TxDOT tries, tries again at 51st and I-35
Ben Wear: Getting There
Published: 10:20 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 8, 2010
Jughandle, meet the gooseneck.
Uh, what?
We're talking about the intersection of East 51st Street and Interstate 35, which over the past decade or so has been something of a problem child for the Texas Department of Transportation.
Now TxDOT is going to take a third swipe at improving the vexatious interchange, possibly with about $2.3 million in City of Austin dollars that could be approved by voters in November as part of the $90 million bond referendum.
The tinkering began nine years ago when TxDOT shut down a cloverleaf ramp leading from 51st to southbound I-35, along with a rather unique bridge that spanned I-35 and enabled drivers on Cameron Road to cross over to the west side of the freeway. The opening of a flyover north of there, where U.S. 290 meets I-35, had rendered this setup unsafe, in TxDOT's opinion. You can still see the outline of that cloverleaf, and the abandoned bridge remains as a sort of forlorn engineering monument.
Then came the "jughandle," TxDOT's name for what resulted when it eliminated a piece of northbound frontage road that connected to 51st.
To accommodate a coming deluge of development on the old Mueller airport property to the east, starting in 2005, drivers on northbound I-35 who wanted to go west on 51st had to turn east on Barbara Jordan Boulevard, north on Lancaster Drive, and then back west.
On a map, that permanent detour resembles the handle of a, well, jug.
That innovation made things better for the developers of Mueller, giving easy access to the new hospital and all the big-box stores and homes that have sprung up in the five years since then.
But it made life worse for people who live in the Windsor Park neighborhood north of 51st and east of Cameron, and for people living on the west side of I-35. They faced a much more convoluted path home that routed them through a busy shopping center, and the Windsor Park Neighborhood Association let TxDOT know that it didn't like it.
Thus TxDOT's latest fix, the "gooseneck," which is my moniker. The agency has left this one undubbed.
What TxDOT would like to build, at a construction cost of about $1.1 million, is a new piece of northbound frontage road that would go under 51st, obliterate part of the abandoned bridge from Cameron, then connect to East 53rd Street and Cameron. Drivers then, with a little backtracking, would be able to get to 51st and go west or east, or go north on Cameron.
If voters say yes to those $90 million in bonds, and thus the $2.3 million for this interchange, then construction on the gooseneck would probably occur in 2012.
TxDOT would use the rest of the money for engineering work on the west side of the interchange. The agency would like to find some way for people to get from 51st to southbound I-35 without going through a traffic light, which is currently the case. Actually building that improvement would require still more money, possibly again from the city (which, like other local governments, increasingly is paying for some state highway improvements because TxDOT is strapped).
Be patient. Perfection takes time.
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