Did Your State Have a Post Interstate Highway Plan ?

[3467]

https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=1813.msg116984;topicseen#msg116984

This has been a long running discussion in the Midwest Forum. Illinois had an ambitious program to double its Interstates that came out around 1970. Thanks to the work of Revive 755 we know Iowa and Missouri did as well. I recall seeing that New York and Pennsylvania did too as well as some metro areas.

Have we missed some? Are there any maps?

[J N Winkler]

I think most states did in the 1970's, although precious little came of them because of the oil crises.  The states certainly had an incentive to devise them since the introduction of Howard-Cramer mileage (200 additional miles in 1968, later expanded to 500 in 1973, per FHWA) opened the door to the possibility of ongoing expansion of the Interstate system.

In Kansas the 1970's saw the creation of a State System of Freeways and Expressways.  Corridors were targeted for improvement to (at minimum) expressway standard, and were to be developed either as turnpikes by the KTA or as free highways by the State Highway Commission (which was succeeded by KDOT in 1976).  SHC/KDOT were required to prepare annual reports on this system for a number of years and these are not too difficult to find in university libraries in Kansas.

It has been some time since I have looked at one of these reports and I don't think I ever took a camera copy of any of them, but Schirmer and Wilson's Milestones (the KDOT house history) mentions that upgrading US 69 between Kansas City and Fort Scott was part of this initiative.  KTA looked at the US 69 corridor and decided that it had too little traffic to support a toll road, and KDOT also decided that traffic levels were not high enough to justify a four-lane freeway or expressway as the initial provision, so KDOT built a comprehensively grade separated Super Two.  Thirty years later, in the early noughties, this was upgraded to full four-lane freeway.  US 75 and US 169 in the eastern part of the state have had extensive lengths of grade-separated Super Two, probably for the same reasons, and some of this mileage has been upgraded to full freeway though neither corridor has received as much attention as US 69.

[NE2]

California has their huge Freeway and Expressway System, much of which is unbuilt. It was defined in 1959: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_California_State_Highways/History/F%26E_System

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Post Interstate plan?  Well, since the state of Ohio has proclaimed that their collection of interstate highways is now complete (since the completion of I-670 back in 2003), I guess the follow PDF from ODOT's website would qualify as a "Post Interstate Highway" plan.
http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Planning/SPR/StatewidePlanning/Documents/long-range%20planning%20text.pdf

[nexus73]

ODOT (Oregon) had a plan for 4-laning various sections of main roads around 1990 to expressway standards.  That went nowhere.  The next idea was parkways and other than a 1-mile demonstration patch in Lincoln County (central coast) on US 101, no more were built since no one wanted parkway medians interrupting left turns.  Since then it's been a bandaid approach with a focus on bridges.

Rick

[txstateends]

You could include that awful Trans-Texas Corridor mess, but we're trying hard to forget it!! 

[2Co5_14]

The State of Georgia started a plan in 1989 to build a 3000+ mile network of 4-lane divided highways, mostly by widening existing 2-lane corridors.  The majority of these are US routes, although there are a few state routes.  They will not be freeways, however (the so-called "Fall Line Freeway" is a misnomer!)

http://www.dot.ga.gov/informationcenter/programs/roadimprovement/GRIP/Documents/Facts/GRIPSystemSummaryFactSheet.pdf

The positive side of this is that is has improved safety and (maybe) provided some economic growth opportuinites in rural GA.  The down side is that it widened quite a few corridors that didn't have much traffic, while leaving the much more congested roads of metro Atlanta underfunded.  The previous governor also funded it using money that didn't exist yet, so since then GDOT has been scrambling trying to clean up the shortfall...

