Six miles of road from Austintown to Girard to be widened by July 2018

June 16, 2015 at 8:14p.m.

AUSTINTOWN

State and local officials gathered Tuesday at Cerni Motors Sales Inc., 5751 Cerni Place, to celebrate the start of an Interstate 80 widening project.

Many of them recalled talking about the same project — at the same place — in December 2012 when Republican Gov. John Kasich made the Austintown business one of several stops that day to announce a road project initiative.

Kasich talked about more funding for road projects in the northern part of the state, specifically widening I-80 from two lanes in each direction to three from Austintown Township through to Weathersfield and Liberty townships and to the city of Girard.

Ohio Department of Transportation officials thanked Kasich for his Jobs and Transportation Plan, which moved the start date on the project from 2027 to now.

“It would advance projects like this that have been talked about for 20 years. Well, let me tell you all, the plan is working,” said James Barna, ODOT assistant director for transportation policy and chief engineer.

The six-mile stretch of I-80 project area has “two to three times the average crash rate for similar facilities across the state of Ohio, so we intend to bring that crash data back down by adding this third lane in each direction,” Barna said.

“Any time they can make the roadways safer engineering, it’s definitetly a good thing,” said Lt. Nakia Hendrix, commander of the Canfield barracks of the Ohio State Highway Patrol. He said there will be “strict enforcement” in the construction zones.

Shelly and Sands of Akron is the contractor on the $108.4 million project to widen the interstate from four lanes to six lanes from the I-80/state Route 11/state Route 46 interchange in Austintown to the state Route 193/Belmont Avenue interchange in Trumbull County.

Six bridges will be replaced and widened. There is a $20 million construction cost for two of those bridges, the 750-foot-long eastbound and westbound bridges just west of U.S. Route 422 that span the Norfolk Southern and Ohio Central railroad lines.

Officials said that between 56,000 and 64,000 vehicles travel the portion of I-80 daily and about 30 percent of that traffic is from trucks.