Makeover planned for I-45 south

While the recently unveiled, $6 billion plan to remake Interstate 45 from downtown Houston northwards is historic in scale and will reshape the heart of the city, a smaller project is taking shape on the freeway's southern reaches that should offer immediate relief to suburban commuters and frustrated beach-goers heading to Galveston.

The same rapid population growth that led to Interstate 10 ballooning to more than a dozen lanes is spreading south. Cities south of Houston, with available land, are growing, especially along the western side of I-45 near Pearland and Friendswood and south through League City, where residents have seen development increase. Adding to the growth is the highway's critical role as a gateway to the tourist haven of Galveston.

Crews are widening I-45 from three to five lanes from Dixie Farm Road to Bay Area Bouldevard. Eventually, Texas Department of Transportation officials want to widen the interstate between Houston and Galveston to at least four lanes in each direction.

The over-under arrangement of interstate and local streets through Clear Lake and other communities also is getting a makeover, with some worried there soon will be maddening - though temporary - traffic problems just in time for beach-going season and summer travel. Relief should fully arrive in late 2017.

As part of the widening, FM 2351, El Dorado and Bay Area Boulevard will see major changes and potentially some occasional closings.

The southern I-45 widening with current and future construction is expected to total about $1 billion. The project follows similar freeway rebuilding efforts that created wide freeways west of downtown Houston, meant to handle the region's growing suburban population. That's brought urban-sized freeways to the suburbs.

U.S. 59 in Sugar Land is already at least four lanes in each direction, not counting various entrance and exit merge lanes, as is I-45 north of downtown Houston to north of Conroe.

Sections of I-45 south of Houston, meanwhile, experience heavy weekend traffic during the summer as travelers make their way to Galveston with only three lanes. Based on 2013 traffic counts, more than 186,000 vehicles use the portion of I-45 between Dixie Farm and FM 2351 on the typical weekday.

With peak beach season starting later this month, construction along I-45 also is expected to accelerate, though the freeway will remain three lanes, starting with the three interchanges and new three-lane frontage roads in each direction.

FM 2351, also called Clear Lake City Boulevard, is the easy one. The street runs below I-45, leaving crews to widen the freeway overpass. At El Dorado and Bay Area, the local street overpasses and a series of curving entrance and exit ramps, referred to as bell curves, will be removed. The streets will come down, and the freeway will travel over them as opposed to under.

"Having an over-section of freeway makes it easier," said Lucio Ortiz, area engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation's office in southeast Harris County.

The bell curve ramps in particular lead to problems. Traffic often can jam on the curves, leading to backups on the frontage road. In other spots, exits that were too close to intersections, such as at FM 2351, led to traffic stacking and backing up onto the main lanes of the freeway.

"I don't know if somebody tried that 20 years ago, but it didn't work," Lucio said of some of the designs.

The future design will be the familiar system where local streets connect to frontage roads, which lead drivers to freeway access, said Juan Embil, TxDOT project manager for the I-45 widening.

Undoing the bell curve and overpass configuration will take some effort. Centerpoint Energy is expected to remove power lines spanning the freeway at El Dorado within the next 10 days, so crews can demolish the overpass this month. Once that occurs, motorists will circle around using the frontage roads until crews can build the freeway overpass and put El Dorado back together below I-45.

"You're going to see movement 24-7," Lucio said.

Williams Brothers Construction is building the roads and overpasses and has incentives built into its contract for finishing early, Lucio said.

"We have to finish that before the holidays," he said of the El Dorado work.

Once that is complete, attention will shift to Bay Area, where crews will do roughly the same shift of the local street back down and the freeway onto an overpass.

New access will come in stages, Embil said, with the new 10-lane freeway opening north of FM 2351 in about 15 months. South of FM 2351 to Bay Area will open about a year after that.

Since work started south of the Sam Houston Tollway in 2013, drivers have slogged through changing lanes, intersection closings and a general slowdown in traffic, despite much of the work happening outside the existing freeway lanes, said Joseph Majsterski, who commutes daily from Clear Lake across Houston on I-45. The trip home is the worst\e, he said.

"If it is a bad day, the backup will be just south of Beltway 8," Majsterski said of his southbound afternoon trip. "It is like hitting a wall right there."

Though traffic moves, Majsterski said the lack of a shoulder and shifting entrance and exit ramps can lead to delays, as people adjust to their exits moving location.