the revolutionary's color and blue was the royalist's.  In the U.S., red was the color of socialists and then Democrats and blue was the color of Federalists and then Republicans.  But in the 1970s and later there was no particular pattern in the U.S. and the electoral college maps produced every four years would switch red and blue between networks and between elections.  It was in the Florida recounts of the 2000 election that use of red for Republicans and blue for Democrats became a widespread convention of all the TV networks and the "red state" and "blue state" phrases became widely used.

Scott5114

Oh, I'm certainly quite aware. Even college town Norman is fairly bad for walkability when you get away from the campus/downtown areas. (Part of that is because of Norman's asinine policy of not requiring sidewalks on undeveloped lots, so sidewalks start and stop at random whenever you pass by a vacant lot.) The point, though, is to illustrate that despite Oklahoma's political stereotype, there are a few people here interested in this sort of thing. I'd expect that these movements are going to start to gel as more and more people move into Midtown/Downtown OKC and residents will start to demand real improvements. It may even spread as other parts of the city see it and say "Midtown gets this cool stuff, why can't we?"
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Bobby5280

I think one key to at least having pockets of walk-able, bicycle friendly areas in other Oklahoma towns & cities is mixed use development.

There are civic & business leaders in Lawton who want the downtown area of Lawton to be transformed in some of the same ways the MAPS program allowed parts of Oklahoma City's core to be transformed. But they goofed on the details -along with the effort being about as ill-timed as it could have ever been: right at the time the criminally insane housing bubble finally burst and took down the economy with it.

Lawton finally got something developed on 2nd Street, but it's far from being what should have been built. The 2nd Street area North of Central Mall got a new strip shopping center with a few Big Box stores, a new Hilton Garden Inn hotel, a big parking lot and not much else. I could go there to buy some new clothes at Kohl's or some running shoes at Dick's Sporting Goods. But then I leave right after doing that. There's nothing there to get me to stay in that part of town for hours. There's no entertainment options. Restaurant choices are very limited there (no recognizable restaurant chains either). One of the worst things: there's NONE of the night life, coffee shops, art galleries and other stuff one would expect in a downtown area that really functioned as the city center. Finally, there's NO mixed use development at all. Very few people actually live in the downtown zone.

Lawton has a bad reputation for crime, one which I think is greatly exaggerated by both locals and others state wide. Statistics show Lawton was actually at its worst back in the early 1970's (it's record of 18 homicides was set in 1973). But this was a time before Central Mall was built. Lawton had a real night life scene in the downtown area, but there was both good and bad to it. The mall erased all of it, replacing it with blandness during day time and crickets chirping at night. Even after the new 2nd Street shopping center was built Lawton is dead downtown after dark.

If anything, Lawton is just getting more galvanized in its car culture. Virtually all new home construction is taking place farther and farther from the city center. That's making things like upgrading Rogers Lane to Interstate quality more of a necessity. With no efforts to build up any mixed use development downtown, and really no new residential homes, apartments, etc. getting built there either that works against the plans to build bike paths in Lawton. People like Lon Parks have been working for more than 20 years trying to get a bike path network started in Lawton. The effort is still in its baby steps.

Too many city leaders in Lawton lack the kind of backbone to come up with a good, specific plan and hard-line enforce it into reality. They just let businesses and individuals do whatever they want to do in random fashion. Even the new 2nd Street big box shopping center had little if any tenant plan to it. Freaking Dollar Tree is the biggest tenant in the 2 outparcel buildings next to 2nd Street. Face-palm.

Scott5114

I don't know all that much about Lawton and how it functions, but it seems to me that building Central Mall was a huge mistake. OKC made a similar misstep a decade earlier with I.M. Pei's downtown redevelopment plan that led to the destruction of countless historic buildings, but some good came out of that in the form of the Myriad Gardens and what is now the Cox Convention Center (which is in the process of being relocated). The Pei Plan never really generated the downtown retail that it was intended to, and as a result the expected downtown residential developments never happened.

