Driving Forward OK

[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.

Is the land on the North side of OK-9 owned by the Chickasaw tribe? If it's not trust land then OTA could acquire those businesses and the ROW needed regardless of what the tribe or Casino management want or don't want.

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.

I wonder if Norman residents realize the Canadian River can flood. Satellite imagery shows in fairly obvious detail how far the river can go outside of its banks. I wouldn't be building anything of value down next to that.

OTOH, having a riverside park wouldn't necessarily kill a new bridge crossing the Canadian River. If the new bridge was designed and built in an aesthetically pleasing way and accommodated pedestrian/bicycle traffic it might actually fly. Look at the Woodrow Wilson Bridges for I-95/I-495 on the South side of Washington, D.C. The bridges carry highly important Interstate highway traffic, but also connect pedestrian/bike paths and parks on both sides of the Potomac River. I'd have that potential bridge connect into the I-35 and OK-9 interchange on the North side of the Canadian River.

The businesses on the north side of SH-9 are not tribally owned. Looking at the map, it looks like there might be room to put a freeway up behind those businesses, along the SE 40th Street corridor. Then existing SH-9 could just be a short commercial strip with freeway interchanges on both ends. Hooking into I-35 from that corridor might get expensive, though.

I don't think the Canadian River Park is intended to be a highly-developed park. Based on the brief description given by the city in the flyers sent out ahead of the referendum, it seems like the main draw will be hiking trails. Presumably if it floods it will just close the park for a while.

[rte66man]

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.

Lawton had to do something.  NO ONE would go downtown during the late 60's/early 70's.  I lived in Duncan at the time and we would drive to Wichita Falls just to avoid Lawton retail (except for the Sears on Gore).  My memories of downtown Lawton were of a rundown home for winos.

While I do agree with Scott that it could have been WAY better, for most of the 80's it was a BIG regional draw.  Although it would be nice to be able to bulldoze it and start over, I doubt there is anyone with the vision to do it right, much less the stroke to get it funded.

[Bobby5280]

What we have in Lawton now is decentralized, gentrified randomness. It's not bad. But it's not great either. Lots of locals love the new Carmike theater and its 598 seat IMAX screen (but not the steep ticket prices). Rumors have it that a Dave & Busters will be built next door to it. This is all next to Rogers Lane, far on Lawton's West side, a few miles away from downtown and a few miles away from I-44 too. It's almost like there's two different cities trying to be built with the ashes of the former city in the middle being left behind to rot.

[Bobby5280]

Here's a little graphical goodness to add to the discussion of the Riverwind Casino "Breezewood" of sorts. There is a few ways to build around it. I think buying up the half dozen or so businesses along OK-9 across the highway from the casino and building there is the very best alternative. But the attached illustration shows some potential options.



And yet again, I had to have some fun with highway markers. Keeping with that I-46 concept, I worked it into the design. I think a Denver to Texarkana via OKC route would be awesome. And it would have Oklahoma criss-crossed in 8 directions and leverage the state more highly as the commercial geographic center of the US even if a point in Kansas is the true geographic center of the country. The I-644 thing would be one idea of a route spanning from the Newcastle area over to Norman. But it could do that via Indian Hills Road.

[corco]

First of all, OK-3 does not go directly to Colorado. It goes to Boise City. That's all. I've driven the Boise City route, where you pick up US-287 going only North, not toward any actual cities. There not nearly as much traffic on that corridor as US 64-87 in Northern New Mexico. You have to go down into the Texas panhandle for commercial traffic counts to ramp up, but that's for oil/gas production, agriculture and some very smelly cattle processing plants and feed lots.

The OK-3 and US-287 route in the Oklahoma Panhandle and SE Colorado is all 2-lane. And it's dangerous. One my girlfriend's friends was killed last year in a head on collision North of Boise City when a semi crossed into her lane. I'll keep taking the four lane routes in the Texas panhandle and NE New Mexico to get to Colorado.

3 actually does go right to the state line...


I'd take 287/3 over 25/87 every day of the week, and a lot of other people do too, with all due respect to your girlfriend's friend. Especially in winter, it's an easier drive, besides being significantly shorter. People die on Raton Pass too.

It's two lane, but there are wide shoulders and plenty of passing opportunities through Colorado, making it a fairly pleasant if boring drive.

[corco]

The distance is also shorter

Most of what you've said is, I guess, opinion, but the distance absolutely is not shorter. 287 is a solid 40 miles shorter to any point in Oklahoma from Colorado than 64/87.

