Published: April 09, 2008 10:36 pm            

Plan will keep Canal Road Project four lanes

Engineer: Reducing lanes would create ‘bottleneck effect’

TERRE HAUTE — Reducing a four-lane section to two lanes as part of Vigo County’s Canal Road project would create traffic congestion and would not meet federal design standards on the second phase of the project, a project engineer said Wednesday.

“It would not be logical to reduce the number of lanes in [the middle section of the project] since there are four lanes to the south and north [between the state’s 641 bypass and Terre Haute’s 13th Street project].

“Reducing lanes would create a bottleneck effect on the road corridor,” Jeff Whitaker, project engineer for Bernardin Lockmueller & Associates, told the Vigo County board of commissioners on Wednesday.

Commissioners had asked the Bernardin firm of Evansville, which helped design the Canal Road project, to review design and construction costs for the project’s second phase, which connects to the city’s 13th Street project near Interstate 70.

Whitaker addressed the idea of changing to a two-lane road from a four-lane.

“The road project must be designed to meet state design standards since federal funds are used for the project and a design that does not meet the standards could result in federal funds being pulled from the project or having to repay the funds spent on a previous phase of the project,” Whitaker said.

Traffic is expected to be 14,000 vehicles per day at Indiana 641 and 22,600 per day at Davis Avenue when the project is finished, Whitaker said. These traffic numbers are projected to increase by 30 percent over the next 20 years, Whitaker said.

“In a design, as the average daily traffic counts gets close to 8,000 vehicles per day, a two-lane facility reaches a level of service of ‘C,’ which is below INDOT’s [Indiana Department of Transportation] design standards for rural roads. With the county’s McDaniel/Canal Road project having a minimum traffic count of 14,000 vehicles per day, a two-lane road design cannot be justified or designed on any portion of the McDaniel/Canal Road project,” Whitaker said.

Whitaker said the road could have been designed with 8-foot paved shoulders instead of 10-foot paved shoulders and curb and gutter designed with 11-foot travel lanes instead of 12-foot travel lanes, but 12-foot lanes were used to be consistent with the rest of the county’s and with the city’s project.

Phase 1 of the Canal Road project, with construction costs of $19.8 million, is under way, with construction of a 40-foot-tall bridge over CSX railroad tracks and the building of a new Canal Road turning north to intersect Feree Road. This phase connects to the state’s 641 bypass near McDaniel Road.

Phase 2 will connect to and widen Canal Road and go under I-70.

The entire cost — including construction, right of way and relocating utilities — of the Canal Road project is about $45 million. The second phase is expected to be bid out in July and county officials hope they can obtain multiple bids, instead of one as was the case for Phase 1.

“It is more of a straight-forward construction project and we anticipate that kind of project will have more qualified bidders that can do that work, which could lower the costs,” said County Engineer Jerry Netherlain.

Howard Greninger can be contacted at (812) 231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com.

        

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