Considering the community’s disrespect for the constitution, zero federal money should have been spent on this. Let them instead choke on their traffic.
PING.
Now they’ve got to get the part between I-40 and Wickenburg, AZ finished. Lots of busy and dangerous two-lane stretches still remaining.
It does reduce travel time bypassing Boulder City. The landscaping on the roadside is very impressive.
Anything that gets me to Vegas quicker I’m in favor of! LOL!
I always hated driving from Phoenix to LV because it was a nightmare between Hoover Dam and LV. So much that when traveling between Alaska and Tucson I would take 17 north in Phoenix and go via Flagstaff on US 89 through Page and cut over on Utah 20 to I-15.
I hated that drive between Las Vegas and Phoenix which required you to go through downtown Boulder and over Hoover Dam on a narrow road with a 15 mph speed limit.
It doesn’t deserve a two digit number. As a bypass, it should have a three digit number. Keeping 515 would have been OK, although it should start with an even number. Or, better yet, give it a federal highway designation. Calling it Interstate 11 is also wrong since it is east of I-15. Sounds like it was all just a scam to fleece the taxpayers.
I’ve traveled this new I-11 route twice now and can confirm it does NOT reduce any time on the road between the Hoover Dam bridge and Las Vegas. What it does is allow everyone on it to continue at 65+mph. It adds about 8 miles to the previous route which went through a part of Boulder City. Now if someone wants to risk a ticket going 90 mph on the new road they can probably reduce some time. Not much but some.
What this new road also did was take away all the drive-by traffic for the multitudes of small business on one little stretch of road in Boulder City that catered to food, gas, and tourism business. I was there just 2 weeks ago during lunch time for a business reason and couldn’t help but notice the empty parking lots in all the businesses that used to be bustling before the route change.
This kind of thing is nothing new. Interstate 40 caused Rt 66 businesses and lots of small towns to die off. Some towns kind of reinvented themselves as tourist spots while others are still destitute or just gone. Williams, near the Grand Canyon, which became the “Gateway to the Grand Canyon” thrived while just down the Interstate; Ashford is still barely hanging on. Still further down, Seligman, has maintained while neither dying nor thriving. Probably due to its remote location as a rest, food, and gas stop. It’s actually a quaint little town.
It takes about the same level of effort and money to build a mile of interstate as it does to build a mile of border wall.
First in 30 years? BS!
I-55 opened less than 30 years ago.
Thanks Tol,
I find the cost interesting - at $21M per mile. I realize it’s empty desert there, but even so, it’s costing California $100M per mile for the first segment of their ‘bullet train’ and most of that runs through now-draughted out farmland.
Could build a LOT of MILES of freeway for $21M per mile...but instead we build trains that no one uses.
I guess the United States had its day...