Moving Through Lincoln: I-80 on the North, O Street Through the Heart

Lincoln is a grid city with a grid's blessings: streets laid out in a legible pattern, numbered streets marching east from the Capitol, lettered streets north and south. Its traffic organizes around a few great facts — Interstate 80 arcing across the city's north side, Interstate 180 diving from it into downtown, and O Street, the city's central east-west artery and one of the longest main streets in America.

I-80 is the region's lifeline and Lincoln's bypass: the transcontinental freight river of trucks that makes the city's north-side interchanges — at 56th Street, 27th Street, Highway 77 — the metro's industrial geography. The Nebraska Department of Transportation's widening and interchange projects on the I-80 corridor through Lincoln are the region's standing construction story, tracked through the state's 511 system.

Inside the city, movement runs on arterials spaced like the grid's ribs: 27th, 48th, 56th, 70th and 84th streets north-south; O, A, South, Van Dorn, Pioneers and Old Cheney east-west. The Antelope Valley Parkway and the highway 2 corridor move the southeast's growth.

Lincoln's peculiar traffic institutions are beloved and debated: the protected bikeways and trail crossings of a city that bikes more than its climate suggests, the Haymarket's event-night surges, and the Husker game-day tide that remains the region's largest recurring traffic event — 90,000 people moving to and from one stadium on five Saturdays a year.

November adds the commuter's adjustments: full darkness on the drive home, the first slick mornings on the city's bridges, and the holiday season's retail flows to the south and east corridors.

Lincoln's drivers enjoy a Midwestern luxury: almost anywhere in the city is twenty minutes from anywhere else. The price of that ease is vigilance at the edges — I-80's truck traffic and the growth corridors where the city is still deciding what it becomes.