Regent Street congestion nearly at an end

While it's five weeks behind schedule, the major road and sewer reconstruction project that has clogged Regent Street much of this year is almost complete.

Kevin Shaw, the city's director of engineering services, said with good weather forecast for the next few days, the bulk of the work should be finished by Friday.

There's still some hydro pole relocation and curb work that will have to be completed on the west side of the road, so all five-lanes won't be open after Friday, Shaw said. But using the median turning lane, drivers will still have four lanes, so traffic should be flowing much better by next week.

Completion of work along one of the busiest roads in Greater Sudbury was scheduled for the end of September, but Shaw said work was delayed for a few reasons. The biggest single factor was a change in the way the city rebuilds roads.

“Five, maybe 10 years ago, we went to a deeper gravel in the road,” he said. “So sometimes we run into the utilities because the gravel goes deeper.”

While laying a deeper level of gravel improves drainage and the quality of the road, it also means projects are more likely to bump into underground utilities, in this case natural gas lines. That means the utility company has to come and lower the line so work can continue.

They also encountered more rock than they expected, which had to be dealt with, causing more delays and driving up costs.

“The rock will affect the budget,” Shaw said. “It takes longer, there's more work to do.”
But with a project of this size – around $4M-$6M, when including all the drainage work – the added costs should be minimal, he said.

The wet weather this spring through fall also worked against them, Shaw said.

“There were a lot of rain days – you can't do a lot of the work with saturated ground,” he said. “So the weather has been bad, and we encountered rock that we weren't expecting in the utility trenches.”

This week, workers are paving the nearby intersections – at Martindale Road and Walford Road, as well as Bouchard Street and Martilla Drive. While the intersections are receiving permanent asphalt, crews will be back in the spring to finish paving Regent.

“For every (major) job we do, we put the surface on the next year,” Shaw said. “That's just standard procedure. We don't want to rip and tear on the surface” when they're doing finishing work.

The heavy equipment they use installing sod and working on the curbs would damage a new road, he said.

“You don't want to run a backhoe over it when you're lifting stuff over,” he said. “And in this case, we also have some sidewalk work to do. There's hydro poles that have to be moved back, or they'd be in the middle of the sidewalk.

“So we'll put temporary asphalt down for the winter.”

Work on the project included:

Installation of a trunk watermain;

Road reconstruction and widening with continuous centre turning lane and bicycle lanes;

Storm and sanitary sewer improvements;

New road granular, asphalt, curb and gutter, and sidewalk;

Streetlight replacements;

Installation of watermain; and,

Traffic signal improvements at Walford Road and Bouchard Street.