Magoffin County, KY — After three years of construction, the new four-lane segment of the Mountain Parkway Expansion running through Salyersville’s Restaurant Row is now fully open to traffic. Restaurant Row marks the second section of the Parkway to be completed under the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC)’s Mountain Parkway Expansion. The Restaurant Row section of the Parkway began construction in September 2016. Accounting for 2.4 miles of the Parkway, the Restaurant Row segment runs from where the old Mountain Parkway had previously ended, extending through the “Restaurant Row” district of the town of Salyersville, to just east of the KY 114 junction at Rock House Road. The addition of the Restaurant Row segment is the first extension of the Mountain Parkway since the Parkway was built in the early 1960s and opened to the public as Kentucky’s second toll road in 1963. The Restaurant Row segment was partially funded by a $24 million federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant that allowed construction to begin two years earlier than the Mountain Parkway Expansion’s initial schedule anticipated. U.S. Rep. Harold “Hal” Rogers and Former Gov. Steve Beshear jointly sought the funding opportunity as part of their combined efforts to improve Eastern Kentucky, known as the SOAR Initiative (Shaping Our Appalachian Region).
