Summer highway construction season is here. What to know about Missouri road projects
Aside from serving as the unofficial kickoff to summer, Memorial Day also serves as a kickoff to the summer highway construction season in Missouri.
The Missouri Department of Transportation is warning motorists to expect delays as several projects are either already underway or will start this summer.
"We're working to deliver more improvements to the state's transportation system than ever, and we need everyone's help to keep our highway workers — and each of us who use the roads — safe in that effort," said State Highway Safety and Traffic Engineer Jon Nelson. "Your cooperation and decisions behind the wheel could be the reason a family gets home safely — including your own. Buckle up, put your phone down, slow down, and drive sober this summer, especially in work zones."
MoDOT notes 10 people were killed and 83 were seriously injured in crashes over the Memorial Day holiday last year, and officials are aiming for zero fatalities this year.
Information on road construction, lane closures, and delays is available through MoDOT's Traveler Information Map.
Major projects to be aware of include:
Northwest Missouri: Interstate 29 in Atchison County is narrowed to one lane in each direction for repairs to the north and southbound Mill Creek bridges between Mound City and Corning.
Northeast Missouri: Interstate 72 and U.S. Highway 36 in Marion County has both east and westbound lanes narrowed to one lane with a 12-foot width restriction from Missouri Route 79 to Illinois Route 106 for bridge rehabilitation work on the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi River in Hannibal. A full closure begins May 30 for up to 30 days.
Kansas City area: Interstate 435 in Clay County has closed left northbound and southbound lanes from Parvin Rd. to 48th St. for bridge rehabilitation until approximately Dec. 1, meaning a new traffic configuration is in place on I-435.
Central Missouri: Multiple projects are underway as part of the Improve I-70 Columbia to Kingdom City project. Interstate 70 eastbound between mile markers 137 and 144 (Route J to Route M) is shifted with narrow lanes, and the ramps to and from Route J at Exit 137 are closed; U.S. Highway 63 south of I-70 in Columbia is narrowed to one lane each direction between the Broadway overpass and the Conley Road underpass.
Jefferson City: Multiples bridges in Jefferson City are undergoing rehabilitation projects. Projects are along U.S. Highway 54, which is narrowed to one lane in each direction from just south of Missouri Boulevard to just south of Stadium Boulevard.
St. Louis area: There are multiple projects in the St. Louis area. Work began in mid-March to add a third lane on Interstate 64 in St. Charles County between Route K and the I-70/I-64 interchange, part of the Improve I-70 Warrenton to Wentzville section. Motorists traveling in both directions of I-64 will notice crews working behind barrier walls on the median between Route K and Lake Saint Louis Boulevard this summer. I-64 lanes will be narrowed slightly, and the speed limit will be reduced in this work zone. Additionally, the westbound I-64 Boone Bridge over the Missouri River is undergoing routine major maintenance. Median crossovers are on both sides of the Missouri River, and two westbound I-64 lanes are on the eastbound I-64 bridge, separated by a barrier wall. The outside auxiliary lanes will be closed in each direction, but three eastbound and westbound lanes will remain open through this work, scheduled to be completed by the winter.
Southwest Missouri: Interstate 44 corridor upgrades are underway in Springfield between Kansas Expressway and U.S. Highway 65, and U.S. 65 widening is underway in Christian County. Some narrowed lanes may be present in these work zones. I-44 bridge rehabilitation work in Joplin at Missouri Routes 86/43 (Exit 6) has westbound I-44 traffic split with one lane (right) open and one lane (left) head-to-head in eastbound lanes. Both westbound and eastbound on-ramps are closed.