Downtown OKC languished in this state (compounded by a poor economy in the 1980s due to the state of the oil industry and local banking crises) until the city got a shock to its system when it was passed up for a commercial airline maintenance facility in favor of Indianapolis, with the quality of that city's downtown area cited as a specific reason why it was chosen over OKC. That lead to the MAPS program.
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J N Winkler

#17
I have read the comments so far with interest since Kansas (as a neighboring red state) has struggled with similar issues in urban areas.  Wichita has been trying to improve conditions for bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit users, at a glacial pace and with minimum funding, but little active opposition until very recently.  Now the governing majority on the Sedgwick County Commission is led by a goldbug and Murray Rothbard devotee who said just two days ago that roads and bridges are a "core responsibility" of government and improvements for other modes are expensive frills for small numbers of users.  This attitude really complicates things since the county writes the TIP along with the city of Wichita.

Where Oklahoma is concerned, I would agree that a $900 million turnpike program that (to the extent it serves urban areas) largely benefits long-distance urban commuters isn't a step in the right direction.  However, I also don't get the impression it will offset chronic underinvestment in the highway system, especially given the percentage of the headline price tag that will be absorbed by costs related to planning failure (chiefly higher ROW acquisition costs due to failure to reserve ROW).  In Kansas the current T-WORKS program is about ten times the size for about half of the population base.
"It is necessary to spend a hundred lire now to save a thousand lire later."--Piero Puricelli, explaining the need for a first-class road system to Benito Mussolini

skluth

Quote from: Bobby5280 on October 31, 2015, 11:43:12 AM
Apologies in advance for such a long post. Hopefully it won't be TL;DR for too many here.

Quote from: drivingforwardok.comIncluded in the package are:

- A new north-south toll road in eastern Oklahoma County, connecting the Turner Turnpike (I-44) with I-40 between Midwest City and Shawnee.
- An extension of the Kilpatrick Turnpike to SH-152 between Mustang and Will Rogers Airport.
- Construction of SH-12, completing the Gilcrease loop around west Tulsa.
- Reconstruction of 9½ miles of the Muskogee Turnpike (SH-351) between the Creek Turnpike (SH-364) and SH-51 near Coweta.
- Reconstruction of 22 miles of I-44 between SH-48 near Bristow and SH-364 in Sapulpa.
- Reconstruction of 7½ miles of the H.E. Bailey Turnpike between Bridge Creek and Newcastle.

The Oklahoma Turnpike Authority says these projects should start by the 3rd Quarter of 2016. That may seem fast, but some projects were already in the works for years. The new terrain routes seem ambitious, but at the same time I'm very pessimistic about them having any chance of being built due to the very stupid, short-sighted methods ODOT and OTA have been using to plan and build new turnpikes or freeways.

Metro OKC is growing pretty rapidly. Check out the historical imagery slider in Google Earth. Mustang, Yukon, Moore and other suburban areas are developing out pretty fast. The pace of this development will easily over-shoot the painfully slow process of getting new terrain superhighways built.

If the OTA and ODOT actually want to have any chance of completing new beltways around the OKC and Tulsa metro areas they're going to have to use a lot of that bond money to acquire right of way as soon as freaking possible. Unfortunately there's bunch of places where the prospective ROW is already developed. OTA and ODOT is just going to have to buy up those homes, businesses, churches, etc. that are already in the way in some of these corridors.

Several years ago some idiot allowed a developer to build a housing addition directly in the way of the current Southwest end of the Kilpatrick Turnpike. Now most of those houses will have to be razed for any Kilpatrick extension to happen, whether it goes to Airport Road for a very mediocre extension or where it should have went 15 years ago: along OK-4 and OK-9 to I-35 in Norman.


Could they extend the Kilpatrick with something like this?


Scott5114

Quote from: J N Winkler on November 11, 2015, 10:21:35 AM
I have read the comments so far with interest since Kansas (as a neighboring red state) has struggled with similar issues in urban areas.  Wichita has been trying to improve conditions for bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit users, at a glacial pace and with minimum funding, but little active opposition until very recently.  Now the governing majority on the Sedgwick County Commission is led by a goldbug and Murray Rothbard devotee who said just two days ago that roads and bridges are a "core responsibility" of government and improvements for other modes are expensive frills for small numbers of users.  This attitude really complicates things since the county writes the TIP along with the city of Wichita.

