Tulsa to get bond funds for I-44, ODOT says
By ANGEL RIGGS World Capitol Bureau
9/1/2006

Just-approved bonds will finance projects on the state's significant roadways.
OKLAHOMA CITY -- The state Council of Bond Oversight on Thursday approved $100 million in bonds for highway projects, including a yet-to-be determined amount for Tulsa.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation had requested the bonds, which will be used to pay for work on the state's 12 "corridors of economic significance."

Those corridors are made up of the most important roadways for Oklahoma commerce and include the road-widening project along Interstate 44 between Riverside Drive and Yale Avenue in Tulsa, said Mike Patterson, ODOT's chief financial officer.

The bonds are funded through a federal grant anticipation program that allows the state to address immediate highway needs by issuing bonds and using future federal highway allocations to retire them.

"Our authorization is to use these grant anticipation notes within those corridors of economic significance," Patterson said.

However, it's not clear exactly how much of the money will be spent on each project. Funding for the projects includes state and federal funds and the bond money.

The bonds will likely be sold in

late October.

Thursday's approval marks the third in a series of grant anticipation notes. The Transportation Department has so far issued $50 million in the bonds in both 2004 and 2005.

Currently, officials are negotiating design contracts for the separate portions of the Riverside-to-Yale corridor, said Cole Perryman, ODOT spokesman. Also, the department is negotiating contracts for service providers, which secure residential and commercial rights of way.

The projects will take a year or more to design, Perryman said.

ODOT officials have estimated that the I-44 project will cost about $260 million. However, because of increased costs for materials, it's more likely that the project will cost between $90 million and $100 million per mile.

At $90 million dollars a mile, the pricetag is nine times the cost of a modern streetcar rail line and four and a half times more expensive than light rail.

Yay more bonds.

$90 million X 6miles = $540 million


Plus is going to take like 6 to 10 years to complete... But it needs it bad and if they don’t do it know then it well never get done...

That means the Crosstown Relocation will no longer be the most expensive state highway project... Our two biggest projects ever going on at once! Wow.

There was an article earlier this year about the highway issues here in Austin and Texas in general, the TXDOT guy interviewed stated that "the cheap and easy roads have already been built" and everything that needs to be addressed now is the roads in the city limits areas and those are expensive and slow and this is true in pretty much every metro area across the nation. We were on one of these yesterday, 121 in Frisco. It was nothing but a two lane road when I lived in Dallas and the state never did anything to it until development already overwhelmed the existing road.

There is also a tremendous amount of truck traffic on I-44 going through Tulsa, commuter rail options are not going to alleviate that. In fact it is the truck traffice that destroys the roads, a 100 Hummers do not do the damage to a road that a fully loaded semi does. Commuter rail might alleviate some of the traffic but it still doesn't address the root problem of too much traffic for the existing road.

Commuter rail is really a very complex topic that I don't feel like starting and gathering stories and maps and stuff for right now...

There are other freeways around Tulsa that need to be expanded for sure, most notably, probably I 44 between 244 and the Creek Turnpike. The work on 169 which will probably work its way north up to Owasso fairly soon has been great.

I-44 is a mess... The city should have not allowed people to build so close to the freeway... Its some 100 buildings and Business that have to be moved because of this project...

Look at how it looks now---

That is the problem in most cities, the roads were never designed with expansion in mind and they bought the minimal amount of right-of-way. The company that I worked for in OKC did the original I-40 crosstown in the early 60's and that section of I-44 was constructed around the same time. At the time the crosstown was designed to accomodate 2 loaded trucks side by side at the same time, some thought it was overdesigned and "that would never happen." Those type of people never envisioned cities growing like they would or rail losing as much ground to trucking.

Supposedly the reason Brad Henry wants the Feds to pay for both projects is b/c there is more national traffic (trucking, vacationers) than local traffic on those roads.

Yeah when you are driving on 1-44, most of the traffic is semi's and people traveling…

The Semi's are a mess... They use both lanes of Traffic and drive crazy...

Man I'm up for this one. I absoltuely HATE HATE HATE driving on this road when I'm in Tulsa. It's so crampped and the onramps were designed by monkeys or something. It's got to be one of the poorest highway designs in OK. Who makes a road with that much traffic without so much as an inch for a inside shoulder? It will be hell to drive through during construction, but look at some of the other projects that were like it. The Ft. Smith Junction in OKC took 10 years, but boy was it ever worth the headaches....or I-35 in OKC between I-240 and I-40. Once they finish the part south of I-240 it will be so nice, and well worth the wait again. Now if we could just get the feds to pay for more of their share of this crap so we don't have to keep finding the money ourselves!

That's what the other 49 states say. And meanwile Alaska wants a bridge to nowhere!

Alaska? Are you talking about the Bering Strait bridge or is this another one?

They are currently working on I-44 at Yale Bridge and they have been working on it since April... It is a pane to drive near it, and even go underneath the bridges... You can finally see the design of I-44 the new roads will be 4 lanes instead of two... They moved skelly drive about 20 ft from where it was and that was hell...

Just 6 more miles left... The business have suffered and moved on to new locations...





Here is the PDF

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