Bypassing the bypass

The work will take six months to complete.
& lt;a href=mailto:jgoodwin@vindy.com & gt;By JOHN W. GOODWIN JR & lt;/a & gt;.
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
POLAND -- Drivers traveling between Poland Village and Poland Township along U.S. Route 224 have been cut off by the closing of the Yellow Creek Bridge, but those operating businesses along 224 say they'll be OK if everyone learns the shortcuts.
The bridge is 247 feet long, but the posted detour takes drivers on an 18-mile journey through Struthers, Campbell and western Pennsylvania before rejoining 224.
A section of road in Pennsylvania along the detour route is under construction, costing drivers even more time.
Work on the bridge will last about six months, to October.
Jennifer Richmond, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Transportation, which is responsible for the bridge repairs, said guidelines mandate that ODOT direct traffic along state routes only. She said it comes down to a matter of liability -- ODOT does not want to be responsible for any deterioration to local roads because of detoured traffic.
"That is not to say people can't go whatever way they choose," said Richmond. "We just can't detour traffic to any road that is not a state route."
Advice to customers
Iola Mordocco, co-owner of LaRocca's Pizza and Pasta Ristorante on 224, said that is exactly what she has been advising her customers to do -- take a shorter route. One of the restaurant's other owners has called village officials to suggest making shorter routes known publicly.
The short cut Mordocco tells her customers to take is state Route 170 to Riverside Drive and back to 224. That route will take drivers about two blocks out of their way.
Mordocco said the bridge closing has not had a major effect on business because most of her regular customers and those who live in the area know the shorter route. She is concerned about those drivers not from the Poland area.
"This can be very confusing to people who are not from this area or who don't know their way around here," she said.
Mordocco said it is too early to tell if she will lose customers to the detour in the long run.
Fewer customers
Donna Magee, an employee at the Sami Quick Stop on 224, said the store has lost a few customers because of the bridge closing. She said many regular morning coffee customers who live on the opposite side of the bridge do not want to deal with finding an alternative route and have not been to the store since the bridge closed Monday.
Magee said even some regular customers who know of the shorter route have not been into the store because they do not want to drive through the added traffic along 170 and Riverside Drive -- a small street that runs alongside a school.
Poland Village Police Chief Russell Beatty said that traffic along the unpublicized route was initially a concern for police but that traffic flow in the last several days has not been too bad.
Beatty said there were minor problems the first day of the bridge closing, but officers monitored the traffic flow, adjusted traffic signals, put "no parking" signs in some areas and set some traffic lights to flash to address the problems.
Carol Johngrass, manager of Bruster's Ice Cream, which sits at the mouth of the bridge where construction is taking place, said business has been a lot slower since the bridge closed Monday, but she will have to wait and see if that can be entirely attributed to the closing. The construction company working on the bridge, she said, has offered to do anything possible to ease the impact on the business.
& lt;a href=mailto:jgoodwin@vindy.com & gt;jgoodwin@vindy.com & lt;/a & gt;