K-10/23rd Street Bridge
The Kansas Department of Transportation is holding the first online public meeting to gather comments on the K-10/23rd Street Bridge Replacement Project.
The public is invited to download a PDF presentation to learn about the proposed construction and then provide comments via phone, mail or online. The website says that a member of the study team will respond to comments and questions.
Final design plans for the bridge should be completed in 2011, with construction starting in January 2012 and ending before the year is through, according to the document. The estimated construction cost is $4.6 million.
The deadline for submitting feedback is August 6, 2010. You can download the PDF presentation here.
Comments
gorilla10 3 years, 7 months ago
Why dont they continue K-10 south of town and keep all of the traffic off the 23rd st. bridge....Lawrence is too crowded on the east side of town and all traffic off k-10 is forced right into east Lawrence....figure it out
tharral 3 years, 7 months ago
Why dont we just be done with it and build the K10 by-pass!,"lower" 23rd st. and the "RUNNEL TUNNEL" with it (for half the price),and stop spending thousands upon thousands of dollars every year trying to fix 23rd st.,putting up with the traffic mess on a daily bases's on 23rd st.,(coming into Lawrence and leaving Lawrence) and just face it,we need the K10 by-pass.It would be save us tax dollars the long run.(should have been done years ago)
RogueThrill 3 years, 7 months ago
Or, how about we just screw the bypass and just have everyone travel on 70.
arch007 3 years, 7 months ago
For whatever reason, when I try to download the report, it has crashed both my home and office computers so I guess I don't know what the entire study says. However, I'd like to take a little poll if I could...
How many of you that are commenting live near or drive across that bridge on a regular (say, daily) basis?
Michael Stanclift 3 years, 7 months ago
You can try opening it with Google Docs https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://media.lawrence.com/news/documents/2010/07/21/K1023rdStreetOnlinePres2010JulyFNL.pdf
3 years, 7 months ago
Thank you for this, I was also having issues viewing the docs.
bigmike 3 years, 7 months ago
The new sidewalks along Clinton Parkway are the nicest streets in our whole town now! Why does there really need to be a bridge there anyway? Just level it with dirt and pave it (without the launch pad/ramp!) so we can save the other 3 million to fix the streets in this town that people actually use. Please!!
Randall Uhrich 3 years, 7 months ago
I agree that the Hwy 10 bypass needs to be completed, except......What genius decided it was a good idea to make it 2-lane? Dump all that traffic off 23rd onto a 2-lane "expressway" and you've got a real deathtrap.
arch007 3 years, 7 months ago
I guess I missed the end of everyone's commenting mood for this one but let me say a few things as one of those that drives that route at least 5 days a week.
I don't think KDOT is stating they planned this project to help people jog as a couple of you seem to have suggested.
I doubt the traffic signals at Barker and or Haskell play much into their study. I get aggravated when I seem to get stopped at the one at Barker nearly every morning for seemingly no reason, but the bridge has little to do with that.
I agree they need to get on with the SLT/SWLT or whatever you choose to call it. But, that will have zero/zip/zilch impact for virtually anyone that lives east of Iowa St.
I love the name "runnel/tunnel" but you can't be serious if you think lowering a railroad will be half the cost of replacing that bridge.
Make everyone travel on I-70, come on now. That had to have been a joke.
gccs14r 3 years, 7 months ago
I've read that KDOT wants to lower the bridge, but I think that would be a mistake. Someday we'll want local commuter rail running out to places like Baldwin, Eudora, Tongie, etc. again and it'll be a lot easier to do that if we can reclaim existing railbed without having to jack bridges up again. However high they make it, though, they need to widen it to six lanes and add a bike lane and a railing-protected sidewalk on each side.
average 3 years, 7 months ago
Unfortunately (and it is quite unfortunate), the Santa Fe branch between the south end of the current Haskell rail-trail and Baldwin was abandoned in the 60s, before rail-banking. There's nothing left of the alignment. No bridge over the Waky or anything. Unlike what The_Big_B above mentions on the MoPac/Flint Hills Trail north of Lyndon which could theoretically become a rail line again.
Preserving the possibility of rail access under this bridge only preserves the ability to pull freight cars to the south Haskell businesses. Which isn't going to happen.
gccs14r 3 years, 7 months ago
The route may not have been rail banked, but it's still clearly visible on Google Earth all the way to Baldwin. There are a couple of houses right next to the old alignment, but otherwise there doesn't appear to be anything in the way of reestablishing the route.
Hoots 3 years, 7 months ago
They should just fill it in with dirt and build the road back over it. A bridge serves no purpose in that spot anymore. It would be much faster and much cheaper. In addition we wouldn't have to bear the cost of building a bridge there in the future. They could backfill that spot in a week and then replace the road.
superduper 3 years, 7 months ago
I'm no real engineer but why don't they just put in a concrete or metal culvert for peds and bikes and fill the rest in with dirt. A bridge is a huge waste there. Not only are there up front costs but I'm sure the maintenance costs are way higher than a typical road. Even if they back filled it they could build a pedestrian bridge for a fraction of the cost or install nice sidewalks and redo the intersection at Larned so that pedestrians could use the light. The trail doesn't go all the way through to 31st street anyway so it could just end at 23rd.
average 3 years, 7 months ago
Besides the fact that going to 27th/28th is handy (I know people who work on south Haskell who pedal it to work), all SLT proposals have a pedestrian path and extensions of both the Haskell rail-trail and the Naismith creek trail out to meet up with it
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