[NE2]

Along the lines of GDOT's GRIP program are similar programs to improve surface roads in North Carolina: http://www.ncdot.org/doh/PRECONSTRUCT/tpb/shc/
Virginia: http://www.roadstothefuture.com/Arterial_Virginia.html
Florida: http://www.dot.state.fl.us/planning/systems/fihs/ http://www.dot.state.fl.us/planning/sis/
Arkansas: https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=3324.msg94837#msg94837
Mississippi: http://www.gomdot.com/Divisions/IntermodalPlanning/resources/Maps/pdf/Vision21.pdf
Louisiana: http://www.timedla.com/

[mgk920]

Here in Wisconsin, one of the first things that former Governor Tommy Thompson did after he first took office in 1987 was to announce a program called 'Corridors 2020', a scheme to play catch-up on several decades of highway capacity upgrade neglect.  Nearly all of the prodigious amount of major highway upgrade work in the state from the late 1980s to the present (ie, US 10, US 41 and 141 north of Green Bay, US 41 freeway upgrades, US 151, US 53, WI 29, etc) was done under that program, it was like an entirely new interstate system was built in the state during that time.  The first project that was built under that program was US 151 between Sun Prairie and Columbus, a freeway upgrade that was vetoed a couple of years earlier by his immediate predecessor (Tony Earl).  The program held because Thompson was re-elected to three additional four-year terms, leaving office to join GWB's cabinet in 2001.

Mike

[sandiaman]

  In   the 90's,      Governor Gary  Johnson   led an ambitious project  to  connect  all New Mexico  cities  over 25,000.   The  first  project  was decommisioning  NM  44  .  That route became  US  550, a  four lane expressway  from Bernalillo  to the Colorado border.  US  285  became an expressway  fro  Clines Corners ( I-40)  to  Carlsbad  and Roswell.  New   Mexico has some   very long  stretches of  continuous  expressway standard  highways  such as US  70  and US  54.  285 and 550.

[J N Winkler]

In North Carolina, Governor Hunt's four-laning plan comes to mind--I forget exactly how it was described in a blurb on the official state highway map which I picked up in 1995, but I recall it was something like 90% (or some such high proportion) of all North Carolinians within ten miles (or some such short distance) of a four-lane highway.  New Mexico, under Governor Johnson (who had Pete Rahn, of later MoDOT fame or infamy, as his transportation secretary), had a plan to build a four-lane connection to every town in the state with over 5,000 population, and this was later copied by Wyoming.

I think these rural arterial plans are actually quite common and have the potential to be disastrous for long-distance mobility unless they are complemented by corridor preservation initiatives.  Wyoming and New Mexico are both slow-growth states so their rural arterials function very much like freeways, but in eastern states like North Carolina four-laning seems intimately associated with stoplight infestation.

[jwolfer]

In North Carolina, Governor Hunt's four-laning plan comes to mind--I forget exactly how it was described in a blurb on the official state highway map which I picked up in 1995, but I recall it was something like 90% (or some such high proportion) of all North Carolinians within ten miles (or some such short distance) of a four-lane highway.  New Mexico, under Governor Johnson (who had Pete Rahn, of later MoDOT fame or infamy, as his transportation secretary), had a plan to build a four-lane connection to every town in the state with over 5,000 population, and this was later copied by Wyoming.

I think these rural arterial plans are actually quite common and have the potential to be disastrous for long-distance mobility unless they are complemented by corridor preservation initiatives.  Wyoming and New Mexico are both slow-growth states so their rural arterials function very much like freeways, but in eastern states like North Carolina four-laning seems intimately associated with stoplight infestation.

So true on stop light infestation.  In Florida many US highways were made rural 4 lane highways in the 1960s.  The ones that are not developed now are 65 MPH and move almost as well as interstates (ie US 301 between I-10 and SR 228. Now development has amde them into slow suburban Blvds.  (ie US 1 between Jacksonville and St Augustine)

[roadman65]

In North Carolina, Governor Hunt's four-laning plan comes to mind--I forget exactly how it was described in a blurb on the official state highway map which I picked up in 1995, but I recall it was something like 90% (or some such high proportion) of all North Carolinians within ten miles (or some such short distance) of a four-lane highway.  New Mexico, under Governor Johnson (who had Pete Rahn, of later MoDOT fame or infamy, as his transportation secretary), had a plan to build a four-lane connection to every town in the state with over 5,000 population, and this was later copied by Wyoming.

