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I'm Dan Labo. I'm a Project Engineer with the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
The I-94 Project goes from Highway 24 in Clearwater and goes to St. Augusta which would be County
Road 75. It's an unbounded concrete overlay and the project duration starts this spring,
April 1 and goes through the end of July.
The projected back-ups, assuming nobody takes alternate routes anyway, we're looking, for
westbound anyway, Thursday and Friday, we're looking at 20 mile back-ups. And eastbound
on Sunday for everybody coming back, it could very well be 20-25 mile back-ups. So, we do
very much encourage people to travel at off-peak times where they can and plan for some significant
delays if they're going to be traveling during peak times.
Good alternate routes for the project would be just depending on where you go. It could
be Highway 12, could be Highway 55, Highway 10 and then we also have the County Road 75
which parallels 94 so that can also be used by the locals.
The duration of this project, we'll basically be working on eastbound 94, we have eastbound
2 lanes closed currently. It will go from April 1 through Memorial Day weekend and we'll
be done before Memorial. And Memorial Day weekend we'll be open to 4 lanes of traffic,
2 in each direction. And after Memorial Day, we'll flip over and we'll do the westbound
lanes and that is anticipated to be closed after Memorial Day and we're hoping to be
open before the Fourth of July. And then for the Fourth of July weekend we'll be open 4
lanes, each direction. After the Fourth of July weekend, we'll be out there just doing,
kind of, final clean up, temporary lane closures for the month of July. Then also we do have
real time travel updates on the corridor so there's several locations anyway so you can
actually see 15-20 miles ahead of time, you know, what the travel duration is. And I guess
if you see some, you'll monitor those and use that information to adjust your route
accordingly.
The benefits of this project will be a smoother road surface, it will be reduced maintenance
on the corridor and we won't be looking any other projects here for quite a while. And
then we'll be looking at a forty year fix for the road. So at least for major construction,
we should be pretty good to go for quite some time. I would just encourage motorists to
taken alternate routes where they can, plan ahead, check our project website. You can
get to that from 511mn.org. Click on the I-94 project and a link to all the project information
which will have the dates, the events. You can actually review the real time travel updates.
You can actually access our traffic cameras and traffic speeds on the corridor. We really
encourage people to use that and modify the roads accordingly.