Winslow Road repaving gets initial $500K nod from Bloomington RDC
Winslow Road, which cuts east-west across the southern part of Bloomington, has received a nod from the city’s redevelopment commission for a resurfacing project that is supposed to be completed sometime in 2023.
The preliminary engineering work for the project is hoped to start this fall and last through the spring, with construction to begin in 2023.
The RDC’s initial approval, which came at its regular Tuesday meeting, established the work as an RDC project, with a kind of placeholder cost of $500,000. But the action by the five-member RDC did not approve the expenditure of any funds.
The scope of the project goes from Walnut Street on the west to High Street to the east.
Public works director Adam Wason responded to an emailed B Square question by describing the planned work as a “standard milling/paving/lane marking project.”
Wason’s department will work with the engineering department on the project, he wrote. Wason indicated the total estimated project cost is around $675,000.
But the city of Bloomington has applied for an Indiana Department of Transportation Community Crossing Matching Grant program which typically gives local units a 50-50 match. Wason estimated the amount the city would need to match at around $330,000.
For the most recent round, CCMG grant applications were due at the end of August, Wason wrote. By mid-October, Bloomington hopes to hear if the application was successful.
Based on INDOT traffic counts, the stretch of Winslow Road to be repaved carries between 9,000 to 13,000 vehicles a day (counting both directions), depending on the exact location of the count.
The posted speed limit for that stretch of Winslow Road is 30 mph. Drivers typically go faster than that.
According to the INDOT traffic counts, in late August of 2020, the “pace” of traffic along that section of Winslow Road was 30–40 mph. The “pace” of traffic is defined by the Institute of Traffic Engineers as the 10-mph band that contains the largest number of observed vehicles.
The 85th percentile speed was 37 mph, which means that 15 percent of drivers were going more than 7 mph above the speed limit.
The intersection of Walnut Street and Winslow Road ranked as the 9th highest-crash intersection in Monroe County between 2015 and 2019, with a five-year total of 113 crashes.