[J N Winkler]

To my mind, the principal advantage of the I-40/US 64-87/I-25 route is that it passes through all of the Front Range cities in succession, which is ideal if the intent is to go to Denver by way of Pueblo or Colorado Springs rather than Denver directly.  A person leaving from Oklahoma City and going directly to Denver is better off time-wise compared to all other routes (though not mileage-wise) taking I-35 and I-70 through Kansas.

US 64-87 may now be four-laned as a result of NMDOT's recent rural four-laning program, but this is largely offset by I-25 in Colorado south of Castle Rock being one of the worst rural Interstates in the country, with a 75 limit in combination with numerous curves with 50-55 MPH advisories.

Edit:  I-40/US 64-87/I-25 is actually the shortest route to Denver both time- and mileage-wise for someone leaving from Lawton.  The underlying point is that the starting point in Oklahoma is critical for determining the route that offers the shortest time or distance for a direct car journey to Denver.  It is not a very good approximation to treat routings from Oklahoma City as representative for the entire state minus Panhandle.

[Bobby5280]

Most of what you've said is, I guess, opinion, but the distance absolutely is not shorter. 287 is a solid 40 miles shorter to any point in Oklahoma from Colorado than 64/87.

My drive from Lawton to Colorado Springs is significantly shorter going by way of US-64/87 and Raton Pass rather than driving up US-287 and taking a left turn at CO-94. I've driven both ways and know the difference very well.

[rte66man]

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.

Then don't use it.  I can guarantee that everyone coming from the west on I40 will jump at the chance to use it as a shorter route to I44 and Moore/Norman.   I know I will just to avoid the hell that is the Amarillo junction.

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.

Logical, maybe.  But where was the money to buy the land going to come from?  If you have $250 million to spend on roads and you spend even as little as $5 million to "preserve future ROW" you will be pilloried in every media available for not spending it on deficient bridges, substandard intersections, etc.  Oklahoma doesn't have that kind of money ANYWHERE.  Sure, we would all love to be able to do that, but it takes $$$, something most voters don't want to vote for to spend on "future" benefits.

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.  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.

As Scott pointed out, you can avoid all of the things you mentioned on Sara Rd except for the development at the intersection of 4 and 152.  You do realize that most of that land had been purchased by developers once the new Canadian River bridge was proposed.  Walmart (through its real estate subsidiary) certainly had.  The $5 million I mentioned above wouldn't have bought 1/2 mile of ROW at that time. 

The route shown earlier would be OK in my opinion IF there is a spur south and west to meet up with OK 4.  But you still have to get through Tuttle.......

[Scott5114]

http://www.drivingforwardok.com/#!Area-of-Study-for-Northeast-Oklahoma-County-Loop-Narrows-to-Area-along-Peebly-Road/tgcb1/569441190cf20ee37c6ec3b9

OTA is looking at a two-mile-wide corridor centered on Peebly Road for the northeast Oklahoma County loop.

[okc1]

OTA has released a preliminary route for the turnpike between I-40 and I-44 in NE Oklahoma County.  Two options are shown for the northern end.  About 100 structures are in the path. http://media.wix.com/ugd/7181a5_07530de184294c6cad8be95cb5eef61f.pdf

It's supposed to be a "relief route" for I-35, but no plan for extending it south of I-40 was presented.

[Bobby5280]

Without connections to I-35 the route will not just fail to function as a relief route for I-35, but I don't think it will attract much traffic at all, probably not enough for the toll road to pay for itself. BTW, I hope the interchange designs with I-40 and I-44 are not final. One fly-over ramp and a cloverleaf? Yuck.

Roads have to go somewhere. Policy makers can't just build a turnpike out in the sticks and expect development to suddenly flourish around it.

[Rick1962]

A tolled relief route for I-35 that doesn't connect to I-35 at either end is really dumb, even by Oklahoma standards.

[Scott5114]

Gotcha. I was thinking BSA.

[Bobby5280]

An even bigger problem is the rail folks can't seem to manage building a commuter passenger rail line without it costing well into the billions of dollars. A light rail line parallel to I-44 between OKC and Tulsa would be guaranteed to cost at least a few billion dollars. That's just something built mostly at grade. When you bury the rail line (subway) or elevate it the cost is just going to skyrocket.

It really pisses me off how road building and maintenance costs have seen such obscene levels of cost inflation in recent years, but they still seem cheap compared to building a freaking subway line. The MTA in New York is expected to spend $17 billion to just to complete the 8.5 mile 2nd Ave. subway line in Manhattan. Construction on it actually began over 40 years ago with some tunnel sections sitting empty for decades. If they're not lining the tunnel walls with gold and emeralds some connected people's pockets much be getting filled that way.

