Oklahoma Transportation Commissioners were cautioned this week that traffic problems along the I-35 corridor to the Red River in Southern Oklahoma will need close observation as Oklahoma moves forward with Texas in widening the interstate.
“We’ve got a lot of things happening down there that we’ve got to pay attention to.”
Tim Gatz, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation told commissioners, “The traffic growth and the volumes we see in the I-35 corridor we’ve recognized many times, is not getting smaller.”
As Oklahoma prepares to work jointly with Texas in a $480 million I-35 widening project that includes new bridges over the Red River, of which Oklahoma will pay $37 million, Gatz anticipates it will eventually be required to expand the interstate to accomodate 8 lanes of traffic.
“We share the responsibility of maintaining of the Red River bridges,” he explained, adding that Texas is widening the interstate to 6 lanes. “The bridges that are being built will be able to support 8 lanes of traffic in the future, if required—-we pretty well think it’s going to be required at some point.”
Gatz informed commissioners that the fastest growing corridor between Kansas City and San Antonio in the United States is the I-35 corridor.
“But not just on I-35. We feel the gravitational pull of the Dallas-Fort Worth area across our entire southern border, whether that’s from Wichita Falls all the way over to Sherman (Texas),” explained Gatz.
The ODOT director recently told News 9 TV news it will take nearly $2.5 billion to widen all of I-35 to six lanes in Oklahoma and work is expected to begin this fall. Work will take nearly 4 years before the massive project is completed.
