Big dig, long haul
Road projects driving traffic jams
STAMFORD — Jodi Amato watched the time as she went from her Glenbrook home to work downtown on a recent weekday morning.
Things went bad on Summer Street, where traffic came to a stop in front of Dairy Queen.
For the next half-hour, Amato said, she crept along from there to Burlington Coat Factory at Summer and Broad streets — a distance of maybe a quarter-mile.
“You run into that and it’s like you’re in the Twilight Zone,” Amato said. “You can’t get out.”
She knew one of the reasons for the backup. The city was repaving roads around Columbus Park, which is across from the building where she works.
“It’s just about finished now. It looks beautiful,” Amato said. “I understand that they have to do construction work, but do they have to do it all at once?”
That’s a reference to the second reason for her crawling commutes lately. On Broad Street, the utility company Eversource is replacing natural gas lines.
Unlike the paving around Columbus Park, which Stamford Transportation Bureau Chief Jim Travers said will be completed on Monday, the Eversource project has no estimated end date, company spokesman Mitch Gross said.
“It’s part of natural gas upgrade work we’re doing downtown. It’s a major project,” Gross said. “We are
working closely with the city to do everything we can to complete it as quickly and safely as possible. We understand the inconveniences, especially for drivers.”
Broad Street has been so jammed, Travers said, that he contacted Eversource last week.
“We want to transition them to night work to ease the burden on the traveling public,” Travers said.
But those projects are far from the only ones underway, creating detours and backups citywide.
On busy Cedar Heights Road in High Ridge, Eversource’s electric division is making equipment improvements.
“That’s part of a multimillion-dollar upgrade to a substation there and to nearby electrical equipment,” Gross said.
That project was supposed to be completed at the end of the year but now should be wrapped up in the fall, he said.
“So far, we’re ahead of schedule,” Gross said.
There’s other good news from Eversource.
“We have nothing else planned in Stamford this year,” Gross said.
That’s not the case for Aquarion Water Co., which has four projects underway. Water mains are being replaced on Stillwater Avenue, Berrian Road, and Orchard Street into Perry Street, spokesman Peter Fazekas said. Those three are expected to be finished in the fall.
But a bigger project on well-traveled Newfield Avenue will go on for a while.
“We’re putting in a 24inch transmission line in a two-phase pipeline project,” Fazekas said. “It’s a 2.7-mile extension of our Southwest Regional Pipeline, which will allow us to move water from our greater-Bridgeport system deeper into Stamford and into Greenwich.”
Phase 1 will wrap up this year, but Phase 2 will begin next summer, he said.
The state Department of Transportation has an even bigger project happening on an even busier street — Courtland Avenue where it intersects with East Main Street. Work began last fall and should be completed by Nov. 1.
The state is widening Courtland and installing sidewalks, and reworking intersections with East Main Street and several side streets to improve safety. The area has a history of intersection crashes.
Two other soon-to-start state projects will hang up traffic in key spots.
Right after the Fourth of July holiday, the state will begin milling and paving Route 1 from the Darien border, through the East Side and downtown, to Washington Boulevard, Travers said.
“It’s a long stretch of road, so it will most likely take them about a month,” Travers said.
In February, a key portion of Atlantic Street will be closed for six months. The state DOT will replace the old railroad bridge that passes over Atlantic near South State Street, a choke point for motorists headed to and from the train station, Interstate 95, downtown, the South End and Shippan.
That could slow Jackie Kaiko’s regular trips from her North Stamford home to the train station and other downtown destinations, already interrupted this year by the DOT’s repaving of Long Ridge Road, and by “ad hoc things you run into, like tree trimming and fixing power lines,” she said.
“You certainly don’t want to discourage them from doing the work, but it can really mess up your planning,” Kaiko said. “You have to leave in enough time to make an appointment or make a train, but you don’t know how long the drive will take. Sometimes you luck out, sometimes you don’t.”
It’s the summer that launched a slew of roadwork, most of it planned years ago.
“We are getting a lot done,” Travers said. “Construction projects are always a challenge, but at the end of the day, there will be a lot of great improvements.”
The city has several up its sleeve.
A realignment of the intersection at Selleck Street and Southfield and Greenwich avenues is mostly complete, Travers said. Intersection improvements and traffic signal installation at Atlantic and Henry streets will be finished by early fall, he said. Similar work is about to begin at West Avenue and West Main Street.
Travers said the work on Oaklawn Avenue, a busy cut-through between Bull’s Head and Newfield, will be completed by the end of the year. The road is being reconstructed, with new sidewalks, between Halpin Avenue and Camore Street.
“I get it. The city needs to do stuff,” Amato said. “But there has to be more thought behind how they close off the roads. The streets can’t handle the traffic as it is, and the construction projects compound it.”
Gross from Eversource said he understands.
“Everybody, it seems, has a hand in the stew,” he said.