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.

 I’m pretty good at math, but this one has me stumped.  The contractor building the Super 70 project, Walsh Construction, failed to meet its deadline at midnight (Wednesday night-Thursday morning) to finish the project.  But not only will it not pay the $120,000 a day penalty for being late, it’s getting a bonus for finishing early.

  Here’s INDOT’s strange math.  Although this was one project with one contractor, it was divided into two contracts, an east half and a west half.  The easier east half was allegedly finished early, while the west half, which was more difficult because of the need to build a hill for the new overpass at Sherman Drive, is late.  INDOT says the bonus for the east will be bigger than the penalty for the west.

  There’s only one problem with that.  The east half wasn’t finished early.  INDOT says it was done at Halloween.  But I kept seeing barreled-off lanes, a reduced speed limit, closed entrance ramps, and trucks unable to use the road. 

  To me that just screams, NOT FINISHED!

  INDOT”s explanation is that the contractor finished the east half, but INDOT wouldn’t allow it to fully re-open, because it would have created a safety problem where it met the unfinished west half.  Well, whose fault was that?  Wouldn’t it be the same Walsh that’s getting the bogus bonus?

  Spokesperson Will Wingfield says INDOT couldn’t re-open the westbound lanes on the finished portion, because it would have created a safety problem squeezing four lanes into two when it met the unfinished portion west of Emerson. 

  Okay, I’ll buy that.  But couldn’t they have at least fully re-opened the eastbound lanes, opened the eastbound entrance at Emerson, and raised the speed limit back to 55?  No, according to INDOT, because that would mean different speed limits on different sides of the road, and you can’t do that, because it might make traffic tickets invalid.

  Well, that simply isn’t so.  As anybody who regularly drives 70 can attest, the speed limit is always different on different sides of the road.  For about a two-mile segment east of downtown, it’s 55 mph eastbound and 50 mph westbound.

  No, I think the real problem is that INDOT doesn’t care about the convenience of the taxpayers who pay for the road.  It’s all about the comfort of its contractors.  It will make any kind of twisted argument (“Well, it rained a couple of days back in May.”) to make sure they get their bonuses.  But it won’t send someone out to change a sign so drivers don’t have to creep along at 45 mph on a road that people are obviously no longer working on.

  Situations like this breed disrespect for speed limits in general.  I hope INDOT remembers that the next time it holds a news conference to complain about people speeding in work zones.

Is it just me, or does the Super 70 bridge over Sherman Drive seem to be producing a lot of big mistakes?  While the overall project seems to be going well (maybe even ahead of schedule, thanks to the drought), INDOT and its contractors seem prone to producing bonehead plays at that one site.

Remember back in mid-summer, when the columns for the westbound lanes turned up 13 inches too short to match the approaches?  Not .13 of an inch or 1.3 inches, but 13 inches.  That’s more than a FOOT!  Don’t any of these guys carry levels?  INDOT has assured us that the pad they put in to extend the columns so they would match is safe.  Okay.

Now it seems the trucks bringing in the beams for the eastbound lanes were loaded backwards at the factory.  That means they arrived here with the smooth end that’s supposed to abut the hill and the end with the rebars that’s supposed to meet the next set of beams reversed.  That may not seem like much of a problem, until you consider how long these beams are and how difficult it is turning the trucks around so the beams face the right way before they’re hoisted into place.  In fixing this mistake, INDOT had to add an extra night to the extra lane restrictions on eastbound 70.

Once again, a question.  Hasn’t anybody thought of putting a This End Up sticker on these beams?  And another question.  Is INDOT maybe asking itself why it just didn’t leave this section as an underpass the way it used to be?

  “Breaker, breaker 1-9.”  Come back, good buddy.”  There’s a smoky in a plain wrapper ahead at mile 89.”

  Anybody who remembers those CB radio trucker songs from the late 70’s can translate that.  It means a state trooper in an unmarked car is waiting at mile marker 89, which in the case of the Super 70 project is the east end of the work zone where troopers wait for trucks to fall into their laps.

The question is, why do they still do it?  Don’t truckers still talk to each other on their radios and warn each other of problems?  If they do, many aren’t listening.  How else to account for the truckers still getting ticketed for driving in the work zone seven months after they were banned from the area? 

  The most recent figures, which cover March through August show nearly 12,000 tickets have been issued just to oversized trucks.

This morning on my way to work I counted five passing me eastbound.  Since I had already passed two police cars waiting at the east exit from the work zone, I knew that at least two of them, and probably all five, could count on getting really expensive tickets in just a few minutes.

  While on the Super 70 project, there will be a change tomorrow.  After rush hour tonight, workers will move the eastbound exit from 70 to I-465 and Shadeland Avenue about 500 feet west.  That means traffic exiting there will be driving on new pavement.  The old pavement they were using for the exit before will then be ripped up and replaced.

  Believe it or not, we’re close to the end of this project.  INDOT doesn’t want to give a date other than “November.”  But I’m told the good weather this summer (good at least for pouring concrete) could mean an early November date, not the end of the month we usually expect.  I’m also told there will be no phase-in this time.  Remember in July when INDOT crossed traffic over from the eastbound lanes to the newly finished westbound lanes in phases?  That won’t be done this time, because the new barrier walls won’t allow space to cross over.

  Let’s take a well-deserved break from the property tax wars today and look at the summer’s other big story, the one getting pushed aside by property taxes.  That would be the Super 70 project on the East Side, which just hit the halfway mark.

  If you drive that area like I do, you’ve probably spent lots of time looking up at that seemingly halfway finished wall.  You know, the one where 70 crosses Sherman Drive and the CSX tracks.  INDOT contractors have built a big hill and a bridge there to take the westbound lanes over Sherman and the tracks instead of under.  The wall is there to hold in the dirt that forms the new hill.  But it doesn’t look right.  It has a number of steel uprights that appear to be the supports for a wire mesh screen.  But the screen doesn’t go all the way to the top.  That screen is covered at the bottom by what appears to be a stone façade.  But that doesn’t go to the top of the wire. 

  I assumed this would be finished before they started letting vehicles drive over the new stretch of highway.  But it wasn’t.  So I called INDOT spokesperson Will Wingfield to see what gives.  Is my car in danger of plunging into a big hole if the unfinished wall gives way?  He assures me this won’t happen.

  According to Wingfield, what appears to be the first of two hills, with the other carrying eastbound traffic, really isn’t.  It will all be one hill that meets in the middle.  So when the eastbound portion is built, the dirt will be filled in all the way to the portion already built.  He says the bridge will also be just one piece, unlike most freeway bridges where the two spans are clearly delineated.

  So for all of us sidewalk engineers, we can watch the second half of the project with a little more knowledge about what INDOT is actually trying to accomplish.  All the time hoping they get it finished before they have to start salting it for winter.