And I’m posting this, not necessarily to share the news, but to bring up the point of why in the hell does De Soto County continually get the shaft on getting funds to widen the interstate?
Widening project coming on 55
- Thread starter DesotoCountyDawg
- Start date
Maybe the windshield repairmen in your area don’t have as strong a lobby as the ones in Jackson.
If it is anything like the stack project... I will never see it come to fruition.
It took several years for the addition of 2 lanes (4 lanes to 6) on 25/Lakeland from Airport Road to Grants Ferry. This will be a disaster with traffic at Northwest Rankin every morning & afternoon.
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Assuming you are correct about Desoto getting the shaft, I would assume it's because lots more state legislators use the stretch of I-55 outside of Jackson as compared to Desoto.
There may be some thought that it's more important to help the Jackson MSA than to make it easier to commute into Memphis. Not sure if that's the right way to look at it or not. I would think better interstate access would make it more likely that industry supporting industry in Memphis would locate in North mississippi. Also making it easier to commute will presumably help us attract more memphis workers, which I guess is a net positive still since they pay Mississippi income taxes. The flip side would be I guess there is an argument that a more difficult commute will make it more likely that memphis businesses relocate offices to north Mississippi?
Man, I spent more than a little bit trying to figure out how they had 17ed up that satellite overhead enough to get hwy 25 and I-55 running parallel like that before my dubmass realized those were two separate satellite images and not one with a banner going across the middle of it.
Willie Simmons needs campaign dollars from, and just enough votes in, Madison and Rankin to stay elected as the Central District Commissioner. And the political leadership at the capitol is more apt to focus on Madison/Rankin.
Don't yall already have like eight lanes?
Edit: And yall got a Memphis bypass a couple of decades ago!
Only to Goodman Road. It's needed.
But yeah, you are right, Desoto definitely ain't getting screwed purposely by the state. They want those lanes widened because that means people moving further south into MS.
Of course, there are plenty of people in Central MS that think that's the only place that exists in the world. They hate it and love it, but most of all, just don't have the worldview needed and it's a big reason why MS constantly fights among itself.
But either way, all of these widening projects are beyond the political pork shltshow. They are in, 'oh shlt, we need to get this done now' territory.
There’s 8 lanes for 1 mile from the state line to Goodman Road and the rest of 55 goes back to 4 lanes. 55 is an absolute mess and is the main problem.
To he)) with I-55**…
They better be saving up to 6-lane I-10 from Gautier to the AL line including prolly $1B for the long bridge over the ‘Goula… It’s almost summer vacation time and the 3-months of wall-to-wall TX and LA folks headed to the beaches and back. Yippee…
The Madison & Rankin projects are much needed. But 4 lanes for Desoto is insane. And I can imagine the trip south going from 4 lanes to 2.
I think I'd rather slow them down so they'll stop and spend some money in the state.
They've been working on I-55 from Byram to Madison since at least the 1973. I know this because in 1973, we were coming from Brandon to the old movie theater by the old Jackson Mall, no not MetroCenter. We were going to a movie for my birthday. We got stuck in traffic on 55 because of construction and never made it to the movie.
They just go from one end to the other, then go back to the first end and start over.
They just go from one end to the other, then go back to the first end and start over.
Expanding from 4 to 8 lanes seems stupid. I'm sure it probably makes sense to do four lanes while you are doing an expansion on the road, but you're just guaranteeing a bigger bottle neck when it runs from 4 lanes to 2 coming southbound.
I've never dealt with them, and I suspect they are probably asking too much of the driving public around and outside of memphis, but it seems like running 6 lanes out and having two interior lanes be contraflow lanes would make a lot of sense south of Memphis. 4 lanes going into memphis in the morning, with two going away from memphis. Then in the afternoon, 4 lanes going out of memphis with 2 lanes going in.
That's basically like building an Express Lane(s). Atlanta has two of them and they work well. The toll keeps the idiots out. Along 75 it has its own dedicated road/bridges. Along 85 parts of it are just across a white line. Some of it is 1-lane, some of it 2-lane.
You usually do the widening first. I mean those interstates north of ATL have minimum 3-lanes one way even where the Express Lane starts and like 6-7 where it ends.