Where Oklahoma is concerned, I would agree that a $900 million turnpike program that (to the extent it serves urban areas) largely benefits long-distance urban commuters isn't a step in the right direction.  However, I also don't get the impression it will offset chronic underinvestment in the highway system, especially given the percentage of the headline price tag that will be absorbed by costs related to planning failure (chiefly higher ROW acquisition costs due to failure to reserve ROW).  In Kansas the current T-WORKS program is about ten times the size for about half of the population base.

I don't think it's a terrible idea. It doesn't promote urban living, to be sure, but two of the projects help bring OKC closer to having a true beltway, which may help reduce pass-thru traffic in the urban core. I don't think anyone is working under the assumption that OKC is heading towards walkable urban paradise and nothing else; I imagine the best end result of the current push will be a healthy balance of urbanized and surburban areas. This is perfectly fine for me–after all, I live in east side surburban Norman, not downtown OKC.

Quote from: skluth on November 11, 2015, 01:34:55 PM
Could they extend the Kilpatrick with something like this?



This is probably close to what they're planning.
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Bobby5280

#20
Quote from: Scott5114I don't know all that much about Lawton and how it functions, but it seems to me that building Central Mall was a huge mistake.

Yes. There's a lot of long-time residents of Lawton who believe Central Mall gutted the heart out of the town. They miss the lost character. Seeing the success of OKC's MAPS program these people have been hoping to reclaim some of Lawton's long lost downtown spirit.

It's easy to understand why Central Mall was built. Violent crime in Lawton was at its historical peak. A lot of people were fed up with all the strip bars, open prostitution, drug dealing and what not going on in the downtown area. Central Mall literally erased and gentrified 12 city blocks in the downtown area.

Lawton's crime rate calmed down a bit, but it's not clear if Central Mall had any valid effect on taking away any of it. Other strip bars opened on Cache Road and Fort Sill Blvd just South of the Army Post. Many referred to it as "the strip" until the late 1990's when the city shut down all of that. Lawton is down to just two topless bars, both of which are outside of the city limits.

In all the time I've lived in Lawton the main streets here have been Cache Road and Sheridan Road. There hasn't been much to draw people to downtown other than Central Mall, government buildings and old churches. Most of the hustle and bustle in Lawton is miles away and car oriented.

The first time I visited Central Mall, when I was just a kid and my family was visiting relatives in the area, I thought the mall's location didn't make a damned bit of sense. Why wasn't the mall located near the freeway a mile to the East?



Like Scott5114 said, this is somewhat similar to what OTA is planning, or hoping to plan.

The problem is frequent, long distance visitors to Oklahoma City such as myself will rarely, if ever, use it. For my purposes, driving between Lawton and Northern OKC suburbs like Edmond that path is completely useless. It serves no big picture, long distance driving functions. It creates a faux Southern beltway path that is nothing more than a crooked, distance wasting way of sucking funds out of my PikePass account.

OTA, ODOT and the Mustang city government should have acted in the late 1990s to secure ROW for future Kilpatrick expansion along S. Sara Road from I-40, down thru Mustang and all the way down to I-44 where the current H.E. Bailey Turnpike extension ends. It has been unforgivably stupid how they sat back and did nothing.

The corridor along S. Sara Road to the Canadian River was the most logical direction for the Kilpatrick to expand. But now that corridor is pretty much shot to hell. I Photoshopped a couple of images to show what a cluster**** S. Sara Rd. has become for the Kilpatrick.



The Kilpatrick dead ends just North of this neighborhood. Not only would any Kilpatrick expansion consume at least a dozen homes of that housing addition, the OTA would need to buy up a bunch of acres of land North of that creek to allow the turnpike to curve over to this point. It's an obvious statement of zero city planning that this housing addition went up shortly after the Kilpatrick expansion to I-40 was finished. I don't know who needs the slap across the face more, the developers who built that housing or the idiots who OK'ed the project. It just makes me angry looking at it.



