Kent State, city of Kent officials prepare Summit Street for a tuneup

By Richard Mulhall & Ian Klein

Kent State students worried about how the Summit Street construction project will affect their daily commute will have to wait until spring.

The two-year, estimated $17.5 million Summit Street: Building a Better Way project was expected to begin this fall, but the majority of roadway construction won’t occur as early as expected. Project contractor Kenmore Construction Company is expected to begin construction early spring, said Michael Bruder, executive director of utilities planning and design.

A few years ago Kent State students were under the assumption that construction would commence in the fall of 2015, but Bruder has since confirmed that major roadway construction won’t begin until the beginning of March.

“There was a schedule [for construction] that ideally would have started probably late summer, and actually through just the bidding environment and through the contracting process, the contractor was not in place to start at that time,” Bruder said. “This fall semester we’ll have some work happening but it will just have some minor single-lane road closures that you would expect in a normal city project.”

Bruder said he expects to receive a final construction schedule from the Kenmore Construction in the next few weeks, which will hopefully serve as a better indicator of when students can expect the project to begin and conclude.

The Summit Street project is expected to be finished in late 2017, with weather pending of course, Bowling said.

The Project

East Summit Street has been identified by the Akron Metropolitan Area Transportation Study as the most congested stretch of road in Summit and Portage counties.

Any student, faculty or staff member driving down Summit Street can easily observe the heavy traffic, and as Kent State enrollment continues to rise, the problem of congestion continues to grow.

“It’s been high on the congestion list for a long time,” said Jim Bowling, superintendent of engineering for Kent.

Congestion and traffic safety concerns have been an issue for Summit Street for quite a while now, which is why Kent State University and the city of Kent collaborated to create the Summit Street project.

The project is a joint effort by city of Kent and Kent State designed to “improve traffic and safety conditions by adding turn lanes, medians and sidewalks to the roadway” of East Summit Street, KentWired previously reported.

[pullquote]“The overall project is meant to relieve traffic congestion (and) improve vehicular and pedestrian safety to the corridor,” Bowling said.[/pullquote]

Relieving Congestion

The project will implement two roundabouts on East Summit Street in order to alleviate congestion. One roundabout will be added at the entrance to Risman Plaza and the Kent Student Center parking lot, which will eliminate two traffic lights and one intersection at Risman Plaza, and another will be added at Ted Boyd Drive that will replace the existing intersection there.

As KentWired and TV2 have previously reported, construction will be divided into two predominant phases that will focus on the 1-mile stretch of Summit Street between Loop Road and Lincoln Street.

“We will be splitting it up into two segments so that we’re not impacting the same area for two straight year,” Bowling said.

Phase one, which is expected to begin in March, entails completing the entire roadway work from Fraternity Circle to Loop Road.

Phase two, which is estimated to begin in 2017, will cover the construction from just east of Willow Street to Fraternity Circle. This phase will also include a realigned West Campus Center Drive to eliminate two traffic lights and combine into the roundabout at Risman Plaza and the Kent State Student Center parking lot.

“We are realigning Campus Center Drive so that it’s an arrival point so that it’s an arrival point into campus that lands at that new proposed roundabout, and there’ll be a lot of transformation happening in that center part of campus,” Bruder said.

During both phases, one-way eastbound traffic toward Dix Stadium will be maintained along Summit Street throughout the construction zone.

Detours & Parking Effects

Bruder said State Route 261 will serve as the the detour route during both phases of construction. From 261 drivers will turn right on South Water Street, a.k.a. State Route 43, then turn right onto East Summit Street. From there drivers can turn left onto South Lincoln Street, which will mark the end of construction.

“There are detour routes so that for people who use Summit Street as a through road, that their destination is not along in that section,” Bruder said. “The detour route would actually be around part of campus through 261 and up 43 to try to divert traffic from the area.”

While the detour routes might raises questions about congestion in the work zones, especially during the peak commuter hours of lunchtime and the afternoon, Bowling said he is more preoccupied with traffic flow around the zones. He said he realizes the detour routes might need to be adjusted and tweak throughout the duration of construction.

“We don’t anticipate congestion problems in the work zone, but around the work zone we’re very concerned that there’s going to be people going around the area in areas that are not our sign detours, and we’re concerned how those are going to react, but until we actually see what happens, it’s hard for us to predict,” he said

Given the large scope of undertaking a roadwork project this big, inconveniencing the steady flow of traffic for Kent State students, faculty and staff while construction is going on is unavoidable, Bowling said.

[pullquote]“This kind of a road job can’t be done in three months or two months when school’s off,” Bowling said.[/pullquote]

Some parking spaces will be lost during construction as efforts are being made to realign and modify the Campus Center lots. Although access to every parking lot will be maintained, parking will not always be in the same place, which might cause disruption.