So, after one spends many billions of dollars building a commuter rail line between OKC and Tulsa how many people are going bother using it? Both Tulsa and OKC are de-centralized, car-oriented cities with work places and living places spread all over each metro area. Both cities would first need their own light rail systems properly covering each area before they could be connected via a regional commuter rail line.

At this point it's probably going to be a long time before OKC or Tulsa get started on their own light rail systems. Oklahoma's state and city governments overall can't even manage to get any real long term transportation plans established and properly enforced. They only think about the short term. Taking action to preserve rights of way for a new freeway, toll road or even a passenger rail line is totally alien to them. They just let developers build where ever they like.

Texas can get some big things done, both in terms of highway and rail, because they plan ahead for it, sometimes decades in advance. Oklahoma's decision makers can't see past the next 4 years.

[J N Winkler]

Looking more closely at London as a comparator to Oklahoma City, the 1861 census has 3.1 million people living in the former County of London, at an average population density of 5,200 people per square mile.

http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm

Modern Oklahoma City has about 620,000 people in 620 square miles--about 1000 people per square mile.

A more fine-grained analysis suggests that 5,000 people per square mile represents a density threshold at which expansion of a heavy rail mass transit network becomes viable.  The lines that made up the London Underground were originally quite small, but were massively expanded during the interwar years (1918-1939) when the growth in the secondary industries (e.g. auto manufacturing), in combination with decline in primary production in the north of England, resulted in population transfer to the south and booming suburbanization in London.  Population density in the outer boroughs was already past the 5,000/square mile threshold in 1911 and almost doubled (approaching County of London levels) between 1921 and 1939.

[kkt]

It really pisses me off how road building and maintenance costs have seen such obscene levels of cost inflation in recent years, but they still seem cheap compared to building a freaking subway line. The MTA in New York is expected to spend $17 billion to just to complete the 8.5 mile 2nd Ave. subway line in Manhattan. Construction on it actually began over 40 years ago with some tunnel sections sitting empty for decades. If they're not lining the tunnel walls with gold and emeralds some connected people's pockets much be getting filled that way.

The 2nd Avenue Line is obviously going to be very expensive.  Tunnel, NY underground as full of tunnels as swiss cheese already, complex interlinks between crossing subways.  However, we know it will get used heavily as soon as it opens.  You can't really say that about most other subways in the U.S.

[bjrush]

Wtf is going on in here?

[J N Winkler]

Although I realize that 35 north from I-40 to I-44 is in desperate need of modernization (built in the early 60's with inadequate capacity), the stretch of I44 west from Lincoln to Dead Man's Curve at OK66/74 is the biggest piece of crap in the entire state.  Built in the mid-70's, they should have know better than to design what they did.  I might melt my keyboard if I start listing all the problems.

I drove this length of I-44 as part of an OKC day trip in late 2014.  I found it fairly painless, but it was at night and well after the rush hour.  Besides the 90° change in bearing at the western end, it has a lot of fairly sharp curves and far too many access points.  Some of these leave or join on the left, and some fail to form part of complete interchanges offering full two-way connectivity.  (I count 24 in 3 miles; an ordinary freeway with simple diamond exits at mile spacing would have just 16.)

I don't think, though, that the late 1970's was a good time to expect freeways to be designed with superior operating characteristics in urban areas.

Partly this was because most of the easy design problems were solved much earlier, in the 1960's or even the 1950's.  The lengths of planned freeway that were still on state DOTs' to-do lists by the 1970's generally had underlying design issues that either delayed letting or made it difficult to develop consensus on a final design.  Rural free I-35 in Kansas was a bit of an exception because its construction was artificially delayed to avoid competition with the Kansas Turnpike, but the Canal Route segment of I-135 in Wichita (itself a somewhat compromised design with closely spaced exits, room left for possible connections to a cancelled freeway, and limited merging area at many exits) is a child of the late 1970's.  Some of the delay came from inadequately mapped water lines since this part of Wichita was developed fairly early in the city's history.

The anti-freeway movement was also in full swing by the 1970's and the light rail line substitution policy came in (if memory serves) by the late 1960's.  This would have had the effect of making a freeway proposal easy to kill if it failed to meet the local community's expectations of access.  I suspect this may be why I-44 has too many accesses.