Then there's this new middle school and big housing addition on either side of S. Sara Road. The only way I see any turnpike getting built through there is if an F-5 tornado flattens the place first. Any Kilpatrick extension would have to dodge this to the East -if some jerk doesn't build a bunch of McMansions there first.



Finally, here's a busy intersection in Mustang. Back when the Kilpatrick extension to I-40 was under construction the intersection of OK-4 and SW 74th Street in Mustang was barely developed at all. ODOT just built a new Interstate highway quality bridge over the Canadian River just South of Mustang. The plan was freaking obvious. All they needed to do was secure the damned ROW. But they didn't bother. They figured they would worry about that later.

Any hopes of OKC having a properly functional beltway are diminishing year after year as the obvious corridors get bottled up with McMansion additions, Walmart stores, other big box stores, etc. The folks in power are asleep at the switch.

Bobby5280

#21
I had a little fun in my graphics programs and threw together this map of sorts showing what could possibly still be built on the OKC metro's SW side if the powers that be can act ASAP. It's a fairly big image since it covers a pretty large chunk of area. Existing freeways and toll roads are overlaid in yellow. Possible new superhighway routes are overlaid in white. The red, red-orange and orange paths represent the impossible S. Sara Road corridor (red) and a couple possible alternative routes that could still get a real beltway connected down to Norman. None of the alternatives are pain-free. At least some homes and a couple businesses would be displaced. But the alternatives dodge the Walmart, Lowes and other more expensive buildings.



Regarding the funny I-46 shields, I figured if I was going to spend a decent amount of free time stitching together screen shots of satellite imagery and then digitizing vector paths of roads over the top of it I might as well have some fun with it. Fictional highway: my idea of I-46 is a OKC to Denver connection -a very huge, obvious hole in the Interstate highway system. OTOH, with the currently proposed extension of the Kilpatrick Turnpike into Airport Road that could actually serve as a logical extension of I-240.


Scott5114

There's precedent for an I-240 extension–all of what is currently I-44 between present I-240 and I-35 was once part of I-240. Though I don't like the implication that an I-240 extension over the Kilpatrick Turnpike would make; it would insinuate that there is never any hope of a "real" OKC beltway extending as far south as Norman. Extending the freeway east along SH-9 from the Bailey Spur from US-62 to Santa Fe Avenue could, for the most part, be done tomorrow if there were funding, but from Santa Fe to I-35 you have an awful Breezewood of sorts. (Maybe a portion of  highway that is allowed to develop into a Breezewood due to poor planning by transportation agencies, when proper ROW protection could have easily prevented it, should be called a 'Riverwind'.) SH-9 through Norman really, really needs to be a freeway, as well; east of the main part of town the road could then swing north and catch the eastern turnpike proposed in this package.

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Bobby5280

Quote from: TXtoNJI don't think it's that bad - with creative routing and the flexibility of turnpike construction standards, your light orange route is workable and will require relatively little in the way of takings.

The light orange path on my map is the "easiest" one to build. It would dodge East of the Walmart and Lowes, but the path would take out Mustang Self Storage and a number of homes North of SW 74th Street before running parallel to Morgan Road, where it would then meet the proposed Kilpatrick Turnpike extension. This route will not stay relatively "easy" to build for long.

A lot of homes, big homes, have been built in this area during the past decade and more developments are starting nearby. I think oil & gas drilling activity is the only thing keeping some of these areas in Mustang clear.

The path I drew in Red could have been built (or ROW acquired) easily 15 years ago. Now in 2015 that red path is impossible for holding a turnpike.

If you look at Mustang, OK and areas around it in Google Earth's historical imagery slider it's becomes fairly surprising how much development has taken place since the late 1990's. Yukon, Mustang, Newcastle, Tuttle, Bridge Creek, Moore and Norman are all growing. At the very least ODOT and OTA need to think about the future and target strategic corridors in the OKC metro area to prevent it from getting bottled up the way cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque have been. I'm not talking just OK-4 and OK-9 either. I think a new I-44 to I-35 link between Newcastle and Norman will be needed in the future. Potential ROW is fairly open along Indian Hills Road between Moore and Norman. Edmond arguably needs its own loop highway from the Hefner Parkway & Kilpatrick Turnpike interchange, up and over to I-35. There are plans to extend the OK-74 freeway North about 3 miles, but that's all. If ODOT or OTA fart around too long they'll have to go well into Logan County before they can start turning that highway Eastward toward I-35.