Southeast Missouri: Missouri Route 74 will be reduced to one lane with a 12-foot width restriction as construction crews perform maintenance on the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge, which is located across the Mississippi River between Cape Girardeau, Missouri and East Cape Girardeau, Illinois. Work is underway and will continue through November 2025.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: These Missouri highway projects are under construction this summer
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Motor Trend
21 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
Volvo Invented a Safety Device You Use Every Day—and Now It's Improving It
Here's a quick quiz: What's something you wear every day (or should), but you can't take it with you? If you guessed your car's seatbelt, here's a cookie. The modern three-point safety belt, specifically, owes its existence to Volvo, the Swedish carmaker renowned for its car safety innovation. In 1959, an engineer working for Volvo, Nils Bohlin, developed the three-point belt—and then Volvo effectively released that patent by vowing not to pursue infringement claims or charge royalties on it. After all, what better way to ensure widespread adoption than to, in essence, open-source a lifesaving technology? Of course, widespread adoption took a few years—okay, decades—but Bohlin's design, which locates two sections of seatbelt over the strongest parts of the body (the pelvis and chest) while also being easy to use by requiring only one hand to grab, pull across one's body, and buckle, eventually became the standard globally. Some innovations have altered the basic design somewhat over the years, both from Volvo and other automakers, namely retractable inertia-reel functions, those irritating motorized track-style units popular in the early 1990s, and more recently, belts with built-in airbags to better distribute crash forces across the body. ZF even came up with heated seatbelts—no mere luxury, this was said to reduce heater use (or need) in EVs, where using the heater can drastically affect range. Now Volvo is announcing another step forward for the three-point belt Bohlin invented 66 years ago: A "multi-adaptive" safety belt. A Multi-Adaptive What Now? This "world-first" technology, according to Volvo, introduces sensor feedback to the seatbelt's action in a crash, allowing the restraint leeway in "adapting to traffic variations and the person wearing it." What this means in practice is that the belt is plugged into sensor data from both inside and outside of the vehicle that can, apparently, gauge an occupant's overall size—including their height, weight, and "body shape"—and match that to their seating position. Using that information, Volvo says the seatbelt can adjust to a "higher belt load setting" for a larger occupant or more severe impact or a "lower belt load setting" for a smaller rider or a fender-bender. But those are only two examples; as Volvo points out, traditional seatbelt pretensioners have only a few load settings at most—the multi-adaptive setup, in Volvo's words, "significantly increases the number of so-called load-limiting profile variations," adding that the technology can improve over time by way of over-the-air (OTA) updates. Volvo doesn't specify how, exactly, the seatbelt pulls off this fine control, but it would seem the load-limiting mechanism for the belt—you know, the part that jams the belt if you try and lean forward too quickly while wearing it, or that locks it after unwinding the belt all the way with the intention of locking it to hold a car seat in place—has been transitioned from somewhat passive to active control. (The exploded view of the seatbelt reel below looks pretty complex.) This gives the belt the ability to more precisely modulate its lockup, we gather, in order to better restrain passengers in certain situations, while allowing some cushioning in others, thus reducing unnecessary belt-related injuries such as rib fractures. In some ways, this technology seems to be tackling the same basic issue that seatbelt airbags attempt to combat: Namely, secondary injuries from the restraint itself. The seatbelt airbag inflates in a crash to effectively increase the safety belt's surface area, spreading the load forces across a broader section of the body. Volvo is attempting the same trick, just not by way of increased belt surface area, but rather control over the belt's load limiter.
Motor Trend
21 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
Reliving "Googie" Nights In a 1958 Edsel Ranger
[This story first appeared in the premier issue of MotorTrend Classic in 2005] Elvis still weighted under 200 pounds. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" was on its way to becoming the year's top-grossing film, without a single Major Warden or Colonel Nicholson Happy Meal action figurine having been sold. Running around naked in the backyard carried a new risk-Sputnik might be peeking. And the Ford Motor Company, apparently jealous of all the press the Hindenburg had received, was finally selling its all-new Edsel, a car that for two years it had hyped so breathlessly ('More YOU Ideas!'), the public no doubt expected a flying carpet that ran on plutonium. No American city in 1958 was a more fitting backdrop for a gleaming new example of four-wheeled, Fabulous-O-Rama technology than Los Angeles. The goofy, Tomorrowland optimism of Walt Disney's nearby theme park had spilled right over the monorail and onto the sprawling, auto-worshipping streets of L.A. itself. Want a quick breakfast? Just drive to the store shaped like a giant donut Hoping to start your singing career? Head to the office building resembling a stack of records. Wife needs a new bra? Better find something that looks like a big Bloomingdale's. The rocket-age City of Angels was having a blast, and no savvy business owner could resist taking a big, living-color bite of kitsch. Drive-through carwashes looked like flying saucers, gas stations became space stations, the average roadside motel blazed with more tiki torches than the entire island of Tahiti-even coffee shops caught the fever. Soon after pioneering architect John Lautner designed a flamboyant, glass-walled, neon-splashed diner called Googies, its roof angling toward the stars from the pop-culture epicenter of L.A. on the Sunset Strip, seemingly every budget eatery in town and across America-was launching meteors from its signs and slapping rocket fins onto its deep fryers. 