A project to improve U.S. Highway 59 between Lawrence and Ottawa has been delayed, but not forgotten, by either state transportation officials or a citizen’s group concerned about which route the road may take.

A key report studying the environmental impacts the road would create is now a full 10 months behind schedule but Kansas Department of Transportation officials say they’re still working on the document.

Lawrence resident Caryn Goldberg, front, Ken Lassmann, right, and Oswald Backus oppose the realignment of U.S. Highway 59. The proposed realignment would move the road 1 mile east.

“It has just taken us longer to complete because of the complexity of the project, and because there has been a number of concerns raised on a number of fronts, including environmental, cultural and historical,” KDOT spokesman Marty Matthews said.

Matthews said KDOT still was not releasing a firm timetable for the completion of the report, called a draft environmental impact statement, but said there is a chance it could be done by this spring.

The EIS must be completed before the necessary federal permits can be issued for construction to begin.

The state is studying two route options for the road. One option would expand the existing highway between Ottawa and Lawrence to four lanes. The second option would involve building an entirely new four-lane road one mile east of the current highway.

Matthews said large amounts of public comment expressing concern over the route for the project has led KDOT to be cautious in its study.

Voicing their concerns

During the delay, an area group that opposes building a new highway east of the current road has been conducting its own “shadow EIS,” and hopes to convince transportation leaders to simply improve the existing road.

Caryn Goldberg, a spokesperson for the Franklin-Douglas Counties Coalition of Concerned Citizens, said that an analysis of traffic counts compiled by KDOT show that a large number of travelers do not use the road to get from Lawrence to Ottawa, but rather exit at many points in-between.

“The traffic counts on the highway we believe are extremely significant because they show almost two-thirds of the traffic on the road is local traffic,” Goldberg said. “That tells us that a big new highway somewhere else probably isn’t going to fix many of our problems on this road.”

That’s because under current KDOT plans, if a new road is built a mile to the east, the current highway, without any major improvements, would be turned over to the county for use as a local road.

Goldberg said her group, which has a mailing list of 800 and an active membership of about 50, fears most of the existing local traffic would continue to use the existing road, traffic counts would soon be at current levels and the number of serious accidents would not decline.

“The road is just substandard and that wouldn’t change with that plan,” Goldberg said. “There is a lack of shoulders, a lack of passing lanes, and then it just has some things that are tough to fix like it goes through lots of hills and some people just drive too fast on it.”

The group also has concerns about the effects a new eastern route would have on patches of native prairie, wagon ruts along the nearby Santa Fe Trail and the amount of farm ground the new road would take.

“But our main concern is safety,” Goldberg said. “We have lots of concerns but everything is secondary to our safety concerns. For a small fraction of the cost of a new highway, some things could be done to make a big difference.”

The group has asked for warning lights near the intersection of County Route 458 and U.S. Highway 59, which was the site of a fatality accident Christmas Eve. Widened shoulders at key points in the road also seem feasible, Goldberg said.

“A shoulder of just seven to eight feet in some spots could provide a pocket that could save someone’s life,” Goldberg said.

Budgetary considerations

But the group knows its efforts to make immediate improvements may face an uphill battle, especially with KDOT facing a tight budget.

KDOT officials said they still don’t know the effects possible funding cuts by the state legislature will have on the department’s plans for major highway improvements. Matthews, though, said he believed the U.S. 59 project was in a better position to survive cuts than other projects that are not as far along in the planning stages.

“We can’t guarantee any project, but this one is further along than most and at some point it becomes a bad business decision to not follow through on a project that has had a lot of work already done on it,” Matthews said.

That doesn’t mean the project is imminent though. KDOT has not set any firm timetable for it to begin, only saying it is scheduled to begin construction sometime between 2004 and 2009. Rough cost estimates anticipate the project will cost between $160 million to $170 million, with a new route east of the current road about $8 million cheaper than rebuilding the highway along its current alignment.