Additional lanes on Whittlesey Road to open to traffic in October

The long-running Whittlesey Road widening project may not be completed by October, but the four lanes will be open to traffic by then.

"It's going to be open to traffic in October, but that doesn't mean it will be finished," said Sam Wellborn, the Columbus representative on the Georgia Department of Transportation board of directors.

The project, which has been discussed since at least the 1990s, will take what was a perpetually clogged two-lane road that runs between Veterans Parkway and Whitesville Road and widen it to four lanes, with turn lanes cut into the raised median.

Drivers will have access to the entire roadway by October, but there are still some finishing touches that will need to be completed, such as curb and gutter work, drainage structures and traffic signals, Wellborn said.

The construction project began in fall 2012 and was estimated to take about 2 ½ years to complete. The original price tag was $8.95 million, with $7.17 coming from the federal government and $1.78 from the state.

In late 2014, the project was running about six months behind because of unforeseen drainage problems, some additional median cut-throughs and foot-dragging by utilities that needed to be moved. Those issues hiked the price tag up to $9.8 million.

The project required extensive right-of-way acquisition and moving of several utilities.

It also required dealing with an active rail crossing and an interstate bridge.

At one point, the section between Whitesville Road and Bradley Park Drive was closed to through traffic for several months.

As that project is winding down, another, larger DOT project is about a quarter of the way completed up the road from Whittlesey on Veterans Parkway, Wellborn said. That is the $18.5 million road widening project on Veterans from Moon Road, past Northside High School, to Hancock Road.

It is designed to relieve the traffic snarls Northside, Veterans Memorial Middle School and North Columbus Elementary School are causing in the mornings and afternoons.

The Muscogee County School District on Thursday announced it would start and end class days 15 minutes earlier at North Columbus Elementary School to help alleviate traffic congestion.

That 1.5-mile project, which is being done by McMath-Turner, the same contractor handling the Whittlesey project, is slated to be completed in summer 2017, about three years after it began, Wellborn said.

This story was originally published August 22, 2015 at 9:46 PM with the headline "Additional lanes on Whittlesey Road to open to traffic in October ."