I think these rural arterial plans are actually quite common and have the potential to be disastrous for long-distance mobility unless they are complemented by corridor preservation initiatives.  Wyoming and New Mexico are both slow-growth states so their rural arterials function very much like freeways, but in eastern states like North Carolina four-laning seems intimately associated with stoplight infestation.

So true on stop light infestation.  In Florida many US highways were made rural 4 lane highways in the 1960s.  The ones that are not developed now are 65 MPH and move almost as well as interstates (ie US 301 between I-10 and SR 228. Now development has amde them into slow suburban Blvds.  (ie US 1 between Jacksonville and St Augustine)

US 27 counts in Polk and Lake Counties as well.  US 17, 92, and 441 also between Orlando and Kissimmee.

[vtk]

In Ohio, the keyword is "Macro-Corridor".  I believe the Macro-Corridor program is responsible for most rural expressways and non-Interstate freeways in the state.  The importance of this system in planning and funding has diminished in recent years – some documents I've read suggest TRAC has made it irrelevant – but the Macro-Corridor system is mostly complete anyway.  The only unbuilt section I know of is OH 16 in Muskingum County, which TRAC has classified a Tier II project, meaning it won't be built anytime soon.

[sp_redelectric]

ODOT (Oregon) had a plan for 4-laning various sections of main roads around 1990 to expressway standards.

I wouldn't quite say "nowhere" - yes, there is that little stretch of U.S. 101 in Lincoln Beach, but there's also Oregon 22 improvements from Aumsville to Stayton and near Rickreall, and then a short stretch east of Stayton.  Oregon 34 was nicely upgraded from Corvallis to Lebanon (which makes one wonder why Oregon 34 isn't given the U.S. 20 designation - it's shorter, faster, the designated truck route...)  U.S. 30 got widened from Scappoose to St. Helens.  And Oregon is slowly upgrading U.S. 97.

However, ODOT is getting nowhere fast on Oregon 99W and Oregon 18...

[bugo]

I think most states did in the 1970's, although precious little came of them because of the oil crises.  The states certainly had an incentive to devise them since the introduction of Howard-Cramer mileage (200 additional miles in 1968, later expanded to 500 in 1973, per FHWA) opened the door to the possibility of ongoing expansion of the Interstate system.

In Kansas the 1970's saw the creation of a State System of Freeways and Expressways.  Corridors were targeted for improvement to (at minimum) expressway standard, and were to be developed either as turnpikes by the KTA or as free highways by the State Highway Commission (which was succeeded by KDOT in 1976).  SHC/KDOT were required to prepare annual reports on this system for a number of years and these are not too difficult to find in university libraries in Kansas.

It has been some time since I have looked at one of these reports and I don't think I ever took a camera copy of any of them, but Schirmer and Wilson's Milestones (the KDOT house history) mentions that upgrading US 69 between Kansas City and Fort Scott was part of this initiative.  KTA looked at the US 69 corridor and decided that it had too little traffic to support a toll road, and KDOT also decided that traffic levels were not high enough to justify a four-lane freeway or expressway as the initial provision, so KDOT built a comprehensively grade separated Super Two.  Thirty years later, in the early noughties, this was upgraded to full four-lane freeway.  US 75 and US 169 in the eastern part of the state have had extensive lengths of grade-separated Super Two, probably for the same reasons, and some of this mileage has been upgraded to full freeway though neither corridor has received as much attention as US 69.

Was what is now US 400 east of Wichita in the original plans?  Parts of it are super 2.

[J N Winkler]

Was what is now US 400 east of Wichita in the original plans?  Parts of it are super 2.

I don't remember them being mentioned in the plans--the proposals for a Southern Corridor Expressway which have been made since the 1950's have generally had Wichita as their eastern terminus.  I think US 400 began to be programmed as an upgradable expressway only in the 1980's, when the first Comprehensive Highway Program was under development.