ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo.—State and local officials on Tuesday celebrated the ceremonial end to a $278 million project that brings major changes to an 8-mile stretch portion of I-270 in north St. Louis County.
The project rebuilt eight interchanges on a highway corridor between the Lindbergh and Highway 367 exits. It also added a lane of traffic in each direction from North Lindbergh to Lewis and Clark.
It created a new outer road system that removed all crossover slip ramps, includes 18 new bridges and also makes the area more pedestrian-friendly.
In 2019, the Missouri Department of Transportation said that both directions of I-270 in that stretch had higher than average severe crash rates, with the eastbound stretch seeing an average crash rate that was 30% higher than other interstate highways in the state.
Community discussions about the need for improvements date back to at least 2006
"Advocacy work sometimes takes a long time and it takes a lot of voices speaking together to be genuinely impactful. However when leaders collaborate like ours did it pays off big for the community. Just look around,” said Rebecca Zoll, President and CEO of North County Inc. ”We now have a safer, more efficient I-270 North Corridor. This infrastructure improvement serves as a great example of positive outcomes that occur when a community forms collaborative partnerships and speaks with a strong voice on what is expected and what is important.”
“We were just barely maintaining. We were putting, we had nets up under the overpasses here on this project in many places were catching the concrete that was falling from years of decay and from an inability to fund major projects like this,” said MoDOT Director Patrick McKenna.
The event served as part of a victory lap for Missouri Gov. Mike Parson heading into his final year in office. Parson has championed infrastructure and workforce development projects since assuming the office in 2018. The I-270 project included an opportunity for more than 100 local high school students to learn on the job, in addition to the trainees and apprentices hired.
It comes as work on a new I-70 bridge near Rocheport in mid-Missouri finishes, the Buck O’Neill bridge over the Missouri River in Kansas City heads toward completion next December, and as the state starts the multi-year process of making I-70 six lanes between Wentzville and Lee’s Summit.
Just to the east of the I-270 corridor project is work that began in June on a $531.6 million joint Illinois-Missouri project to rebuild the Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River.
“We’re going to keep pushing for more and more infrastructure in this state. We’re going to keep pushing for more and more young people to learn what it is to go into the workforce of tomorrow and what it’s like and North County will play a huge role in in making all those things possible for the next generation,” Parson said.
In the more immediate term, drivers of the 140,000 daily estimated vehicles that traverse the newly-designed I-270 corridor will need to figure out how it works.
“We are confident that the improvements we’ve made here will result in a lower crash rate and a lower fatality rate. Now all we need is everybody to drive it correctly, but we have reduced a lot of conflicting movements where two vehicles would have to decide how to move and they could run into eachother. We have removed those, so it’s a lot safer to drive this corridor,” MoDOT St. Louis District Engineer Tom Blair said.
