Future
Long-term plans call for I-49 to be extended southeastward from Lafayette to New Orleans and northward from Shreveport to Kansas City, Missouri where it will connect with other interstates and provide a seamless freeway link from Louisiana ports to the Canadian border in North Dakota via Interstate 29 and to other points north via Interstate 35.
Construction for the extension north is already underway in southwest Missouri, northern and southwestern Arkansas, and in northern Louisiana.
A 180-mile stretch of U.S. 71 from south Kansas City to Joplin will officially become Interstate 49 on Dec. 12, 2012.
U.S. 71 is already a divided highway with a 70 mph speed limit, but the change to an interstate meant eliminating all intersections and cross roads along the route. The Missouri Department of Transportation has awarded $63.3 million since 2009 to remove the crossings and replace them with four overpasses, nine interchanges and three outer roads.
Read more about this topic: Interstate 49
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“Whoever influences the child’s life ought to try to give him a positive view of himself and of his world. The child’s future happiness and his ability to cope with life and relate to others will depend on it.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“The yuppie idea of the future ain’t my idea of a future. Your safe car, and home, and job, and all the time rushing between the three—let’s make people feel they can grow up and have some education, some interest in life! That’s what counts!”
—Joe Strummer (b. 1952)