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Travelers used alternate routes to avoid the Wick Avenue construction project its first day
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Motorists used alternate routes to avoid the Wick Avenue construction project its first day.
Work began Monday on the $4.1 million project on Wick from Wood Street to Eastbound Service Road of the Madison Avenue Expressway.
That main route to Youngstown State University will be under construction until September 2017.
Some drivers, however, didn’t get the memo. Cars traveling southbound on Wick met a closed sign at Lincoln Avenue and had to turn around and drive north.
The road is closed to through traffic, although local traffic will be maintained southbound to parking lots and businesses including the main branch of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County and the Arms Museum.
Detours are posted via Fifth and Andrews avenues.
Ron Cole, YSU spokesman, said everything went smoothly the first day of construction and neither campus police nor parking services reported problems.
Neither freshman Keimarra Boyd nor sophomore Michael Dipaolo, however, altered her or his travel because of the Wick project.
“I always come the other way” up Fifth Avenue, said Dipaolo of Boardman. “I knew it started this week.”
He travels Glenwood Avenue en route to school.
Boyd, also of Boardman, travels Glenwood, too, following it to Mahoning Avenue and then to Fifth.
The Lincoln Avenue project that started a few weeks ago, though, required both students to leave home earlier.
That project, between Wick Avenue and Hazel Street, includes paving, sewer improvements, marked crosswalks, new sidewalk curbs, small pedestrian islands at intersections, installing 18 parking meters that allow motorists to pay with debit and credit cards, and removing parking spaces on the north side of the street.
The $1.3 million Lincoln project started in mid-August, and the road will reopen in mid-December.
“They closed the entrance to the M2 parking deck,” Dipaolo said. “I had to change my route a little bit.”
The closure of one entrance led to more traffic at the other.
Boyd reported a similar experience.
She was a couple of minutes late to class one day because she has to walk farther to get there. She’s since made an adjustment.
“I leave a little bit earlier,” she said.
The Wick project will move above-ground utility poles underground, replace two waterlines with one, replace a sewer line, install new traffic lights, reduce the three-lane road to two lanes, with the middle being a turning lane, plus include paving and new signs.