Looming Highway 40 Shutdown May Gridlock St. Louis

Interstate 64 runs across about half of the country west from its starting point in Chesapeake, Virginia to its western terminus at O'Fallon, Missouri. From Virginia it runs through portions of West Virginia, across Kentucky through Louisville and Lexington, and through the lower part of Indiana. After that it ribbons through the central part of Illinois and crosses the river into St. Louis, Mo. From downtown St. Louis it winds its way west to near O'Fallon. It then continues as an arterial road connecting St. Louis with St. Paul, Minnesota. Not exactly the mother road of legend like Route 66 that also goes through parts of St. Louis and Missouri, but an important road nevertheless. Besides being Interstate 64 it also has the designation of being called the Daniel Boone Expressway and U.S. 40. If you're from St. Louis and you refer to the highway on the east side of the river, you always call it Interstate 64. West of the river you call it Highway 40, or Highway Farty, as a lot of people around here pronounce it.

Us St. Louis folks are rather fond of our "Highway Farty." We must be as it is probably the busiest highway in the area. It, and its north and south counterpart, Interstate 270, are legendary for their jammed traffic during rush hour. Down in the city, Highway 40 is the main thoroughfare for ambulances and employees getting to the Barnes Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine complex on Kingshighway. It passes alongside Forest Park, the art museum, science center, and the Zoo. Further out as it leaves the city proper, it goes through the heart of some of St. Louis' most wealthy neighborhoods where it also serves St John's and Missouri Baptist Hospitals. After it crosses over I-270, it runs through booming Chesterfield and St. Charles where new homes, retail, and office space is growing at a tremendous rate.

So it came as kind of a shock when the Missouri Department of Transportation announced that it was going to completely close a 10.5-mile stretch of the Highway for two years on January 2^nd, 2008. Now 10.5 miles may not seem like much to a highway that is 953.74 miles long, but it has the potential to severely disrupt the lifestyle of many people in the St. Louis area. The Missouri Department of Transportation had two different options to rebuild the entire highway and replace all of the overpasses: they could close parts of the highway down for four years or completely close the 10.5 mile stretch for two years. They chose to bite the bullet (or I should say chose for us to bite the bullet) and opted for the latter.

The scariest thing is that no one really knows what will happen when they shut the highway down. MetroLink has launched a campaign to try to get people to use the train and busses to get around when Highway 40 closes, but no one knows how well that will work either. Every week there's a story in the paper telling people to plan alternate routes because it could get nasty. Some businesses are relocating and some homeowners are moving to get closer to work, but what happens when those alternate routes become hopelessly grid locked? Or it just might be a minor inconvenience. Nobody knows. There have even been some concerns about how ambulances are going to get to the Barnes complex. Will they have to be routed to another hospital? A doctor friend recently started riding his bicycle to work there.

I guess the only way to find out what's going to happen is to wait and see. I noticed the other day that they have electronic "countdown to completion" clocks on billboards around town. The time can't pass quickly enough as far as I'm concerned.