US 41 road work on pace for 2020

Here’s a look at what’s happening in other parts of North Georgia:

The Georgia DOT says bridge work is causing delays.

CARTERSVILLE — Originally slated to be a threeyear project, efforts to reconstruct several bridges along U.S. 41 are now expected to continue until February 2020.

The project to rebuild the interchange at U.S. 41 and U.S. 411, which also includes the reconstruction of the bridges along Joe Frank Harris Parkway over the CSX line and the reconstruction of the bridges over Pettit Creek, began in 2014.

According to the Georgia Department of Transportation, the project is almost 50 percent complete.

“They were hoping it would be a much shorter process than that, but we have a lot of limestone underneath the road that forms caverns, and they’ve found themselves in one of those caverns on Tennessee Street,” said Bartow County Transportation Planner Tom Sills. “It’s a $57 million project, overall, from design to construction. It’s all federal transportation dollars.”

There is no timetable in place for when each bridge will be completed, but Sills said the cloverleaf reconstruction will be finished first.

“Environmentally, they’ve got to deal with Pettit Creek stuff, and the railroad, they’ve got it ready to go because the railroad was charging them for delaying the trains through that route,” he said.

At this point, Sills said he does not expect any project cost overruns. He laid out a tentative schedule of the construction progress anticipated by year’s end.

The temporary bridges over Tennessee Street will remain in place this summer, but Sills said he does expect some significant work to be completed before 2019 on the new permanent bridges that will eventually replace them.

Sills said there will be no road closures while work on the bridges continue. The project, he said, is ultimately more of a maintenance issue than one about roadway capacity.

John Swift, Cartersville Daily Tribune News