I didn’t say that it needed to be eight lanes for the rest of the way. You have a lot of traffic that runs from Memphis to Goodman Road and eight lanes works there. It’s a continuation of the eight lanes in Memphis. The rest of it needs to be six lanes to south of Hernando and that is the long term plan.
Aren't there plans to widen I-55 from Goodman Rd to the I-55/I-69 interchange just north of Hernando?
I guess my phrasing was poor there. Transitioning from 4 immediately to 8 lanes seems stupid. It just guarantees a huge bottleneck because you are suddenly cutting the capacity in half unless there is a ton of traffic exiting right before it cuts from 8 to 4. Seems like it'd be better to do a longer stretch of 6 lane interstate.
But again, I'm sure it is more cost effective to expand to 8 lanes while you are expanding to 4, but you do lose a lot of utility while you are waiting to extend that 8 lane road compared to if you had a longer stretch of 6 lanes instead of a short stretch of 8.
ETA: And maybe all of my statement was incorrect. If you have essentially two lanes worth of traffic exiting on Goodman, then it is more like a transitioning from 6 lanes to 4 if the lanes are designated for Goodman far enough back to prevent traffic waiting to exit on Goodman from slowing down I-55. I rarely drive that way and I didn't catch the meaning of comment about Goodman the first time through.
Yes, there are plans, but who knows when that’s going to happen. I know someone who’s pretty close to the situation dealing with this, and he has told me that I will be retired and have grandkids before it gets done. He is saying 20+ years.
It does down to two lanes each way at Church road. It needs to be widened at least to the 269 interchange and ideally all the way to the tate county line.
Hopefully (as we were told it would) this includes putting ii an interchange at Reunion Extension and I55 .
The bids are to high. No one wants to take on that headache for the price its expected to cost. Same as the widening of goodman rd.
The problem is the state doesn't have the foresight to do things before the problems arise. Now it's a huge problem and widening would create massive problems. I hope now it doesn't happen before my wife and I retire.
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An interstate loop, say I-655, should have been built from Terry to Brandon, to Gluckstadt to Clinton to Terry a million years ago. Every time I drive to/through Jackson I cuss the politicians that were in charge of all this way back when.
When I worked at MDOT they had started replacing the bridges N of Senatobia for the widening project. The bridge across Commerce St in Hernando was supposed to have been done already but it would have caused so much trouble in Hernando and on the interstate. The bridge over commerce st is problem.
There are on- and off-ramps shown in purple on the aerial, so I assume so.
The Hernando exit is one giant cluster and the underpass is entirely too narrow.
The way it’s configured it’s not terrible because the right two lanes are exits for Goodman Road and the middle lane merges left. The bad part is the clover leaf merge lane coming on off Goodman road meets the two lanes can get hairy sometimes.
Jackson is nowhere near big enough to require a loop. 220 is the least used interstate segment in the country. And there’s not enough out of state traffic coming through there to justify any of those routes being controlled access.
Everybody talks about waste/fraud/abuse in the government but the politicians won’t let the government engineers do their job. So you get a pork project like 220, which, if you had to pick a quadrant of the Jackson Metro to connect, is the least needed one.
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Simple answer: It's in NORTH Mississippi. The northern part of the state has always been slighted when it comes to roads.
I'm fairly certain the Commerce Street exchange in Hernando was designed by Ole Miss engineers. And I only found out a couple of years ago that Ole Miss even had an engineering program.
Never fear, Hernando will keep permitting high-volume businesses in the mean time, I mean what is wrong with Manhattan traffic anyway?
I avoid that area like the plague. There isn't room for proper cloverleaf exits unless you build up, and then the circumference is probably too large for the current businesses. Not sure what would work (I'm not an engineer) but they need to do something yesterday. And stop adding traffic in the meantime.
Never fear, Hernando will keep permitting high-volume businesses in the mean time, I mean what is wrong with Manhattan traffic anyway?
I avoid that area like the plague. There isn't room for proper cloverleaf exits unless you build up, and then the circumference is probably too large for the current businesses. Not sure what would work (I'm not an engineer) but they need to do something yesterday. And stop adding traffic in the meantime.
I drove through there around lunch last week against my better judgment. It’s awful. If I go to commerce from Mcingvale I just take Mt Pleasant. Same amount of time.
Lunchtime is bad but fridays from lunch until about 6:30 is the spawn of Satan.