Getting in or out of downtown Peterborough has been more difficult this week, as work on both the Main Street Bridge and Route 101 bridge projects reduced traffic to one lane.
Traffic on Route 202 has been limited to one lane in each direction as workers have spent the early part of the week doing what Aaron Lachance of Hoyle Tanner, engineering manager for the Main Street Bridge project, called “reclaiming” – mixing the existing surface pavement with the gravel below in preparation for putting the new paving on top.
According to Lachance, the initial repaving of Route 202 is scheduled for Thursday. That will be a one-day operation with a single lane open.
Lachance said work on Route 202 has also included storm drainage and limited water main work. Plans also call for a slight widening of the road and sidewalks on the east side of the road, which will include periods of one-lane traffic. The lane configuration will be the same, but wider shoulders will allow for more separation from the sidewalk and more space for bicycles, although it will not be a formal bike lane.
At the bridge itself, workers were doing final masonry work on the outside wall Tuesday morning. Lachance said final paving on both Route 202 and the bridge will be done over two days in about three weeks. Route 202 will be a single lane during that time, and Lachance said conversations are ongoing with the town, the school district and first-responders over whether to limit traffic on the bridge to one lane or close it during final paving.
After vehicles returned to the bridge in December, work on the bridge and Route 202 was supposed to be done by June 30, but Lachance said the expected end date is early October.
“There’s a whole host of things that happened on the project,” although he said the project is still on budget.
Among those complications, Lachance said, was COVID-19, as work began in March 2020. Furthermore, work in the water in July 2021 coincided with what he called the rainiest July on record.
Lachance said “very much so” when asked if he would be happy when the project was finished.
“(Hoyle Tanner project engineer Kayla Hampe) and I have been working on this since the end of 2014, the town much longer,” he said. “The town began planning for this in the early 2000s.”
Hampe said the Main Street Bridge is “a good project, very complex.” One of the complexities, she said, is the shape of the bridge. The walls on both sides of the bridge are the same length, but the geometry is such that they’re offset and the ends aren’t across from each other.
Additionally, Hampe said essentially putting back what was there, but widening for safer travel, is more of a challenge in a historic area such as downtown Peterborough. If the bridge was somewhere else, she said they might have just built a concrete deck with steel beams, which she called “a little bit more straightforward.”
Over at the Route 101 bridge, which the state Department of Transportation started reconstructing last December, the single-lane traffic was due to the installation of girders, which ended Tuesday.
“This is our final push toward fall for this part of the bridge,” state DOT representative Zachary Paight said.
With girders in place, Paight said work on the bridge deck could begin, which is expected to take four to five weeks, followed by paving.
“All those dates are weather-dependent, but the goal is to have traffic in the new part of the bridge by mid-November,” he said.
The first phase of construction eliminated the middle turning lane on Route 101 and turned it into a lane for through traffic as the construction crew worked on the eastbound side of the bridge. During the fall and winter, once traffic is switched over to the new part of the bridge, crews will demolish the portion drivers are using now and then repeat the process on the westbound side, starting with the foundation in the spring and working their way up.
“It’s going to be the same kind of timetable we had this year,” Paight said.
According to Paight, the project has had a couple delays with material manufacturers and difficulty finding workers, and th e expected completion date is October 2023.
“Overall, we’re making good progress,” he said.