'Googie' architecture was born. Very soon, of course, the whiz-bang Edsel went the way of, well, the Edsel. Gushed an ad in 1958: "The Edsel look is here to stay!" -which was true only if you counted very, very slowly. Just one year after the car's debut, Ford revised the dramatic "horse collar" grille, largely because most people thought it looked if you want us to say what it resembles out loud you'll have to pick up a copy of Motor Trend Hefner. By 1960, Ford had shrunk the pseudo-collar thing into oblivion. Then, just three years after its Geraldo Rivera-grade entrance, the Edsel itself disappeared. Within the next decade, Googie followed. The Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, Susan Sontag novels-America wasn't in such a good mood any more. Across the country, the meteors cratered, the tiki torches flamed out. Undoubtedly due to its iconic status, the original Googies coffee shop managed to survive until 1989, when it was finally bulldozed to make room for a very important Virgin Megastore. By then, though, the Googie life was long dead. Of course, nobody loves a great second act more than Hollywood. For the fan of Fifties culture, Los Angeles is one of the country's prime public time machines. Thanks to the work of vocal preservationists-and the fact that L.A. remains a leading purveyor of quirkiness-devotees can still find plenty of midcentury lore here: famous 1950s landmarks, period houses, kitsch classics, globules of Googie. We dusted off a 1958 two-door Ford Edsel Ranger from the Motor Trend vehicle humidor (okay, we rented it from a company that supplies cars to movie studios) and hit the streets in search of that heady, spacey land that restraint forgot. Kids didn't walk to school in the 1950s because America was a safer place. They walked because damned if Mom was going to wrestle with two tons of Atomic Age steel lacking both power brakes and power steering any more than was absolutely necessary. Our Edsel has neither (they were options on the entry-level Ranger), so performing three-point turns amid the palm trees of Beverly Hills is like trying to drag a five-year-old out of a showing of 'Madagascar.' After a workout like this, you need a hot dog. That's right: Just look for the gigantic tube steak. Tail O' the Pup is to L.A. what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, and not just because both are full of weenies. Built just after World War II, the Pup is quintessential kitsch and a true Los Angeles landmark-which accounts for its presence in countless movies (among them, "L.A. Story" and "Body Double"). Orson Welles loved to fill up on the Pup's dogs, yet that hasn't scared the customers away. Order a Baseball Special (mustard, relish, onions), then get back in line and order another. In our first Edsel Ranger road test in October 1957, we measured a 0-to-60-mph time of 10.2 seconds. That feels about right-a modern V-6 Camry would blow the 361-cubic-inch V-8 Edsel into the weeds. The old girl bolts smartly away from stoplights, though, thanks in part to 400 pound-feet of torque. Our Ranger also has the optional Tele-touch automatic transmission, which allows the selection of drive, reverse, etc., via pushbuttons on the steering-wheel hub. Very George Jetson especially considering that it was nearly half a century before Michael Schumacher finally got rid of his shift lever. Another Edsel innovation is its horizontal, "rolling dome" speedometer, which looks like a giant compass ("Come right to a heading of 45 miles per hour, Arthur"). Believe it or not, there's actually some debate as to whether the Capitol Records building was intentionally designed to look like a stack of records. Why sure, and it's pure coincidence that a guy looking very much like Abraham Lincoln ended up inside the Lincoln Memorial. Anyway, Capitol's 13-story headquarters, built in 1954 and just north of the famed intersection of Hollywood and Vine, lays claim to being the world's first circular office building. Don't be surprised if the company's next HQ accidentally gets shaped like an iPod. "She looks just like Lana Turner." "She is Lana Turner." "What?" "She is Lana Turner."" In 1997, director Curtis Hanson shot one of the most memorable scenes of his brilliant 1950s film-noir homage "L.A. Confidential" in the Formosa Café. Built in 1925, by the 1950s the Formosa had become an A List celebrity hangout-as the countless star headshots on the walls attest. The real Lana Turner and her gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato were indeed Formosa regulars-at least until the star's teenage daughter had a hissy fit and stabbed Stompanato to death at their home in 1958. Drop into the Formosa for a drink today, and there's a good chance you'll spot a modern-day celeb-no surprise, given that right across the street is the former Goldwyn Studio (now known as The Lot), filming site for such 1950s classics as "Some Like It Hot" and "West Side Story." You're hungry again. Barney's Beanery, a funky, memorabilia-filled bar and billiard parlor with a menu as thick as a newspaper, has been in its current location since 1927Ðwhen John "Barney" Anthony served beans to drivers passing via old Route 66 (many of them, arriving in California to start new lives, nailed their old license plates to the wall, where they remain today). By the Fifties, Barney's had become a beatnik hangout. Among them were James Dean and a still unknown Janis Joplin. Some of the patrons at the bar look like they've been there since then, too. Though it wasn't built until 1965, Jack Colker's Union 76 station in Beverly Hills is one of SoCal's finest existing examples of 1950s-style space-age architecture. The Edsel seems to belong under the station's sweeping canopy roof-at least until that price sign comes into view: $3.11 for a gallon of premium? Surely an extra digit got tacked on there by mistake. What, no free road map? Don't you know what time-space continuum we're from? It's been a long day of sightseeing and dodging annoying sightseers. The old Edsel has been a peach, though, always starting right up, complex electro-shift transmission working fine, never overheating when idling in the sun. It seems unfair that a car this basically solid and likable has become a synonym for ' But, hey, the Edsel sure does look swell pulling up under the winking neon of Norm's Coffee Shop on La Cienega. Designed in 1957 by John Lautner contemporaries Louis Armet and Eldon Davis, Norm's is a bona-fide Googie masterpiece: soaring, jet-wing roof; aquarium-like walls of glass; enough combined candlepower to illuminate the Super Bowl. The hipsters come here now for late-night coffee and pancakes. 