With the latest phase of PennDOT’s Atherton Street project now fully underway, many community members have questioned the timing of a road closure for a heavily traveled area in downtown State College.
The reason, a PennDOT official said on Tuesday morning, is mostly due to supply chain issues and the length of the project.
South Atherton Street between West College and West Beaver avenues closed around the clock to traffic on Monday — the first day of Penn State’s fall semester — and will remain shut down until Sept. 6 as contractors work on upgrades to the sanitary sewer system. The intersection of Beaver Avenue and Atherton Street is also fully closed until Monday, Aug. 29, resulting in several detours.
At various public meetings over the past two years, PennDOT representatives outlined the timeline for the three-year project and indicated the road closure would take place earlier in the summer.
But Marc Maney, PennDOT construction inspector for the $31 million project, said delays in acquiring materials pushed the schedule back.
“We’ve planned this job for two years now,” Maney said while speaking to reporters on Calder Way near the current work zone. “Our industry in transportation is just like a lot of other industries. We’ve been dealing with a lot of material procurement delays. Materials we could readily get last spring — we could get them within a week — we started seeing delays of nine to 15 weeks last fall. This spring, we started to see delays of up to nine months for those same materials. Currently, some of these materials we’re looking at 12 months.”
Delaying the sewer line work — one of a series of infrastructure and road improvements involved in the project — would delay anticipated completion of the overall project from fall 2024 to 2025. PennDOT also didn’t want to move the work to later this fall when it would throw a wrench into Penn State football traffic.
Maney expects the current closure to be the worst of the traffic impacts. (A similar full road closure will be in place for water line and drainage upgrades next year, but that will take place earlier in the summer.) And though the stretch between College and Beaver will be closed for an extra week, the Beaver Avenue intersection’s expected reopening on Monday should alleviate some of the traffic problems, Maney said.
“Once that happens, that will help eliminate a lot of congestion,” Maney said.
This week, motorists traveling on North Atherton Street are being directed to Park Avenue and then Route 26 to reach downtown or the Mount Nittany Expressway for points beyond. Those coming from the Pine Grove Mills or Boalsburg areas are being directed to the expressway and the Route 26 exit.
Starting next week, the detours will be somewhat simpler, with drivers directed west on College Avenue and east on Beaver Avenue to get around the closed section.
Travelers who are familiar with the area may use local roads, but Maney urged them to use caution.
“We have had some reports of motorists speeding on the side streets, so we encourage anyone that’s using those side streets to keep their speed down, be aware of their surroundings, especially if they are coming in and past the project,” he said. “Be aware of the work that’s going on. Go slow. Be alert.”
The current work is taking place near the Alpha Fire Company’s downtown station, but Centre Region Emergency Management Coordinator Shawn Kauffman said it hasn’t had a significant impact on the fire company’s operations.
“We’ve had just a little bit of a time delay there, not real significant, but it’s a little unusual when you’re trying to go to the north side of town and you’re traveling south for a couple of blocks to get there,” Kauffman said.
PennDOT also reminded pedestrians to be alert and follow pedestrian detour routes, which Maney said were being “tweaked” on Tuesday.
“It’s our goal to keep folks as safe as possible and to provide them with pedestrian access wherever they’re going,” Marla Fannin, community relations coordinator for PennDOT District 2, said. “That may take them out of their way up to a certain point, but our goal is to keep them safe and make everything as accessible as possible.”
After the road closure is lifted, traffic largely will be managed with single-lane closures and flagging, Maney said. Short-term detours are expected for sewer replacements at intersections from West Nittany Avenue to West Hamilton Avenue. Some night work may also take place.
Work will not occur during Penn State home football weekends, but some lane closures may still be in place.
“There is a possibility that there could be a lane closure in the sense that instead of having two lanes in one direction you might be down to one,” Maney said. “More than likely we’ll at least have one lane in each direction open at all times.”
Work for this season will continue until December. The project is expected to then resume in March.
Construction information and current detours will be updated regularly at penndot.gov/athertonstreet.
What the project involves and what’s next
The project includes roadway reconstruction, drainage improvements, water and sewer lines, concrete curbing, sidewalks and detectable warning surfaces, pavement markings and traffic signals and supports from the Curtin Road intersection on North Atherton Street to the Westerly Parkway intersection on South Atherton Street.
It’s the third phase of Atherton Street work originating from a 2010 review of the entire corridor showed a need for repairs and upgrades, primarily for drainage.
“We have a lot of corrugated metal pipe that’s through the corridor and back then we identified quite a bit of the pipe as being bad,” Maney said.
Since then, PennDOT has completed the first two phases of improvements, similar to the current work, from the start of North Atherton Street near Gray’s Woods to Park Avenue.
Like with previous phases through Patton and Ferguson townships, PennDOT worked with State College Borough and utilities to incorporate upgrades and relocations into the current phase.
“We figured since we had to get down here, we had to impact traffic and pedestrians, we worked with the borough and Penn State and others so we could do all this work simultaneously so we didn’t have to do one project after another to then upgrade the water line and the sewer line,” Maney said.
“If you did each project separately you could be easily looking at five years if you give each individual utility company and stakeholder their time to do the work.”
This year’s work is centered on sewer line replacement, while next year will involve water line replacement from College Avenue to Westerly Parkway and drainage and streetscape improvements.
In 2024, drainage improvements will take place at the north and south ends of the project and the entire project area will be milled and paved by the end of the year.
“There is a lot of infrastructure that is underneath the roadway. It’s old; it’s deteriorating,” Maney said. “We’re finally getting into this third phase of the project now. After this project is over we’re looking at doing one more phase to get us the bulk of the way up through Atherton, which will be quite a few years down the road. But at least at that point we’ll have everything done from the beginning of Atherton near Gray’s Woods the whole way down to Westerly Parkway.”
HRI, Inc. of State College is the contractor for the project.
