Oklahoma City Crosstown Expressway
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| I-40 Crosstown | |
| Route information | |
| Maintained by ODOT | |
| Length: | 5.00 mi (8.05 km) |
| Existed: | early 1960s – present |
| Major junctions | |
| West end: | Agnew Avenue in Oklahoma City |
| East end: |
     I‑40 / I‑35 / I‑235 / US-77 / US-62 Crossroads of America in Oklahoma City
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| Highway system | |
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Oklahoma State Highway System
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The Oklahoma City Crosstown Expressway, aka I-40 Crosstown, is a roughly five-mile (8.0 km) stretch of Interstate 40 (I-40) just south of Downtown Oklahoma City, running along the Oklahoma River between Agnew Avenue and the I-40/I-35/I-235 Crossroads of America junction. Prior to 2012, the I-40 Crosstown was an elevated stretch that bisected downtown. The Oklahoma City Crosstown is the defacto east–west artery through Oklahoma City, serving as an unofficial dividing line between north and south Oklahoma City (the official dividing line for address purposes is Sheridan Avenue). It is owned and maintained by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT).
The Oklahoma City Crosstown was the busiest of Oklahoma's many aging bridges. While the Crosstown Expressway designed to withstand about 76,000 vehicles a day, by 2010 it was used by nearly 120,000 vehicles a day.
The Crosstown was completed in the 1960s using an engineering process commonly termed as "fracture critical", a process that has not been used since the 1970s because it does not provide redundancies. According to Brian Windsor, an ODOT structural engineer, without redundant support, the failure of a single beam created the risk of total collapse of that section of bridge. The entire stretch of the original I-40 Crosstown Expressway was elevated, and at some points, the elevation is as much as 50 feet (15.2 m).
According to a 2006 report, Oklahoma led the nation with 6,299 "structurally deficient" bridges. Attention to the Crosstown project increased after the collapse of a stretch of I-35W in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 1, 2007. At that time, ODOT released a statement indicating that the condition of the Crosstown was "deteriorating", but that it "remained safe."
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