More Lanes, More Capacity Planned for Highway N

Big improvements are planned for Highway N-that long flat ribbon of road that runs through farm fields and wide-open land in one of the fastest-growing part of St. Charles County.

"It's a prime area for developers to put up new houses," says St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann. "It's flat, it's not in a floodplain, and it's the kind of place where residents will need better roads to get to work and school, and we're going to make it happen."

Ehlmann is pushing for a 2027 groundbreaking. County transportation planners have been quietly preparing for about a decade.

"We've been buying right-of-way along the route and doing environment and design work," says Amanda Brauer, the County's Managing Director of Transportation Planning. She says the County hopes for work to happen in two phases.

Phase One would widen Highway N to three lanes in each direction (six lanes total) from Hawk Ridge Trail west to Sommers Road. From there, it would narrow to two lanes in each direction (four lanes total), continuing west past Perry Cate Boulevard to Ebert Lane. Altogether, Phase One will improve 4 miles of the Highway N corridor.

A big concern has been capacity, creating enough road lanes to handle the extra traffic from hundreds of new homes.

"I think the Phase One improvements will be adequate to handle traffic in that section of roadway for the next 30 years of growth," Brauer says.

The cost of Phase One is estimated at $80-100 million, Brauer says. The funding package would be a mix of federal, state and local funds. The County has set aside more than $46 million in local Transportation Sales Tax funds for Highway N improvements, money it hopes to spread out across both phases of the plan.

If all goes well, Brauer predicts the funding for Phase One could be in place by June, and construction of Phase One could be complete by 2029.

Phase Two would widen Highway N to two lanes in each direction (four lanes total) from Ebert Lane to west of Forrester Drive, and then a new connector road would be built from Highway N to the intersection of Buckner Road and Highway Z

Construction on Phase Two would likely start after completion of Phase One and not take as long or cost as much, because it's only a 1-mile stretch and involves fewer lanes, Brauer says.

Planners are pushing the project forward to alleviate traffic concerns from private developments. Developers have drawn up neighborhood plats, or lot maps, for more than 1,700 homes along the corridor, some of them in O'Fallon and others in unincorporated St. Charles County.

The area is served by the recently completed Duckett Creek sewage water treatment plant, which makes the area more attractive to developers.

County Planning and Zoning Division Director Robert Myers says the homes that are coming won't all pop up overnight.

"I expect to see those 2,000 new homes built over the next 5-10 years," Myers says. "The growth will come in tandem with road improvements, not necessarily after them."

Eventually, the plan is to connect Highway N to the new David Hoekel Parkway in Wentzville, creating a kind of outer belt for the area.