Quote from: TXtoNJI don't think the Riverwind situation is as bad as it looks - there's plenty of setback there for ROW. A new freeway bridge over the South Canadian is needed anyway as a general bypass of Norman/easy route to Lloyd Noble, but finding the funding has likely been difficult.

It would have been better for OK-9 to become a freeway, and it could have easily become that years ago. Now a Interstate-quality bypass of Norman to the East would have to be built farther South between Norman and Noble.

Regarding the Riverwind "Breezewood" it might be possible to squeeze a freeway and frontage roads through that area without taking out any buildings. But it would be a very tight squeeze and would involve re-doing all the drainage adjacent to the OK-9 and involve property owners giving up some land. I just don't see the Riverwind Casino people going along with that. It would be safer and probably even more cost effective to buy up the businesses on the North side of OK-9.

QuoteYou have to look at how the US has historically developed - from Northeast to West and Southwest. These are the traffic flows that the entire country's development pattern has created. You also have to consider the relative cost of modes - water is cheaper than rail which is cheaper than highway. A major reason there aren't many Northwest to Southeast road routes is because it's cheaper to get goods to railheads and/or barges in the Mississippi or Great Lakes, and ship this way, than it is to send it overland the entire way. It's simply not worth the cost to build a corridor that isn't going to get used by commercial traffic.

I disagree with that, having driven between Oklahoma and Colorado many times. While there is more population down South and Southwest for places in the US West of the Mississippi River there are still major, high population destinations in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest -not to mention a lot of tourist & vacation destinations.

Currently the best route for personal and commercial traffic to take between points in Oklahoma and Front Range cities in Colorado is going clear over to Amarillo and picking up the Ports to Plains corridor then going clear to Raton, I-25 and crossing Raton Pass. That's pretty far out of the way, but right now it's the most direct route. You either do that or take a lot of "L" shaped turns and waste a whole lot more mileage and time.

Scott5114

The whole Riverwind situation would be a difficult problem to tackle. Involving Riverwind itself in any plan is a non-starter; I could go on at length about Riverwind management, but it's probably best that I don't. Even assuming that they were on board, Riverwind itself has to answer to the Chickasaw tribal government, which is based in Ada, and the traffic in Norman is so far down their priorities list as to not be worth mentioning. Beyond that, even if the tribe were in favor of constructing a freeway here, there are all kinds of legal hurdles involving transferring land to and from tribes that would make it be way, way more expensive than fair market value. All of this goes as well for the Sovereign urgent care clinic on the south side of SH-9, which is owned by the Chickasaw Nation and shares some management staff with Riverwind.

Beyond that, you still have an unpleasant planning situation here. SH-9 is the dividing line here between the city of Newcastle to the north and the town of Goldsby to the south. Newcastle is the largest city in McClain County, but this is far, far away from "downtown" Newcastle along US-62/US-277, which is, itself a quasi-suburban strip-mall hell, or it would be, if strip-mall developers had any interest in it. As it is now, Newcastle is one long, narrow, five-lane commercial strip, with practically nothing on the cross roads, which doesn't bode well for Newcastle having a planner on staff at all, much less one worried about its extreme southeast corner.

Goldsby is a town of around 1800 people and has yet to get its own post office, zip code, or school (such services come from Washington, to the south, population 635). Town hall has about ten people working in it; the mayor has a day job. You're not going to get planning from Goldsby.

The best option would be to swing the freeway north at about Santa Fe, cross the river on a new bridge, and then follow the north shore until you can connect at the current exit 108A. Unfortunately, this isn't going to be an option for much longer, either, as Norman residents just passed a referendum to build a shoreline park here. Your only option, then, is to swing deeper into Goldsby and cross the river somewhere between Norman and Noble, as you mentioned. This, sadly, does very little for SH-9 east of I-35, other than possibly relieving a little bit of its traffic, although it may be so far south that people just stay on SH-9 anyway.
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