Anchorage drivers are getting their first chance this week to drive a major expansion of Dowling Road into the Sand Lake area.
According to the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, the West Dowling expansion -- a $47 million project featuring an overpass to clear railroad tracks and Arctic Boulevard -- became available to Anchorage motorists last weekend. Dowling also extends east to Elmore Road.
The newly opened project -- Phase 2 of a plan to extend Dowling, adding a section westward from C Street through to Minnesota Drive -- creates a new cross-town artery. In 2010, transportation officials said an expanded Dowling Road would handle an estimated 20,000 vehicles per day, relieving the burden on east-west roads across Midtown, including busy Tudor Road.
"The project is a four-lane facility with on-street bike lanes, a separated multi-use path, and improvements on connecting streets," DOT officials said in a statement on the road's opening. "The project also constructs ... new signalized intersections and extensive stormwater management for Tina Lake."
DOT spokeswoman Shannon McCarthy said Tuesday federal funds covered about 90 percent of the project's costs.
McCarthy said state officials have been working to address a "decades-old need" for cross-town routes like Dowling.
"Anchorage is kind of noted for the east-west connections -- we need more of them," McCarthy said.
Jim Amundsen, the department's chief highway engineer and a former manager of the project, said the project also benefited from input offered by Greenroads, a group that rates roads programs on seven core sustainability values to "fundamentally change the way the world builds transportation projects."
In the West Dowling case, a Greenroads assessment requested by the state in conjunction with its designer, HDR, and builder Granite Construction found that its baseline score "rated well among other national projects on best practices for sustainability toward the environment and the economy."
"Not only did we want to open up this entire corridor for easy, multimodal access, we wanted to do it the smartest way possible," Amundsen said in the statement. "We engaged Greenroads to find every best practice out there. We were surprised and pleased to incorporate their stormwater cost/benefit analysis that put data to our ideas."
McCarthy said the final form of the project won out over other versions, in part due to the nature of traffic expected along it.
"They looked at roundabouts but decided that roundabouts would not fit, because traffic would be one-sided from one direction," McCarthy said.
The West Dowling work ultimately came in on time and on budget. McCarthy said the fact it involved fresh construction, rather than rearranging an existing intersection, was a factor in that success.
"We have an advantage in that it was a new alignment, so we didn't have to move traffic to the left or the right or do detours," McCarthy said.
The new overpass won't be the city's last, according to planners with the department. Three public open houses have already been held on the design of a "diverging diamond" interchange planned to update the current interchange at Muldoon Road and the Glenn Highway. While only a few such interchanges have been built in the U.S., state officials say the design, which includes a second overpass of the Glenn, will cost $10 million less to build than the alternatives and offer added safety benefits.