There’s been talk of a possible second crossing between Juneau and Douglas Island for decades. Now, local and state transportation officials are ready to share early ideas for potential locations for the crossing.
“It’s not on our website yet, but we will have that at our listening sessions,” said Marie Heidemann, the project’s manager for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities. “We’ve got a lot of locations, and we are developing screening criteria, which we will be applying.”
There are two listening sessions scheduled for Saturday. One is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Eaglecrest Ski Area during the Discover Eaglecrest event. The other is from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Safeway in the Mendenhall Valley.
These listening sessions are part of a transportation study that the City and Borough of Juneau partnered with the state to work on. The study is just one step on a long path toward securing federal funding for a potential project.
With this particular type of study, public participation is supposed to guide transportation officials’ decisions at several early stages of developing the concept. Public meetings and open houses began in April, with transportation officials sharing traffic and planning information about the area as it is now, and soliciting comments about why a second crossing may be needed.
Now they’re ready to share potential locations and get more feedback.
“We’ll take all comments,” Heidemann said. “And it’s always helpful to hear how people view impacts of a north crossing, both benefits and concerns. For the upcoming work on the study, we will be analyzing different locations. So comments related to which crossing locations would be most beneficial to support travel patterns would be useful to us.”
Comments can also be emailed to JDNorthCrossing@dowl.com.
More meetings will be scheduled over the fall and winter to refine the ideas and narrow down the options. The study, which is budgeted to cost up to $2 million, is scheduled to be complete next spring.