Two-year Interstate 270 widening project wraps up

Efforts to loosen one of the St. Louis regions most notorious traffic choke points wrapped up on Friday.

During the last two summers, the Missouri Department of Transportation overcame one significant physical obstacle to add another lane in each direction on Interstate 270, roughly between Manchester Road and Interstate 44.

MoDOT had to work around railroad bridge columns that carry tracks over the bustling interstate, and blasted away some of the rock bluffs that posed a natural barrier to widening. Replacing the bridge would have been cost-prohibitive, MoDOT officials say.

So the project called for adding a fifth lane in each direction to the four-lane highway. MoDOT did this by making the north- and southbound lanes slightly narrower than the traditional 12-foot lane width.

Reader Marcel Roy of Crestwood noticed that there were some complications to merging onto southbound I-270 at Dougherty Ferry while the work was under way.

With the entrance ramp restricted to one merge lane, traffic could sometimes back up on eastbound Dougherty Ferry, and sometimes on southbound Des Peres Road.

The new northbound lane between Manchester Road and I-44 opened in December 2012. With little fanfare, MoDOT officials on Friday opened the fifth southbound lane between Dougherty Ferry Road and I-44.

The need was pretty clear. The roughly four-mile stretch carries 175,000 to 185,000 cars each day, making it one of the busiest roads in the region.

Traffic is known to slow to a crawl and by crawl, we mean about 35 mph on a typical morning commute on the northbound segment of I-270. That means it takes about 10 minutes more to drive this section during rush hour than periods of light traffic.

The state learned during the nearly two-year closure of Highway 40 (Interstate 64) that it could restripe highways without sacrificing safety. During the Highway 40 closure, MoDOT painted narrower lanes on sections of Interstate 70 and I-44.

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Two-year Interstate 270 widening project wraps up