Monday, August 17, 2009

Construction Update: Football Traffic

At last week's Construction Junction, there were updates given on a lot of the road construction and parking issues around campus that could have affected football season. Lets run through some quick updates:

Farm Lane:

As we first reported back in April, Farm Lane will not be ready and open for football season. They suffered another setback because of all of the rain so far in August, and not all of the drainage is completely functional yet. They were granted an extension until September 22nd, and that is the current date they are looking at for reopening the road and sidewalks. The comment at the Construction Junction was "We might be able to do better, but that's the plan."

It should be noted that the date of September 22nd is for opening the road, not the completion of all work. There will be periodic lane closures for landscaping work, etc. related to the project. Those lane closures most likely won't occur on game days.

Mt. Hope Road Reconstruction:

They are scheduled to reopen the closed section of Mt. Hope (currently by the commuter lot from Farm Lane to Harrison) tomorrow, August 18th at the latest. It could already be open (I've not driven over there) because as of last week they were "Quite a bit ahead of schedule." At this point the section from Harrison west to the US127 overpass will go down to one lane in each direction. While this will cause some traffic backups, it should not be nearly as big of a problem as the full road closure has been. They have had to put flaggers at some intersections because of traffic backups.

One consideration here though is that the intersection of Mt. Hope and Harrison will be reconfigured slightly during the construction, and so there may be some slow down at this point on football Saturdays. But that said, with the pace they are ahead of schedule, it's possible that this project won't last long into the season anyway.

Birch and Wilson:

This was supposed to be done last Friday, but is running delayed. Roads and sidewalks should now open on Saturday, August 22nd at the latest, so no issues for football here.

Shaw:

Shaw by the Cyclotron has been down to one lane for much of the summer. This will be back to normal by football season.

1 comment:

  1. Shaw by the Cyclotron has been down to one lane off and on for well over a year, possibly 2 years. What in the world are they doing down there? Shuffling all the traffic over the one lane crumbled the road so badly that for a while they had a big sheet of steel over the road. Every time I thought "OK, this time they're done," they'd bring the fencing back out and cut it back to 1 lane a week or two later.

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