Road work will shift more lanes

Commutes still will be shifted and switched for the next few months as crews continue to work on a bevy of road projects in Richmond County.

With 22 projects under construction, Mike Keene, area engineer for the Georgia Department of Transportation, said motorists can expect to see new traffic shifts and lane closures on Interstate 20 and in downtown Augusta.

With a target date of September, the DOT will begin shifting I-20 traffic onto two new inside lanes between Bobby Jones Expressway and the Augusta Canal.

"We'll be finished with the center part, and we'll be moving traffic over to the left and putting them into the new build part of the center lanes," Mr. Keene said. "We're shooting for sometime in the first of September."

When construction is completed on the project in July 2010, there will be three lanes each way on I-20, he said.

In downtown Augusta, construction on the St. Sebastian Way project, which is designed to connect River Watch Parkway to the area's medical complexes, already has caused traffic shifts on Greene Street. Those will be expanded to Broad Street next month, when the lanes between 13th and 15th streets will be narrowed.

"We will lose a little bit of parking, and we'll lose the lanes inside toward the median out there," he said.

Mr. Keene said there are plans to reopen the I-20 ramp to westbound Bobby Jones Expressway. A detour has been in place there since last fall.

"They were hoping to open the center ramps and kind of relieve some of that pressure where people were having to detour, 'cause right now they have to go up Davis Road," he said.

The construction projects have not been without problem. Just three months after installation, the sound barrier walls that line I-20 near Belair Road are crumbling.

Cissy McNure, a spokeswoman with the Georgia Department of Transportation, said the concrete slabs appear to be breaking loose from their steel restraints and sliding out of place. That is also occurring along both sides of the interstate in Columbia County.

The cost of replacing the walls falls on the project's contractor, Anatek Inc. of Marietta, Ga., and not the taxpayers, according to Mr. Keene.

Reach Adam Folk at (706) 823-3339 or adam.folk@augustachronicle.com.