Portal:Michigan highways/Selected article/November 2011

M-37 interchange incomplete while the remainder of the freeway was under construction

M-6, or the Paul B. Henry Freeway, is a 19.696-mile (31.698 km) freeway that serves portions of southern Kent and eastern Ottawa counties south of Grand Rapids. The freeway is named for Paul B. Henry, a congressman who died in office representing the area. The freeway connects Interstate 196 (I-196) on the west to I-96 on the east while running through the south side of the Grand Rapids metropolitan area in Western Michigan. Each end is in a rural area while the central section has suburban development along the freeway near the connection to US Highway 131.

The freeway was originally conceived in the 1960s. It took 32 years to plan, finance, and build the freeway from the time that the state first authorized funding in 1972 until the South Beltline opened to traffic in November 2004. Initial construction started in November 1997, with the first phase opened in November 2001. The first phase of construction was completed in asphalt, while the second and third phases were built in concrete, costing a total of $700 million. The project was built with two firsts: the first single-point urban interchange in Michigan, and a new technique to apply the pavement markings, embedding them into the concrete to reduce the chance of a snowplow scraping them off. (more...)

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