Missouri to Solicit Innovative Means of Upgrading I-70

Missouri transportation officials have declared Interstate 70 a “laboratory” for private industry, entrepreneurs and innovators to suggest ideas that will help plug gaps in the state’s ailing road and bridge budget.

Calling its new initiative “Road to Tomorrow,” the hope is that the private sector can find innovative solutions to keep the state’s most heavily traveled interstate in good working order in the face of severe transportation infrastructure funding shortfalls.

On any given day, trucks account for 30% to 40% of the traffic on I-70, or from 10,000 to 14,000 trucks, Missouri Department of Transportation spokesman Bob Brendel said.

I-70, which runs 250 miles across the state between Kansas City and St. Louis, was constructed in 1956 and has been hailed as the nation’s oldest interstate.

But now, officials have made the interstate a poster boy of sorts to draw attention to the serious state of road and bridge funding in the Show Me State.

“The state of funding is abysmal,” said Tom Crawford, CEO of the Missouri Trucking Association.

Crawford said I-70 is very congested and in dire need of widening. While MoDOT has done a good job keeping the road’s surface smooth, the interstate’s base is eroding, he said.

“It’s been a challenge, and it’s going to continue to get worse,” Crawford said. 

 So far, Missouri voters haven’t given permission to raise taxes for road and bridge maintenance and construction.

“We were the tea party before the tea party was cool,” Crawford told Transport Topics.

Missouri’s 16-cent fuel tax has not been increased in nearly 20 years, and by fiscal year 2017, the state will be unable to meet its required match to receive its rightful share of federal funding, officials said.

If that happens, the state would lose out on $167 million next year in federal funding and $400 million the year after, according to Brendel.

Just to maintain the state’s 8,000 miles of primary roads and bridges in fiscal 2016, which began July 1, the state estimates it would need $485 million but will only raise $325 million in revenues.

As a result, the five-year road and bridge plan approved July 2 by the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission essentially added no new projects to the first year of the five-year plan, Brendel said.

MoDOT officials were hoping to raise the state sales tax to pay for highways, but taxpayers last August voted down a proposed constitutional amendment that would have raised the sales tax from 4.225 cents to 5 cents for 10 years to pay for road improvements.

Widening I-70 alone would cost from $2 billion to $4 billion, which Brendel said currently is not in the cards.

MoDOT Chief Engineer Ed Hassinger has appointed a team of MoDOT experts to solicit and evaluate ideas submitted to the Road to Tomorrow program by the private sector. 

MoDOT officials said that Road to Tomorrow ideas need to not only focus on innovations in traffic engineering, design and construction, but also ways to fund transportation infrastructure.  

Brendel said his agency has received about 130 suggestions since it was announced last month.

They have ranged from raising revenue using advertising along I-70 to generating electricity using solar panels to power vehicles, Brendel said.

“We’re trying to sort them out, put them in buckets and see where we go from there,” Brendel told TT.

A bill that failed in the state legislature this year would have raised diesel fuel taxes by 3.5 cents and gasoline by 1.5 cents.

Crawford said the state trucking association supported the fuel-tax increase bill but ended up opposing the measure because it would have allowed consideration of tolling I-70.

“Missouri is a low-tax sort of state,” Crawford said. “So it’s hard to push any kind of funding increase proposal.”