It’s time for regular motorists on Bonanza Drive to start finding an alternate route.
Road crews on Thursday are scheduled to start what will be a major redo of the critical street, and a stretch of Bonanza Drive early next month will be shut down to traffic to allow the crews to work.
City Hall has long warned that the work is needed to install a water line underneath Bonanza Drive and redesign the road in a bid to better manage traffic, but signs announcing the construction have gone up in recent days and workers have regularly been seen marking pavement in anticipation of the start.
Matt Cassel, the Park City engineer and the City Hall staffer directing the work, said the crews on Thursday will start digging along the route of the water line. The trench will run from Deer Valley Drive to a point just south of Kearns Boulevard. The digging will start at the Bonanza Drive-Deer Valley Drive intersection.
Cassel said two lanes of traffic will be maintained during the early stages of the work. Flaggers and barricades will be in place.
Starting on Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day, Bonanza Drive between Deer Valley Drive and upper Iron Horse Loop will be closed to traffic, with a scheduled reopening on Oct, 15. The remainder of Bonanza Drive, from upper Iron Horse Loop to Kearns Boulevard, will be kept open.
“It will allow the contractor to get in there and out as quick as possible,” Cassel says. “It’s not going to be painless.”
Drivers will be detoured to Kearns Boulevard and Park Avenue.
The project will extend over the next two years. Work planned this year includes the installation of the water line, and road improvements –repaving, new curbs and gutters and bicycle lanes — between Deer Valley Drive and upper Iron Horse Loop.
Next year, the rest of Bonanza Drive will be redone, a sidewalk will be built on the lower portion of the road and a pedestrian-bicyclist tunnel will be constructed at the Iron Horse Drive intersection. City Hall expects to spend $5.3 million on the work over the two years, with most of the expenses scheduled next year.
“There will be stress to it. It will cause stress, but my belief is the people are pretty resilient,” Cassel said.
The work has been looming for several years, with City Hall officials and businesspeople along Bonanza Drive holding extensive talks about the construction and the details of the road designs. Some of the businesses are worried that they will have difficulty during the roadwork even though the stretch of road where they are located will remain open to traffic this year.
There has also been concern that the redone road could make it tougher for customers to drive to the businesses, but City Hall, in a concession to the businesses, eliminated most of the medians that had been under consideration. The medians would have restricted left turns. One, outside Maverick just off the Kearns Boulevard intersection, remains in the blueprints.
City Hall has scheduled an open house about the roadwork on Aug. 11 from 4 p.m. until 6 p.m. in Room 205 of the Park City Library and Education Center. A hotline has also been set up. The number is 615-5190, but the line was not operating Tuesday morning. More information is available on the project’s Web site http://bonanzadrive.wordpress.com/