First, the good news. There are no new detours at the Kansas Turnpike entrance yet.
Now the bad news. When they do come, you’ll have to find an alternative to the Graphic Arts Road bridge .
On July 9, the bridge over Interstate Highway 35 will be shut down for 9 months so it can be widened to four lanes and lengthened. No additional detours around the bridge have been announced yet.
The work is part of the ongoing $32.9 million “spaghetti bowl” project at the Emporia entrance, meant to simplify the tangle of roads leading to the turnpike. The project includes five bridge replacements, as well as putting in two roundabouts for I-35, U.S. Highway 50 and turnpike traffic.
Once the new Graphic Arts bridge is up, the entrance and exit for I-35 will pass directly underneath and feed into the northernmost roundabout.
“We need a little more room underneath that bridge,” said construction manager Tony Menke of the Kansas Department of Transportation.
Looking a little sooner on the calendar, paving work on the north half of U.S. Highway 50 should start in a couple of weeks. That’s “should,” as in “should start if the weather stops acting so screwy.” Repeated rain and even the odd spring snow have made following the schedule a little challenging for workers.
“If the weather would behave, we could get some of this done,” Menke said.
The paving work will involve two weeks to get the base down and maybe another two for the surface, Menke said.
Most of what’s happened so far is infrastructure or preparatory work. Most of the grading work for the first phase of construction is done, Menke said. Some sewer lines have been moved and a storm sewer has been put in, along with box structures to carry water under the road.
The four parts of the project are:
F Step one: (In progress) Build four detours, a new turnpike plaza, a new set of entrance and exit ramps for northbound and southbound traffic, and the north half of the U.S. 50 improvements. Those last improvements include a roundabout and two new bridges over it. This work began in September and is expected to take about 13 months.
F Step two (estimated at eight months) Tear down existing ramps. Start building a new bridge over the turnpike and rebuild the Graphic Arts bridge. Build the improvements along the south half of U.S. 50, including the second roundabout.
F Step three (estimated at three months) Build a small amount of pavement between the new plaza and the new bridge over the turnpike, along with pavement connecting the new roundabouts. Some old ramps removed.
F Step four (About a month) Detours and the last of the old ramps are removed.
If everything moves to schedule, the work should be done by mid-November 2008. But right now, Menke said, it’s difficult to say how quickly or slowly the project is moving.
“The problem with this project is we are so disconnected and broken up into pieces, which makes it hard to estimate,” he said. “We do a little bit here, a little bit there.”