Huntsville AL to get 21km (13mi) tolled southern bypass

Alabama is moving to accelerate construction of a Southern Bypass around the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville with tolls. URS has been selected to do a traffic and revenue study to assess the feasibility of the proposed tollroad. State governor Bob Riley saidrecently he had told the state DOT he favored the toll financing study. Last week the local Huntsville MPO amended their transport improvement plan (TIP) to add toll study money.

Huntsville Southern Bypass (HSB) is largely located on the fringe of the Redstone Arsenal, a major US Army post specializing in rocketry and missiles. Wernher von Braun the famous German rocket scientist worked there from 1941.

The post houses Army Aviation  and Missile Command, Space Defense Command, the Missile Defense Agency, missile R&D, intelligence activities, logistics training, and many program executive offices. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is there too. The army website says the base supports 157k soldiers and 28k civilians.

10k extra at Redstone

The Pentagon's Base Realignment And Closure (BRAC) program is adding about 10k.

The post is 153km2 (59 sq miles) and has buildings with 11.7m sq ft (4.2m sq m) of floor area.

The missile and space activities have attracted a variety of other hightech companies to the area, many of which are located in Cummings Research Park.

Steve Dinges, director of long range planning at the Huntsville plan organization says the HSB Bypass is fully permitted and no longer faces significant opposition. The major environmental challenge was getting acceptance of the highway's handling of wetlands.

Nearly a third of its length or 7km (4 miles) go through swamps of the Tennessee River. They will be built on bridge structure to protect the wetland.

Traffic modeling suggests point-flows of up to 80k, so the road will all be at least 3+3 lanes with some segments 4+4 lanes.

The road serves:
- general east-west connectivity across the south of the region
- some north-south movement relieving US231 Memorial parkway
- improved access to Redstone Arsenal
- as a portion of future I-22 in planning Atlanta GA-Huntsvillle & Decatur AL- Memphis TN

Construction cost was estimated about two years back at $600m but may now be closer to $700m due to inflation. Land costs are small because so much is within Redstone Arsenal and is being donated. Overall project however seems likely to be in the $750m to $800m range, Dinges agrees.

The HSB bypass is about 90 lane-miles (146 lane-km) or $8.9m/lane-mile, $5.3m/lane-km based on $800m all-up cost.

Other priorities in the area are upgrade of US231 to full expressway standard by completing grade separations and frontage roads, and a northern bypass or belt route.

Population of the Madison Co AL (90% of the Huntsville area) is approximately 300k and projected to be 345k in 2015 and 372k in 2030. The Decatur area to the west is almost a twin city and in 2000 the Census MSAs of Huntsville and Decatur combined was 488k.

see http://www.hsvcity.com/Planning/FinalYear2030transplan.pdf

TOLLROADSnews 2007-09-04