Highway 218 closing lanes, reducing speed for bridge work

A high-traffic route connecting Southeast Iowa to Iowa City is closing lanes for construction until late next week, according to state DOT officials.

DOT District Engineer Jim Webb said the project will adjust bridge approaches at intermittent points from Riverside to Marion Avenue in Iowa City.

“You come up on some of these bridges, sometimes you get a little settlement between the pavement and the bridges (and) you get a little bit of a bump,” District Engineer Jim Webb said. “They do a little milling and then put in a new lift of asphalt to smooth that out and make the ride-ability better.”

While the work is only on the pavement around bridges, Webb said the lane closures stretched much farther for safety reasons.

“That traffic control does get kind of long there because normally to close the lane you need quite a bit of distance ahead of time to get traffic moved over,” he said. “They may have it over several miles, because it looks like these are spaced out fairly evenly … between Riverside and Hills.

“Rather than doing a lane closure, opening it, and then closing it again, we find that it’s very unsafe to open the lane up and then have to contract again.”

Webb said bridges on northbound and southbound sides of the road would undergo the procedure, with the exception of the bridge after the Riverside exit, where only the southbound required construction.

The $212,000 project contracted through LL Pelling is scheduled to finish late next week, weather permitting, according to Webb.