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Jed Boal reporting People who drive I-80 between I-15 and 1300 East will notice an acceleration of work in the months ahead. They'll see crews making progress on the most challenging part of the job.
More than 100,000 vehicles ride the stretch of road every day. There's still a lot of work to do, but a strange-looking staging area is starting to take shape. The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) calls it "Bridge Garden."
"Here's where you see the bridges take shape and grow and be harvested by shipping them down the corridor," explained John Montoya, UDOT's I-80 project manager.
UDOT will widen the interstate and rebuild 17 bridges from I-15 to 1300 East. Crews will build the bridges at 1300 East then move them down the road and put them in place.
It's the same building method they used to replace the bridge at 4500 South over I-215. "It greatly reduces the construction time and helps us to minimize delays due to construction and basically get out of here a year early," Montoya said.
Two of the bridge decks are already pretty far along. In June, crews will start putting the seven that they've built into place, and then start again with a new batch. "We're hoping to move about a bridge a week. During a seven-week period, you'll notice all of the bridges in the westbound lane get replaced," Montoya explained.
Next summer they'll replace eastbound bridges. UDOT thinks this is the largest scale bridge replacement of this kind.
On the interstate, big trucks are supposed to detour. Not all do, and UDOT says it's working on better compliance. However, it says speed is the bigger problem
It's a 55-mile-per-hour construction zone, but a Utah Highway Patrol (UHP) study shows an average speed of 65 miles per hour, and rear-end crashes are up.
UDOT says we'll see more speed enforcement. "We need people to obey that speed limit because it is a construction zone, and we need everybody to be safe," Montoya said.
It's not a place to gawk from the car, so UDOT hopes people will look for project updates online. To check on those updates yourself, click the related link.
E-mail: jboal@ksl.com
