When a $7 million reconstruction project is finished a little more than a year from now, Anthony Wayne Trail motorists will have a smoother ride driving through and between the intersections with South and Western avenues.
Travelers on South and Western, meanwhile, will have a wee bit more time — one second, to be precise — to finish making left turns onto the Trail when the light turns red before the Trail’s drivers get their green.
Whether that will be enough, however, to clear vehicles from the space between the Trail’s inbound and outbound lanes remains to be seen.
As part of the joint city-state project to rebuild about three-quarters of a mile of the Trail, traffic signals at the South and Western intersections will be changed so that the eastbound and westbound left-turn arrows are at opposite ends of the green phase for the cross streets, said Karl Huss, chief signal engineer with the city transportation division.
Those arrows now display in both directions at the end of the green for South and Western, which sometimes means that traffic backed up waiting to turn left in one direction blocks traffic trying to turn left in the other.
Sometimes, both directions back up enough that the left turn lanes gridlock each other, and stopped traffic then blocks one or both sides of the Trail when its lights turn green.
“Vehicles can get trapped out there,” Mr. Huss said. “We’re going to eliminate the gridlock with the lefts.”
While some preparatory work, such as erecting signs and staging barriers, began last week, contractor Geddis Paving of Toledo is expected to start setting up the first work-zone traffic patterns Monday for its $7,073,914.30 state contract.
Weather permitting, the left lane will close in both directions for the first phase of work, said Nick Zenk, project engineer for the Ohio Department of Transportation, which is managing the work.
“It’s supposed to rain quite a bit, so I don’t know if that’ll push it [the start date] back or not,” Mr. Zenk said.
In several phases, the Trail will be dug out and rebuilt from the dirt up from south of South Avenue to north of Western. The rebuilt roadway will have modest shoulders instead of curbs, modern drainage, and a drainage swale in the median where now there are trees.
ODOT’s desire to redesign the intersections for improved safety was how project planning started, however. Only later did the city chip in $3 million to rebuild the Trail between them.
South and Western now have two sets of traffic lights at the Trail, one for each half of the divided roadway.
During the project, the more distant stoplight in each direction will be removed, ending the practice of cars stopping in the Trail median for red lights.
But whether left-turning vehicles entering the intersection with a yellow arrow will have enough time, with an all-red phase of just one second, to finish their turns before Trail traffic in the far lanes starts moving on a green remains to be seen.
Mr. Huss said city officials will monitor the intersections after the project’s completion — scheduled for September, 2016 — to see how well that works.
But while lengthening the stoplight cycle time at the two corners during off-peak hours from 70 seconds to 90 is possible, he said, lengthening the all-red phase during rush hours would only reduce the time available to move traffic. The lights already are on 90-second cycles during the morning and evening peaks.
“It’s a mix between trying to get the clearance with the all-red [phase] and keeping the Trail moving,” agreed Michael Stormer, ODOT’s district planning engineer in Bowling Green. “But this project is going to go a long ways to making them a lot safer and more efficient intersections than they are today.”
Other four-way intersections along the Trail already have just a single traffic light for cross traffic, but the only cross street closer to downtown Toledo, City Park Avenue, is not as busy as South or Western, nor is the next one to the south at Harvard Boulevard and Woodsdale Avenue.
Besides changing the traffic-light layout, the project will include adding a right-turn lane on the Trail’s outbound side at both Western and South and restricting southbound Hawley Street to right-turns-only onto westbound South. Motorists who now use southbound Hawley to reach either the Trail or eastbound South will no longer be able to go there.
Rebuilding pavement in the middle of the intersections, meanwhile, will require closing South and, later, Western to through traffic across the Trail for three days each.
The South closing is scheduled for July 31 and Aug. 1 and 2, “although if we keep getting 1 to 2 inches of rain every week, that’s not going to happen,” Mr. Zenk said.
A tentative date for the Western closing has not been set.
Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.
First Published July 11, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
