Start 1: Marquette Interchange
Cost: $810 million

Discussion to reconstruct Milwaukee's Marquette Interchange began in 1992, and construction finally started last year.

Replacement of the interchange, which connects interstates 94 and 43 and provides the only freeway access to downtown Milwaukee, was needed because of deteriorating structures and inadequate capacity.

"The Marquette Interchange was never intended to be the only downtown interchange," said Brian Manthey, communications director of the Marquette Interchange Project for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

The interchange was intended to be one of two serving the downtown area. A moratorium on freeway building occurred after the Marquette Interchange had been constructed.

The current project removes numerous dangerous left-hand exit and on ramps and replaces existing one-lane connections between I-94 and I-43 with two-lane connections.

Has Five Legs

The project has been divided into five separate legs to keep the interchange open to the public.

The first leg was the Clybourn Street Project and consisted of work adjacent to I-94 and on the 16th Street Bridge. The work was completed in December with Chicago-based Walsh Construction Co. serving 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 I-43 from Wells Street north to North Avenue, including several bridges.

Work began in February on the project's third leg, the West Leg, with Marquette Constructors, a joint venture of Lunda Construction Co. of Black River Falls, Wis., Edward Kraemer & Sons Inc. of Plain, Wis., and Zenith Tech of Waukesha, Wis., as the general contractors.

Manthey said the project's final two phases, the core contract and the south leg, might be let as a single contract since that work is heavily intertwined.

With the prior three phases of work out of the way, this phase will replace the core of the interchange, while keeping two lanes of traffic open in each direction throughout construction.

Work is expected to continue through 2008.

Citing the project's greatest challenge as communicating with the commuters, Manthey said that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation has assigned a communications officer to the project and set up a Web site for travelers, www.mchange.org.

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