On Dec. 7, 2009 the new highway 40 opened after about two years of construction. The construction spanned about 10 miles east to west, from Kingshighway to Ballas Road. The opening of the new highway excited St. Louisans because it was closed for so long. Commuters had to rely on city streets greatly lengthening the daily trip.

The construction also made for confusing and often absurdly extensive detours. Any highway would have seemed better than the previous situation, but when properly analyzed one should be able to see the faults of the thoroughfare. The design flaws appear specifically around the portion that crosses Hanley Road.

Hanley, which is right near my house, is a major North-South road that a plethora of commuters and shoppers use most days if not every day of the year. It is relatively close to many neighborhoods right near the new highway plus it is next to a popular shopping area on Eager Road that includes stores such as Best Buy, Target, Sports Authority, Trader Joes, and many other supermarket and specialized shops. Pre-construction, Hanley had an east and west exit and entrance for 40.

The problem with this was the heavy Eager road traffic mixing with other cars coming off of the highway from the west. Enough people complained and the city decided to include the Hanley road overpass and intersection into the construction. This project closed this portion of Hanley, cutting off the connection between Clayton and Richmond Heights.

The drive to get to the Eager Road shops used to take me an average of around five to ten minutes. The detours resulted in a near 20 minute drive just to access a facility a mere quarter mile away. A year passed and finally the bridge reopened. It looked new and useful, but problems arose when people realized that Hanley was no longer directly connected to the highway in some directions.

There was an exit onto Hanley for cars traveling west and a ramp onto 40 to travel south. However, to get onto 40 going west, there is a new connecter road with an exactly one minute and 12 second light at the end before a car could finally traverse onto the new road. This connector has a 40 mile per hour speed limit which several people have been caught violating most likely in a feeble and dangerous attempt to catch the light.

Adding about a minute or two to a commute doesn’t sound too bad. But if someone were to do this for the 261 business days in a year, that is nearly four hours per year spent – no – wasted on a forced change after two years of not having the highway at all. There is also a lack of an exit ramp for people coming from the west to get onto Hanley. I understand this move as to limit the masses of Eager Road traffic plus highway departures, but apparently the city has decided to get rid of the highway travelers all together.

Did anyone think to perhaps simply place an exit strategically so that cars would empty onto a different portion of the road? A cloverleaf ramp was built for the Eager traffic heading to Hanley which was a terrible decision. This caused for a one way Eager-Hanley connection and resulted in a detour for shoppers heading in the opposite direction.

The cloverleaf ramp should have been reserved for the highway as an exit and the Eager traffic could have a direct link as they did before. Sadly even the best of city planners couldn’t solve this simple puzzle. The greatest frustration people should have with the planners is that they purposely covered up the plan for Hanley. They knew that their design was poor and unpopular.

According to an article in the St Louis Post Dispatch on December 14, 2009, the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) spokeswoman Linda Wilson said that they hid the plan from the public because they thought people would forget about the changes if they were aware of them too many months in advance. That answer is both offensive to the intelligence of the public and purely illogical.

The only reason I can imagine for the botched design of the roadways there is laziness and haste so the construction would be finished quicker. The new design has made traveling around St. Louis more difficult and frustrating to hopeful citizens expecting a better highway.

As with every issue, some citizens may be satisfied with the changes and others infuriated. However, the goal of the planners should have been to try to make everybody happy and they dramatically failed that task. Unfortunately people such as myself are stuck with the horrible highway and don’t really want more years of construction to correct it.