The double-nickel speed limit might also have had an effect in making state DOTs unwilling to fight to hold the line on design speed within urban areas.  FHWA published a report in the late 1970's noting that the double nickel was expected to be a permanent policy and laying out the pros and cons of allowing lower design speeds for freeways.  My recollection is that, for a variety of reasons, the report recommended that the existing conservative approach to design be retained, but I don't think state DOT engineers would have felt safe insisting on 60 or nothing for urban proposals that already had significant access, constructability, and environmental-justice issues.

[Scott5114]

The anti-freeway movement was also in full swing by the 1970's and the light rail line substitution policy came in (if memory serves) by the late 1960's.  This would have had the effect of making a freeway proposal easy to kill if it failed to meet the local community's expectations of access.  I suspect this may be why I-44 has too many accesses.

I'm not sure that the ODOT access policy had anything to do with perceived possibility of a freeway protest. As far as I know, Oklahoma has only had one full-on freeway protest, and that was against the Creek Turnpike in the 1990s (which was mostly just area residents that could not offer a serious argument against the freeway's construction other than the impact it would have on their personal lives). I-240 shows a similar overabundance of exits, so I think it may have just been ODOT's design choice at the time.

This segment of I-44 was originally Grand Boulevard and, upon being upgraded to freeway, first carried the I-240 designation, not I-44. I don't know if any of that influenced its design or not.

[okc1]

New proposed alignment for OKC SW loop http://www.drivingforwardok.com/#!Southwest-Kilpatrick-Extension-Preliminary-Alignment-Announced/tgcb1/56fb0d500cf226b8e685e468

[Bobby5280]

It's interesting the OTA is actually moving forward with at least some kind of plan before all the land in Mustang is filled in with development. I think this project is a more urgent priority than the one on the East side of the metro area due to so much random development going unchecked and blocking possible corridors. It will be interesting to see if they can get a corridor finalized and protected before developers screw it up.

I laughed when I saw the first part of the extension. Immediately South of I-40 the alignment hooks sharply West to dodge two schools (that it already dodged before dead-ending at SW 15th Street). The real reason for the odd hook to the left is the Mustang Creek housing development, idiotically put directly in the path of the turnpike's logical extension. The the road hooks around hard to the East just to cut under that development, but then has to turn hard again to avoid Castlebrook Crossing.

Still, this proposed turnpike extension path is cutting across some housing developments that are in progress.

The big question is: How are they going to ever connect this with OK-4 South of Mustang? The OTA, ODOT and City of Mustang absolutely have to figure an answer to that question ASAP, get a corridor identified and at least start trying to acquire the ROW for it. The OTA and ODOT also have to at least start some kind of planning with the OK-9 segment between I-44 and I-35 South of Norman.

[Ned Weasel]

The big question is: How are they going to ever connect this with OK-4 South of Mustang? The OTA, ODOT and City of Mustang absolutely have to figure an answer to that question ASAP, get a corridor identified and at least start trying to acquire the ROW for it.

"Absolutely have to?"  Is the world going to end if the connection just never gets built?

[Bobby5280]

"Absolutely have to?"  Is the world going to end if the connection just never gets built?

The world won't end, but eventually traffic in that part of the OKC metro area will turn into a complete clusterf*** that's impossible to fix if the powers that be don't screw on their heads and start actually doing some real planning for the future.

I don't expect Oklahoma City to have a complete superhighway outer loop built any time soon. But if they hope to ever have the possibility of building one anytime in the future they need to specify the corridors and start acquiring the ROW now. They could easily have done this 20 or 30 years ago -like Texas has been doing for decades. That proposed Kilpatrick Turnpike extension wouldn't be so laughably crooked and curvy.

The very least thing they could have done was require substantial minimum set-backs along S. Sara Road in Mustang. Any idiot could have easily seen that was where the turnpike was eventually going to expand. Instead they just let everyone build right up next to the street along with as many driveways as they wanted.

[Scott5114]

I think the ideal endgame for OKC would be a dense, urbanized area in the "core" (the area bounded by I-44, I-235, and I-40) with easy transit access to and within that area, and the remainder of the city with its current suburban development style. That seems like an ideal setup to give OKC residents a choice in the sort of lifestyle they want to live.

(I do have to laugh at the mention of Ada in a transit discussion. I'm fairly familiar with it since my wife has family there and it will probably be the last place on Earth to ever get transit. If it ever happens it will be because the Chickasaw Nation decided to start throwing money after it, and then there's a fair chance its use would be limited to tribal members and employees.)

That said, while the east loop is somewhat questionable, the Kilpatrick extension does serve a need, and even more so if it gets extended further down the SH-4 corridor. As a Norman resident, I can think of some plausible uses for it already, though I tend to be a tightwad and would probably just stick to I-44 unless it's, like, pay day or something.