Highway 92 patching begins this week

Motorists traveling through Washington should see patchwork on Highway 92 this week. Jason Huddle of the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) said the patchwork will start Wednesday near the intersection of Highway 92 and G36 and move south into Washington and then east on Highway 92 to the eastern city limits.

Once the patching is done, West Madison Street will be milled and resurfaced. That portion of the project is expected to begin Aug. 27 and will stretch from the intersection with Highway 1 to the intersection with Second Avenue. The DOT will close two of the four lanes at a time so that motorists can continue to use West Madison during the road repair. Huddle said business owners and their customers will also be able to use their driveways on West Madison during this time. The milling should take about a week.

?You can drive on a road after it has been milled, it?s just not as smooth,? Huddle said. ?The contractor is pretty good about maneuvering around people. They?ll work with the businesses. The businesses won?t have to close, they?ll just see some machines out their window.?

Huddle added that the milled portion of the road will be combined with new asphalt and laid again. In late June, road workers took samples of West Madison to their laboratory to find out how much new asphalt they needed to add to the mixture.

The patching between Highway 1 and G36 will require the closure of one lane of traffic. A pilot car will escort motorists on the highway between the intersection of Highway 1 and the intersection of G36. Huddle said a pilot car will not be necessary on Highway 92 within the city limits since it is four lanes. The patchwork is expected to last about three weeks.

Huddle said the contractor is patching weak spots in the road. If the weak spots are not patched, they can cause the asphalt laid on top to crumble easily. The DOT will resurface Highway 92 between G36 and Highway 1. It will not mill that portion of the highway as it plans to do with West Madison. Road crews will begin applying the asphalt to Highway 92 from G36 to Second Avenue Sept. 3. That portion of the project should last about four weeks.  

East Washington Street from Second Avenue to the city limits will only receive patchwork. The patching will be full-depth and will include excavating the bad concrete and replacing it with new concrete. Huddle said a few lanes of traffic may be closed on East Washington during the patchwork phase but that the street will remain open to traffic throughout the construction.

Once West Madison is resurfaced, it will be converted from a four-lane road to a three-lane road. One lane will go east, one lane will go west and a third lane for turning traffic will lie between them. The east-west lanes will remain 11 feet wide but the turning lane will be made 14 feet wide. There will be a 4-foot buffer zone where cars cannot drive on both sides of the road. Under the current configuration, each of the four lanes is 11 feet wide and there is no buffer.

Former City Engineer Rob McDonald told the city council in 2011 that the West Madison paint would last two years. If the council wanted to repaint the road back to four lanes, it would have to grind off the old strips of paint rather than simply paint over top of them.

Portions of the sidewalk will be replaced along Highway 92 in the city. Wherever a sidewalk meets the road it must be sloped to allow wheelchair access. This improvement is required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In April 2011, the Washington City Council voted to convert West Madison from a four-lane road into a three-lane road since the DOT was going to resurface it anyway.

The DOT has jurisdiction over the road but allowed the council to decide whether it would remain four lanes or change to three lanes. DOT engineers Troy Jerman and Jim Phillips visited Washington in January 2011 and recommended the adoption of three lanes. They said three lanes would reduce the number of accidents on the street by reducing traffic speeds and by making it easier for traffic to enter the street.

Phillips pointed to statistics showing that West Madison Street had 50 percent more collisions per mile driven than the state highway average. Jerman showed evidence that reconfiguring a road from four to three lanes has reduced collisions every time the DOT has tried it, often reducing the number of crashes by 50 percent.