That weird stretch of Saddle Creek Road from Dodge to Leavenworth Streets along the edge of the University of Nebraska Medical Center looks like Omaha traffic engineering at its funkiest.
Drivers must negotiate the hopelessly tight half-cloverleaf at Dodge, travel south-by-southwest past a semi-blighted former industrial area, and then negotiate the unfortunate convergence of Saddle Creek, Leavenworth and 48th Street in a jumbled five-way intersection.
“It creates so many goofy turns, cars coming out of nowhere,” said John Ashford, president of the Dundee-Memorial Park Association, which encompasses the Saddle Creek neighborhood. “People are just popping in and out. It’s not pedestrian-friendly. It’s chaos.”
UNMC and Omaha’s Public Works Department are cooperating in an effort to un-funk the Saddle Creek corridor, in support of UNMC’s development of a multi-billion “innovation district” along the road’s west side.
People are also reading…
Last year, engineers extended 46th Street (a block west of Saddle Creek) south of Farnam in what will become the main drag in UNMC’s new “innovation district.”
The adjacent stretch of Farnam was also closed for much of the year to widen the street between 48th Street and Saddle Creek and add sidewalks.
On Wednesday, city engineers and consultants laid out plans for 2024 during a public hearing at UNMC, focusing on upcoming construction near the Saddle Creek/Leavenworth intersections. About 40 people attended.
The engineers said work is slated to begin in April and wrap up next fall, though utility work will start sooner. Planned improvements include:
- New dual left-turn lanes on Leavenworth Street.
- Longer left- and right-turn lanes on Leavenworth and Saddle Creek.
- A new traffic signal, sidewalks on the northwest and southeast corners, and new driveways to several adjacent businesses.
In addition, the direct access from 48th Street to Leavenworth from the north — about 100 feet west of Saddle Creek — is being eliminated. 48th Street traffic will instead be diverted to Saddle Creek at Jones Street, north of the QuikTrip gas station.
The Saddle Creek/Leavenworth crossroads has long been a traffic bottleneck, with lengthy backups in the single left-turn lanes.
“There gets to be a pretty good queue of cars waiting to turn,” said Brian Spencer, UNMC’s executive director of campus development and real estate. “That’s perhaps the biggest (traffic) pain point.”
He said the university considers relieving the intersection to be a key to the success of its multi-billion dollar Saddle Creek campus. He also hopes that the new access points at Emile and Jones will help ease the burden of added traffic from the innovation district along the busy Saddle Creek corridor.
“UNMC is excited about the improvements,” Spencer said. “It’ll make getting into and out of midtown Omaha so much easier.”
UNMC’s expansion west of Saddle Creek Road began in the 1990s with the acquisition of old Union Pacific railroad lines in the area and, later, the former Commercial Federal bank property.
The university now owns all of the rough triangle bounded by Farnam, Leavenworth, Saddle Creek and 48th Street, except the Ace-Rent-to-Own and Russell Speeder’s Car Wash.
Last May, private developers broke ground on the $65 million Catalyst project on the site of the former Omaha Steel Castings plant, along the new 46th Street extension.
On land leased from the university, the Catalyst will include 130,000 square feet of space for businesses as well as an event center, food hall and market.
In addition, it will house the 40,000-square-foot UNMC Innovation Hub, bringing together UNeMed and UNeTech – UNMC’s development arms – in a medically centered incubation space for medical inventors and entrepreneurs.
Spencer said the project is well underway and should be completed in about a year.
Besides the Catalyst project, UNMC has begun construction on its new $87 million Campus Operation and Research Excellence (CORE) building, at the southwest corner of Saddle Creek and Farnam.
The building will include three stories for laboratory research, one for computer-based research, and two administrative floors. It’s also being built to accommodate a future pedestrian bridge over Saddle Creek Road.
The city is building a parking garage next door to serve the building.
“You’ll see it go vertical next summer,” Spencer said. Completion is expected in early 2026.
Eventually, UNMC’s innovation district also will connect to the main campus via the new Midtown Medical Bikeway Connection. Last fall, the City of Omaha received a $13.5 million federal grant to build the bike-and-pedestrian path, which will bisect the campus along Jones and Emile Streets and connect to the Field Club Trail near 39th and Marcy Streets.
The traffic changes, the bike and pedestrian connectors, the UNMC redevelopment — it’s all welcome news to Ashford and members of his community.
“It could really turn into something cool,” he said.