Two major road rehab projects on major thoroughfares in town will complicate life for everyone looking to get around town starting in May.
There are two major projects that the town has ongoing: Third Street from Central Avenue to York Ave, then work on Scott Street from Reid Avenue to Mosher Avenue.
Manager of Operations and Facilities Travis Rob says the Town is working with the contractor to make things go as smoothly as possible.
“So both of them are going to be full road reconstruction, sewer, water, storm, curb and gutter, sidewalk, road surface; the full, full reconstruction,” Rob said.
This means that the stretches of those roads being worked on will be closed for the majority of the summer, with current end dates set for around the middle of September.
“The same contractor’s doing both jobs [Bay City Contractors],” Rob said.
“They’re plan is to start with Third Street, so they’re working right now on getting traffic control set up for the detour, they’re getting temporary water put in place right now. The plan is to have that road shut down to traffic as of the week of May 5.”
Rob said he’s not sure on the start date for the work on Scott Street as the company will be splitting the workers up to manage both projects.
There will be detours in place around both worksites, with traffic from Third Street being diverted onto Fourth in a split fashion to avoid too much activity at one intersection.
“We’re going to split traffic, everybody’s going to use Fourth Street whether you’re eastbound or westbound,” Rob said.
“But eastbound traffic is going to come up the four laners to York Avenue, up York and down Fourth Street. The westbound traffic will go west to Webster Avenue and back onto King’s Highway just to split the turning movement, so we don’t have two trucks trying to turn into each other at the same intersection. It gives us a little bit more space, a little bit more room to manoeuvre.”
With the addition of increased traffic flow onto Fourth, there will be additional parking restrictions, with no parking allowed on the detour route.
“We’re going to prohibit parking on Fourth Street for that space from Webster Avenue to Central,” Rob said.
“We’re going to limit parking on the 800 block of Webster Avenue that’s between Third and Fourth Streets and York Avenue. It’s only one block long, so we’re going to do all of York Avenue. York Avenue will basically become one-way. So it will only be north-bound traffic on York Avenue. That gives us the entire road width for trucks to manoeuvre that right hand turn onto Fourth Street in the event that there’s a U.S. traffic lineup that ends up through construction, that gives U.S. traffic basically the whole curb lane for their queue, plus still plenty of road width for trucks to make the corner.”
Rob says during the installation of the traffic lights at the intersection of King’s Highway and Lillie Avenue for the Legion Park, they had an opportunity to experiment briefly for the detours going into place for this year, which was when the realized a split was the best approach.
“When we did the traffic signals, at the splash park last year, if you recall, we split the traffic there as well, and we had a little bit different situation, because we could allow some traffic, but we split the traffic, and we had just westbound traffic coming down Webster. Eastbound traffic went through the construction,” he said.
“So we had an opportunity to kind of trial out the split in the traffic. In the past, we’ve tried to run everybody down the same road, but you then always run into this conflict of the turning trucks. And so we were able to try kind of splitting it up last year. It worked quite well. Nothing was going to be perfect, obviously, when you’re dealing with truck traffic on non truck roads, but, you know, we think this is a great way to try and mitigate some of those issues.”
Rob says the plan is to make sure there’s lots of signage in place to make sure the detours work smoothly but they will be monitoring the situation, especially as cross-border traffic picks up with the fishing season.
The hope is that none of the traffic will try to lineup to the east, as the road closure on Scott Street will impact traffic around Church Street and near the border.
“What we didn’t want to do is change where they lined up and start lining up down Church Street or something, for example, because the people that have been doing this for years and years and years are going to say ‘wait a minute, I’ve never done this, I’ve never lined up here before.’” Rob said.
“Plus we’re going to have Scott Street closed and we’re going to be running trucks down Church Street. So again, it’s just adding to the confusion of it all if all of sudden now we’ve got one detour running into another detour, running into the queue. We were trying to keep the disruption as minimal as we could.”
Most of the traffic from Scott Street will be diverted to Second Street, but trucks will take Front Street to Victoria Avenue onto Nelson Street then onto Church. For the week to 10 days that the tent is blocking Front Street during the Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championship, truck traffic will be directed down Second Street. Rob says that while that’s not ideal given Second is a central thoroughfare through town for a lot of traffic, it was the best option for the week while the bass tournament closed down Front Street
Both projects are being funded in part by Connecting Links grants from the province of Ontario. According to the province, “connecting links are municipal roads that connect two ends of a provincial highway through a community or to an international or interprovincial border crossing.”
The program covers 90 per cent of the eligible cost of the repaving of the road while the Town is on the hook for the other 10 per cent plus the cost of the infrastructure work that goes on under the surface. Some of which will be covered by other grants and the rest of it coming from the town’s budget.
“The Third Street work we’re going to be using Connecting Link and whatever Federal Gas Tax funding is called now,” Rob said.
“Total project costs for Third Street is $4.7 million and our Town contribution is $808,000. For Scott Street we’re using Connecting Links and NORDS (Northern Ontario Resource Development Stream). The total project cost on Scott Street is $3.3 million and our contribution is $1.6 Million.”
While it’s not ideal to have both projects ongoing at the same time, Rob says it was a confluence of funding that caused the overlap.
“It took us a couple of extra years to get the funding for Scott Street that we were hoping to get,” Rob said.
“We were hoping to be done with Scott Street by now but it all depends on when the grant funding comes in so we have both happening at the same time. So we’ve got to just take that and try and deal with it and manage the chaos a little bit for the summer. By the end of it all they will both be done and ready for another 25 years of travel.”
