GRIDLOCK GURU : Pinnacle job ever so near completion
Posted on Friday, March 28, 2008
Pinnacle Hills Parkway in Rogers is thisclose to done, so drivers are gonna have to persevere a little longer.
This week’s questions come from Bella Vista resident Tom Smith, who asks about the Rogers street, and Farmington resident Joe Dunn, who asks The Guru for more information about one aspect of an answer from last week’s column.
Question: “I read the March 21 complaint about the ‘terrible mess’ at Interstate 540, Pinnacle Hills Parkway and New Hope Road,” Smith writes. “I’m sure this question has come up before, but why in the world does this condition continue for so long ?
“ I go by there three or four times a week, and there hasn’t been any progress on this work for many months. What is going on ?” Answer: David Bushey, the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department’s resident engineer in Bentonville, said construction on and near Pinnacle Hills Parkway should be done by April 30 with two possible exceptions.
Bushey asked his Highway Department bosses in Little Rock to approve two new lanes for roads in the Pinnacle area. The bosses haven’t decided whether they’ll do them.
Bushey wants a deceleration lane to allow drivers headed north on Pinnacle Hills Parkway to go south on I-540. He also wants a rightturn lane on New Hope Road to allow drivers headed west to more easily turn north onto I-540.
Q: “In reading your [March 21 ] column, I notice that the feds only allow entrances and exits a mile apart,” Dunn writes. “How do they explain the entrance from Garland Avenue and the exit going east toward the Gregg Avenue exit ?
“ I don’t think it is a mile apart.” A: Dunn is generally correct, but the way I-540 slips through the western area of Fayetteville is important in understanding what happened.
The Highway Department opened the Fayetteville bypass with exits at Gregg and Garland in 1982.
The road, commonly referred to as the Fulbright Expressway, runs from School Avenue north of the Fayetteville Municipal Airport to College Avenue south of the Northwest Arkansas Mall.
Toward the mall portion, there remains a one-mile gap between the Garland Avenue entrance ramp and the Gregg Avenue exit ramp.
Problem was that some wise guy decided a U. S. 71 bypass of Fayetteville wouldn’t suffice. He insisted that the road go farther north, running west of Johnson and on toward Springdale.
The issue: Where does the road toward Johnson and Springdale get attached to the Fayetteville bypass ? There weren’t great options if the goal was to maintain the onemile gap.
So the U. S. 71 extension, with the approval of the Federal Highway Administration, was attached to the Fayetteville bypass right in the middle of the one-mile gap between Garland and Gregg. The new section of U. S. 71, now called Interstate 540, opened in 1985.
It connected to what’s now known as U. S. 412 in Springdale. Robert J. Smith, aka The Guru, writes on traffic issues in Northwest Arkansas each Friday. He can be reached at gridlockguru @arkansasonline. com or www. nwanews. com / gridlockguru.
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