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Sam Penrod reporting Relief is on the way for traffic congestion in Utah County. One project is a short-term fix, and the other is a long-term upgrade to I-15.
Several miles of I-15 can be very slow to get through both in the morning and in the evening, but crews are now installing ramp meters to help with the congestion. In addition, plans are moving forward for a new I-15 in Utah County after the project was funded by state lawmakers.
Traffic in Utah Valley keeps increasing as the population keeps growing. In order to keep the freeway from turning into a parking lot, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) now has $1.8 billion to completely rebuild the freeway between Lehi and Spanish Fork.
"It will be fantastic. We will have a brand new freeway with new interchanges, and we will have six lanes in each direction for a significant portion of that," said Merrill Jolley, UDOT project manager.
Work is expected to begin in the spring of 2010. It will take five years from start to finish and will mean detours, temporary closures and freeway realignments.
Those details will all be worked out as the planning is finalized over the next 18 months. "It's certainly a major reconstruction. There will be some interference with traffic with a project this big. We don't know the details of that yet, and that's part of what we need to develop in the next year and a half," Jolley said.
While it will be seven years until the freeway is rebuilt, UDOT is investing in some temporary relief in the form of ramp meters. Crews are installing the meters now at on-ramps between University Parkway and the Alpine-Highland exit. The meters will operate only during rush hour and keep traffic flowing onto the freeway in a constant trickle, instead of a rush of cars that can cause gridlock.
"We are hoping to see an overall increase in the speed of traffic, not so much congestion on the freeway. There will be some backup like we have in Salt Lake County with the ramps as the traffic awaits to get on the interstate, but generally we are hoping the interstate will flow much smoother," said John Higgins, also a project manager for UDOT.
Construction on the ramp meters will continue through the spring, and they should be up and running sometime this summer.
