Palmer-Wasilla Highway expansion beginning

PALMER — You may have noticed the surveyors on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

Turns out, they’re one of the first steps toward a widening of that road from two to three lanes.

“We’re expecting the last of the survey stuff here in the next couple of weeks and then we can take the first crack at figuring out what that’s going to look like,” said Jim Amundsen, who’s heading up the project for the state’s Department of Transportation.

The step after that is to take those preliminary drawings out to a series of public meetings to gather input.

“Our biggest concern is that we find out if somebody’s septic tank or water well or who knows what else is in the right of way,” Amundsen said.

The third lane will be a center turn lane. Amundsen said a lot of that work has already been done at each of the many recently installed stoplights. Each of those intersections was previously widened. The upcoming project will fill in the gaps.

The idea is to cut down on accidents and make the road safer for people making left turns into driveways or side streets, he said.

“They have a refuge, if you will, so they won’t get hit from behind and launched into oncoming traffic,” Amundsen said.

He said that to accomplish that he’ll need some more room.

“There’s 40 feet of pavement and we’re going to widen it to 48 feet of pavement,” he said.

Eight feet — that sounds like it’ll be easy to find — but anyone who’s been on that highway knows there are homes and businesses along its entire length.

“It’s an extremely congested corridor. We know that going in,” Amundsen said.

He said one thing the state won’t do is take away the bike path to get those eight feet.

“I’ve heard that concern already. Nobody’s losing the pathway. The pathway will still be there,” he said. “We might have to shove over a little bit, but it will be there when we’re done.”

Something else he’s anticipating is a comparison to the work he’s also in the middle of in expanding the Parks Highway north of Wasilla into a four-lane road with a center divider.

Some opponents of that project, including the city of Wasilla, have suggested a better option is five lanes — two northbound, two southbound and a center turn lane. Why do center turn lanes work for one road and not another?

“It’s because of the types of accident problems we’ve been seeing in the accident history,” Amundsen said.

Palmer-Wasilla Highway accidents are generally two types: a car gets rear-ended and pushed into oncoming traffic or a driver trying to make a left turn gets clipped trying to scoot through a too-small break in traffic.

The Parks Highway, meanwhile, sees more head-on crashes due to drivers losing control on one side and driving into the other, or taking a risk passing slow-moving traffic.

Amundsen said that the eastern end of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, from Hemmer Road to the Glenn Highway, is part of a different project, the former Palmer Couplet project that was changed after the public strongly opposed the proposed design.

Now it’s the Palmer-Wasilla Highway Eastern Terminus project and it includes no one-way streets, instead opting for a series of fixes to downtown roads including Dogwood Avenue and Felton Street as well as expanding the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

Right now, Amundsen said, the state is buying up land to build that project.

“It’ll probably be summer of ’15 by the time we get the last of the right of way bought,” Amundsen said.

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