'After-bar food' they call it. In the 1950s, it would've been 'Hangover-O-Matic.' What Really Killed Edsel? Forget the styling, the Eisenhower recession, the poor initial quality, and the untried dealer network: Edsel was dead before the first car was even sold. Edsel was key to an ambitious Ford plan to tackle GM's Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac. The idea was to build three basic bodies small, medium, and large and spread the costs across five divisions: Ford, Edsel, Mercury, Lincoln, and Continental. The Fords and entry-level Edsels would share the small body; the upscale Edsels and standard Mercurys would share the medium body; and a new "super" Mercury would be built off the next-generation Lincoln body. The wheels began to fall off in 1956 when chief engineer Earle MacPherson ordered the 1958 Lincoln be switched to a unibody design to boost volume at the Wixom plant built to manufacture the unibody 1958 Thunderbird, effectively killing the "super" Mercury. Then, the day after the Edsel went on sale in 1957, Ford division chief Robert McNamara, who resented the power of the product planners responsible for the Edsel, was made a group vice-president. Sources insist that McNamara had let slip that the Edsel would be discontinued, and sure enough he began hacking away at the slow-selling Edsel's budget. Within months, he had reduced its future product plans to a different grille for 1960 Fords. In his book, °Disaster in Dearborn,° Thomas E. Bonsall blames the Edsel's demise on the byzantine politics played by warring management factions: "If Ford Motor Company management wasn't willing to invest several years of effort in the Edsel, they didn't deserve to "succeed."
Fox News
25 minutes ago
- Fox News
Controversial airport watchlist program terminated by DHS amid weaponization concerns
EXCLUSIVE: The Department of Homeland Security is ending the Quiet Skies program, which left some Americans subject to additional screenings at airport security. The department says the agency was overly politicized to either benefit or hurt specific people and ran a bill of roughly $200 million annually. According to DHS, the program kept a watchlist as well as a list of people exempted. The department says Quiet Skies has not prevented any terrorist attacks but will continue to use other methods to assure safe air travel. "It is clear that the Quiet Skies program was used as a political rolodex of the Biden Administration—weaponized against its political foes and exploited to benefit their well-heeled friends. I am calling for a Congressional investigation to unearth further corruption at the expense of the American people and the undermining of US national security," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. DHS says that the list of exemptions of people who avoid "security policies" included "foreign royal families, political elites, professional athletes, and favored journalists." The program that started in 2010 was seen as a terror prevention method, and it faced escalating scrutiny from the left and right, including groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. "TSA's critical aviation and security vetting functions will be maintained, and the Trump Administration will return TSA to its true mission of being laser-focused on the safety and security of traveling public. This includes restoring the integrity, privacy, and equal application of the law for all Americans," Noem continued. In 2018, the ACLU asked the Transportation Security Administration for more information about the program. "The TSA is engaging in covert surveillance of travelers and raising a host of disturbing questions in the process. While the program's existence is now public, the TSA has kept nearly everything else about the program secret," Hugh Handeyside, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said in a 2018 news release. "Travelers deserve to know how this surveillance is being implemented, what its consequences are for Americans, and for how long the TSA is retaining the information it gathers. What we've seen so far is troubling, which is why we're demanding that the TSA hand over records it's been hiding from the public. This is a much needed step towards transparency and accountability for an agency with a track record of using unreliable and unscientific techniques, such as 'behavior detection,' to screen and monitor travelers who have done nothing wrong," he added. DHS pointed out a specific situation in which William Shaheen, the husband of New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, was removed from the list after reaching out to the former head of TSA during the Biden administration in 2023, according to CBS News. DHS said that he "traveled with a known or suspected terrorist" three times. The senator's office confirmed to CBS News she had reached out to TSA after her husband dealt with intense security obstacles while flying, but was unaware of any specific lists her husband was or was not on. The outlet reported that he was flying with an attorney was subject of the terrorism flag. The department also cited Tulsi Gabbard's past placement on the Silent Partner Quiet Skies list. Fox News Digital reached out to Shaheen's office for comment.
