DOT gives green light to Parks-Stanley signal

WASILLA — As snow flurries signal the start of the cold season, most construction projects are winding down.

But not a state project at the Parks Highway and Stanley Road, where the state is putting up a new traffic signal. If all goes according to plan, that signal will only be up a couple years before it’s upgraded again as part of a project to widen a portion of the Parks Highway from the edge of Wasilla to just past the Big Lake Road turnoff.

“Where they’re putting that, it will end up getting taken down and relocated somewhere else later,” said Jim Amundsen with the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

Amundsen is heading up the project to widen that stretch of the Parks Highway from two lanes to four.

“Clearly, when I widen the road from two lanes to four lanes, a light that would work for a two-lane road isn’t going to be usable for a four-lane road,” he said.

The traffic light is going up on poles permanent enough to keep it up for a couple of years while DOT gets the project under way, but temporary enough to take down once they need to go.

DOT spokesman Rick Feller said it’s not a process foreign to the state.

“We can go on a life cycle basis and say OK, we’re going to invest $100,000 at this intersection and get a couple good years of life out of this,” Feller said. “It makes sense to do that instead of letting an increase in risk grow over the course of the intervening years.”

Risk is what motivated DOT to install a light at the intersection ahead of the widening project.

Amundsen said the project is being paid out of highway safety money, and that the project was selected because of the number of accidents there.

“It is an intersection that it has been determined can be made safer by putting a traffic light there,” Amundsen said. “The justification has been based on a higher than normal number of accidents at that intersection.”

The intersection is inside the Parks Highway Safety Corridor, one of four roads designated as safety zones as they are four of the five most dangerous in the state. The Valley has three of those five. Another corridor is on Knik-Goose Bay Road and the only of the top five not to get a corridor yet is the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

Feller said that DOT had planned to put the signal in late in the year. That’s just when it fit on their schedule.

“We knew that we’d be pushing the season a little bit with this but we sure wanted to get the safety benefits out there sooner rather than later,” he said.

They worked ahead as much as they could, pre-ordering parts and getting everything set up before hand, Feller said.

“We’ve got much of the underground work already completed. We’re going to be paving the newly expanded turn lanes tomorrow,” Feller said Monday, “so we’ll have the majority of the in-ground work.”

The plan is to have the light operational by mid- to late-November with some finish-up work to do after the ground thaws in the spring.

“We still are anticipating a substantially complete project before winter freeze in,” Feller said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.