It's going to be another tough weekend to get into and out of downtown St. Louis.
All of the eastbound lanes on Interstate-64 will be closed between Jefferson and the Poplar Street Bridge starting Friday night at 8:30 p.m. The entire Martin Luther King Bridge will be shut down Saturday and Sunday. In addition, two lanes will be closed in each direction on the Poplar Street Bridge. Deanna Venker, MoDot's area engineer for the city of St. Louis, says the 6th Street and Pine Street ramps will stay open for at least one hour after Friday's Cardinals gameends so that Illinois traffic can use eastbound I-64 to return home.
"After the game starts we will go ahead and start closing those ramps but leave a couple of ramps open so that traffic exiting out of the game can certainly get in and get out and travel back over into Illinois across the bridge to head home without delay," Venker said today.
Venker says MoDot needs to replace bearings in the elevated sections of I-64. Jeff Church, an engineer with the Illinois Department of Transportation, says they need to reseal the bridge deck on the MLK, so it will be closed both Saturday and Sunday.
"It will impact traffic because even when we shut a couple of lanes down on the Poplar Street like MoDot’s done the past few weekends, we get the backups. So when we take this alternate away it’s going to increase traffic a little more. So that’s why we encourage people to be patient, give themselves a little extra time if they’re coming to the downtown area on Saturday and Sunday," Church said.
All of the projects are expected to wrap up by 5 a.m. Monday.
For a map of the closures, click here.