A four-year-plan to ease congestion on the Charter Oak Bridge is finally coming to fruition.
Preliminary work started in April. The construction cones aren’t out yet, but already people are anxiously anticipating the changes coming down the road.
Mention the bridge to drivers around Hartford and the reaction is swift.
“The Charter Oak bridge, forget it. The traffic is terrible,” said Maxine Pugrab of Berlin.
“It’s a challenge,” added Andrew Silvers of Windsor.
Keith Sales drove a UPS truck in this area for most of his career. Now living in Florida, he says he doesn’t miss it.
“The traffic here, it’s ridiculous,” said Sales. “If you don’t go over all the way to the left side of the lane you’re going to be in a God awful mess.”
Local
However, some say when it’s time to exit the aggravation reaches a new level.
“It was like really bad. We could have gotten into an accident,” said Lela Monahan of Manchester.
“They cut your right off, so they’re cutting you just to get over to the other side,” added Pugrab.
The Connecticut Department of Transportation is trying to fix the unsafe congested strip of I-91 north for drivers headed from Hartford toward East Hartford and I-84 east over the Connecticut River.
“It’s safety. It’s a huge safety issue right now. The back-up’s all day,” stated Donald Ward, DOT District Engineer.
A $213 million project will add a lane to the interstate, expand the exit to two lanes, and move it from the right side of the road to the left.
“The trucks just cannot get up that incline and get up enough speed to get to that bridge,” explained Ward. “If we get the Charter Oak traffic to the high speed side on the Charter Oak Bridge they just continue straight and there’s no weaving anymore and people who want to get to Rt. 2 they’ll be on the right side.”
The welcome news means drivers may no longer have to find unconventional and unsafe ways to get around the bottleneck.
“Some people are smart enough, they’ve been in it long enough where they’ll get ahead of everybody then creep in where there’s a truck at,” said Silvers.
“What we do is we come off and then we turn around into the gas station and then go up the road,” said Pugrab.
While many people admitted to doing the same thing, Ward said that is ill-advised because the intersection cannot handle the traffic and it’s not a safe area to make a U-turn.
Most of the work on the next exit will done off site and at night so the DOT does not expect construction to add to the delays.
