Many drivers and business owners on the East side are feeling hoodwinked by INDOT, and it’s hard to disagree with them.  This is the area that suffered most from the eight-month Super 70 project last year.  Now they’re about to undergo the Orange Barrel Nightmare again.  And many are asking, “Why?”

  Next Monday, or thereabouts, INDOT will close the eastbound on-ramp at Shadeland Avenue.  For two months, you won’t be able to get on eastbound I-70 or north or southbound I-465.  Work crews will rebuild the bridge that takes that ramp over Shadeland, because the steel rebars are coming through the pavement.  When was this discovered?  Last week?  Last month?  No, engineers discovered it last year during the Super Seventy project.

  So why wasn’t it fixed at the same time?  Because, according to INDOT, this bridge was not part of that project.  The Super Seventy contract only called for rebuilding the mainline I-70 bridges at that point.  Repairing the other bridge would have meant bidding out a separate contract.  Still, it seems it would have made sense to do all the work at once.  But INDOT says no, that traffic was already being squeezed and backed up, and adding more work would have made it worse.

  Drivers and business people we talked with in the area disagree.  They would have preferred to get all the pain over with at the same time.  And some are suspicious of INDOT’s motives for the delay.  One sharp driver recalled (with no prompting on our part) that the Super 70 contractor got a big bonus for finishing the project early.  Given INDOT’s history of cozy relationships with its contractors, he wonders if the state’s engineers conveniently forgot about the ramp bridge to avoid creating a delay that would have cost their buddies their bonus.

  Even taking INDOT at its word, you have to question why they waited so long to even inform people about the problem, then dropped this bomb on them just a few days before the work is to start.  Sure, drivers can find alternate routes without much notice.  But how about business people, who need to educate their customers on alternate routes so they don’t lose their business and who might need to reduce their purchases so they’re not stuck with merchandise they can’t sell to the reduced traffic?

  It all seems like the typical INDOT way of operation.  It’s all about the department’s convenience and its contractors and not the convenience of the people who pay the bills.  Remember last November, when most of the Super 70 work was done, but INDOT adamantly refused to pull up the barrels in those areas and let drivers return to the normal speed limit?  Department officials came up with all sorts of lame excuses about why they couldn’t do it.  But the real reason seemed to be that they just didn’t want to take the trouble to do it, because it would only benefit drivers.  And the same motive seems to be in operation here.