Photograph by Dan Galvin
About a year ago, you may recall, the skies opened up, the gods rained down diamonds and bonbons, and people danced in the street. You don’t remember? Maybe that’s because you were too busy weeping tears of joy when something even better happened: Interstate 64, a.k.a. Highway 40, reopened after two years of construction.
“We came in ahead of schedule and under budget,” recalls Missouri Department of Transportation district engineer Ed Hassinger, “and we solved a lot of issues, including the direct connection to I-170.”
OK, but a year later there are still plenty of concerns: Try getting off Highway 40 at Grand Boulevard on a Friday at 7:30 p.m.; you’re lucky if the line of cars trying to get to shows in Grand Center isn’t backed up onto the highway.
“The problem,” Hassinger explains, “is that the public thinks we can solve every issue at once, and we just can’t afford to. In fact, we still have recurrent congestion west of I-270 and at the Mississippi River, but this project was never intended to address those problems. The Mississippi River Bridge is under construction now, and that will help. On the west end, we really don’t have a funded solution yet; that’s the next thing I want to solve.”
“A project like the Highway 40 project is going to happen with I-44,” he adds. “Not today, not tomorrow, but in our lifetimes, we are going to have to do the same things to the I-44 corridor. All these interstates built in the ’60s are going to need to be remade; we’re starting to prepare for that in the next 10 years.”
