| Marquette Interchange
Milwaukee's Famed Crossing Faces the Future by Elaine Schmidt Milwaukee's Marquette Interchange, the connection between
Interstate 94 and Interstate 43 in the city's downtown area, is getting a much-needed
redesign and reconstruction.
The $810 million project is aimed at delivering a safer,
more useable interchange in 2008.
The project is complicated by the need
to keep Milwaukee's downtown open for business and both highways open to traffic.
Innovative Pavement The on-grade sections of the highways
will feature a long-lasting, all-asphalt roadway.
"This is a substance
called perpetual pavement," said Todd Hughes, Milwaukee area manager for
Waukesha-based Payne and Dolan, a project engineer. "This is the first time
it has been used in Wisconsin - except for a couple of test projects."
The
perpetual pavement consists of an all-asphalt recipe, over a base of crushed stone.
Pat
Goggin, senior project manager with Chicago-based Walsh Construction, one of the
project's general contractors, said the stone layers consist of 18 in. of select
crushed stone, 6 in. of 1.25-minus stone and 4 in. of open-graded stone.
The
asphalt will be 13 in. thick on the mainline roadways, Hughes said. It will be
laid in layers that will be graduated in strength, with the hardest asphalt at
the top to resist rutting from traffic. The most flexible layer will be at the
bottom to resist cracking.
"It is generally faster and cheaper to
build a road with asphalt than with concrete," he added. There is no curing
time involved with asphalt, so trucks can drive on it the day after it is laid.
"The
lower 11 in. of asphalt should never have to be replaced," Hughes said. "The
tops layers will be milled off and replaced every 20 to 25 years."
Why Now? Brian Manthey, communication director on the Marquette Interchange
project for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, said the interchange has
been overtaxed since the day it went into service.
As the only interchange
serving the downtown area, the Marquette has handled double the expected traffic
since it opened in 1968, reaching 300,000 cars per day by the early 2000s. Key
objectives include placing entrances and exits on the right side of the roadway
and increasing the distance between entrance and exit ramps. Currently the interchange
mixes right-and left-hand entrances and exits, some in close proximity, requiring
traffic to shift over several lanes of traffic in a short space.
The current
interchange design connects I-43 and I-94 via one-lane bridges that curve tightly
enough to require motorists to reduce their speed drastically. The new interchange
will feature two-lane connections in loose curves that allow motorists to maintain
reasonable speeds, thus reducing congestion.
The project includes the closure
and reconstruction of 13 on/off ramps, with five more to be closed and replaced
by new ramps. Nine bridges will be demolished and eight of them replaced.
"The
Marquette Interchange was never intended to be the only downtown interchange,"
Manthey added. "It was intended to be one of two interchanges serving the
area, but the other one was never built."
Land was cleared for the
other interchange, north of the Marquette, but a local moratorium in the 1970s
on freeway building stopped the project before it began.
The system was
originally designed with each interchange handling equal amounts of traffic, Manthey
said.Leg Work The project's first leg was the Clybourn
Street Project and consisted of work adjacent to I-94 and on the 16th Street Bridge.
It was completed in December, with Walsh Construction as the general contractor.
Walsh
is also the general contractor on the second leg of the project, which began in
October and will wrap up in December 2006. It covers the longest stretch of the
project, I-43 from Wells Street north to North Avenue, and includes several bridges.
Work
began in February on the project's third leg, the West Leg, with the Marquette
Constructors, a joint venture of Lunda Construction Co. of Black River Falls,
Edward Kraemer & Sons Inc. of Plain and Zenith Tech of Waukesha as the general
contractor.
The project's final two phases, the core contract and the south
leg, may be let as a single contract because the work on the two is heavily intertwined.
This phase will replace the core of the interchange, while keeping two lanes of
traffic open in each direction.
Bridges and Utilities The
project's bridge work has been complicated by traffic and on-bridge utilities.
To demolish bridges over the highway with a minimum of traffic disruption, structures
such as the Wells Street Bridge have been removed during single, overnight highway
closures that drew crowds of onlookers.
"The people watching worried
us a little," Goggin said. "Having construction people around is one
thing, but having the public that close is another thing. We had the sheriff move
them back a few times."
Many of the bridges also contain utilities
that have to be kept in operation throughout the project and rebuilt into the
new structures.
Although state policy bans utilities from bridges, other
than the electrical service to lights and traffic signals on the bridge, the Milwaukee
bridges are an exception. Many of the bridges carry a number of utility lines,
including gas pipes, electrical lines and steam pipes.
He said that it
added $6 million to $7 million to construct the bridges with the necessary strength
to hold the utilities. In addition, the utilities had to be routed to other bridges
or hung over the roadway on a temporary basis during construction of the new bridges.
Expanding
roadways and ramps requires an expansion of the system's stormwater collection
capabilities.
Tom Collins, assistant resident engineer on the north leg
of the project for WisDOT, said crews have been laying 72-in.-diameter water-collection
pipes, some of them 40 ft. below grade, to serve the new interchange.
Working Round the Clock Night work is effectively limited to a six-hour
window to have the maximum number of lanes open for the morning rush. Night shifts
have been used during periods of heavy earth removal.
Scheduling work around
events such as Milwaukee Brewers baseball games and the Wisconsin State Fair has
also helped to alleviate construction congestion.
Brady Frederick, project
manager for Marquette Constructors, said that from his perspective the toughest
part of the project has been access in the tight spaces between the existing freeways
and bridges and the temporary structures to handle traffic during the demolition
and reconstruction of the old structures.
"We are building bridges
between bridges," he addedsaid. "In some spots there is a bridge just
inches off the crane boom." Safety First Safety
is a primary concern. "We pay for a sheriff's deputy to be assigned 24 hours per
day, six days a week [whenever crews are working]," Manthey said. "If something
happens on the site, everyone knows to contact this deputy." No major problems
have occurred.
The project's budget also includes funds for expansion
of the WisDOT traffic operations center's hours. The normal operational hours
of 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. have been expanded to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a
week.
Collins said 95 percent of the project's work is going on behind
temporary barriers. A lengthy closure of the southbound lanes of I-43, with southbound
traffic routed to share the northbound lanes, has also helped to provide a safe
work environment. When the northbound lanes go under construction, traffic will
share the southbound lanes.
"We will always have two lanes open in each
direction," he said. He added that some system ramps may go out of service during
off-peak hours, requiring motorists to make surface-street detours for connections.
Perhaps the greatest safety feature of the project is WisDOT's community
outreach program. Using the Internet and frequently updated brochures, WisDOT
describes current work and scheduled closures and offers alternate routes to reduce
congestion. SIDEBAR Bridge Murals
Honor Underground Railroad Colorful tiles representing adinkra symbols
of African derivation will be on bridges, fences and cast concrete-relief murals
on the Fond du Lac bridge abutments being constructed as part of the Marquette
Interchange project in Milwaukee.
The interchange structures in a neighborhood
on the project's north leg will reflect the area's African American history, including
squares from quilts that were hung as signals along the Underground Railroad.
The
Underground Railroad was the secret chain of individuals that spirited runaway
slaves from the South to freedom in the North during the Civil War era.
The
project will include other elements of Community Service Design, including bridge
piers that reflect the Gothic shape of the city's church steeples
CSD,
a relatively new approach to the development of transportation projects, involves
community members before major decisions are made.
Enhancements are often
low-cost, highly visual features such as the shaping, sculpting or coloring of
items like piers, railings, light fixtures and retaining walls to reflect unique
elements of the community they stand in.
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