AASHTO Journal, 3 October 2014
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx used a visit to a major highway project site in Wisconsin to repeat the Obama administration’s call for increased federal spending on surface transportation infrastructure.
Foxx said a proposed widening of the 45-mile Interstate 39/90 route from near Madison to the Illinois state line will cost nearly $1 billion and rely on considerable federal support. “Hundreds of thousands of people depend on this route every day, and widening it will help it meet the needs of today and for years to come,” said Foxx.
He visited the northern section of the project area with Wisconsin Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb and other state and local leaders, the DOT said, “to see first-hand the traffic congestion it would alleviate” and call for more investment in infrastructure nationwide.
Foxx said if Congress passed President Obama’s $302 billion, four-year surface transportation plan, Wisconsin would get an estimated $3.3 billion a year from it or nearly 15 percent more than the state’s current federal funding level.
WisDOT says it needs the I-39/90 project to accommodate growing traffic and to revamp 11 interchanges that were built in the early 1960s and “have outdated design features that contribute to safety concerns.”
The project, expected to begin next year and continue to 2021, will widen the Interstate route to six lanes from four in most sections, and to eight lanes in a section between state routes 11 and 26 around Janesville.
The U.S. DOT said, besides serving more than 362,000 Wisconsin residents who live along it, “I-39/90 is a major commercial freight link connecting Chicago, Green Bay, Milwaukee and Minnesota’s Twin Cities,” with state officials estimating that commercial trucks make up about 35 percent of the route’s total traffic.