Katherine Manning, director of planning for PARTA, said in a July 2015 interview that previous reports suggest construction on Campus Center Drive could cut hundreds of spots.

“At that point, we’re going to be losing spaces in that commuter lot,” Parking Services Manager Larry Emling said in an April 2014 interview. “We’ll probably lose a couple hundred spaces. And that could unfortunately, realistically, be a permanent loss.”

Safety Concerns

Along with reducing congested traffic, the Summit Street project also hopes to create a safer, more attractive roadway for both drivers and pedestrians.

[pullquote]“Typically when you have high congestion, you have high accident rates, Bowling said.[/pullquote]
When Kent submitted applications to receive grants in order to fund the project back in 2007 and 2008, the Akron Metropolitan Area Transportation had done a study of the past three years of traffic in Portage County. The study found that four of the top six crash intersections in Kent at the time were on Summit Street.

From 2011 to 2014, the Akron Metropolitan Area Transportation conducted a similar study on pedestrian crash rates, and 23 percent of all pedestrian accidents in Kent happened in the 1-mile stretch of road on East Summit Street. In other words, seven out of 31 pedestrian accidents in Kent occurred in this 1-mile stretch out of the 88 miles of roadway in Kent, a staggering fact that raised safety concerns among officials and helped finance the project’s grant funding.

Since Summit Street is actually owned by the city of Kent, Bowling said, the city partnered with Kent State, and with the aid of federal funding, got the project out of the early talking stages .

[pullquote]“The reason the project is funded is because that section of Summit Street is one of the most congested and accident-prone sections of road in all of Summit and Portage County so that is what made us eligible for the funding,” Bruder said.[/pullquote]

City of Kent and Kent State officials chose roundabout installation as the best solution to the issues of congestion and accidents on Summit Street.

“All but one of those accidents [in the AMATS] were in signalized intersections when pedestrians were in crosswalks,” Bowling said. “Studies have shown that roundabouts reduce crashes.”

According to a study by The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, roundabouts are significantly safer than conventional intersections because they reduce 35 percent of crashes, 76 percent of injury crashes and 89 percent of fatalities.
“In a regular intersection, they show 32 conflict points, so 32 times that a car going left and a car going straight, they cross – that’s a conflict point” Bowling said. “In a roundabout, there’s eight, and it all has to do with someone merging into the roadway or diverging off of it.”

Bowling explained that that there are a lot less conflict points, or chances of an accident to happen, in a roundabout than a standard signalized intersection.

Speeds are also slower in roundabout intersections because roundabouts are designed to intentionally slow the driver down, whereas signalized intersections are designed to make the driver go the speed limit.

“They have a designed speed that’s closer to 15 miles an hour to go around that circle,” Bowling said.

From a pedestrian standpoint, roundabouts dramatically reduce injury crashes and fatalities based on the statistics given from the U.S. Safety Report. In a roundabout, pedestrians have to travel less of a distance and cross just one direction of traffic at a time.

“There’s less conflict points, even for pedestrians,” Bowling said. “Shorter crossing with less directional traffic is easier.”

In addition to adding turn lanes and roundabouts, sidewalks and medians will also be added to ensure pedestrian and cyclist safety.

“We were looking at trying to dedicate areas to pedestrians and bikes because it’s not clearly identified now, and so by providing infrastructure for that it would be safer,” Bruder said.

First Steps: Utility Relocation

Although phase one of the roadway construction won’t be in full w until after the winter, with officials not expediting construction due to potential inclement weather, efforts were made this past summer to prepare Summit Street for its major makeover.

Bruder said the majority of the construction that was done in the summer was preparatory work.
[pullquote]“We won’t see any changes to the traffic patterns or really see the changes that are coming about until next spring,” Bruder said.[/pullquote]

According to Jim Bowling, the private utility companies for electric, phone, cable and gas started relocating their facilities. First Energy has already actively been out putting up new utility poles, and Dominion East Ohio Gas will be out soon to adjust its gas line on Summit Street soon.

Bowling said this utility relocation process will continue through the fall semester, and then Kenmore Construction will be working on underground, publicly owned city utilities in preparation for next year when the bulk of the construction will begin.

“The plan always included utilities going first – that as a necessity has to go first,” Bowling said.

Contrary to past reports claiming that construction would begin in the summer rather than the fall, the actual roadway construction won’t be in full swing until next year, Bowling said, which is mainly due to the approach of winter.

“When you go ahead and work on a road, you want to get a significant portion done so that when you stop work, you can open up the road to two-way, two-lane traffic again, and depending on how money resources the contractor wanted to put on the project, which is out of our control, we felt we were uncertain, but now that we’ve got a contractor that we’re working to sign the contract with, and we’ve talked to them and we’re in agreement that we wouldn’t start any major work this year,” Bowling said.