The completion date depends on good weather conditions, he said.
The intersection is a high-crash area, which from 2008-10 had 50 wrecks, ranking it among among Ohio’s “Top 100 Non-Freeway Fatal and Serious Injury Locations” at the time.
Because of the safety improvements being made, the Ohio Department of Transportation is paying 90 percent of the estimated $3.2 million cost. ODOT also provided a 90 percent of the funding for improvements to the intersection of High Street with Martin Luther King Boulevard, which also had a large number of wrecks.
Meanwhile, the city in 2020 plans to repair another crossing involving a tangle of streets that meet in sharp angles and at intersections very close together. That group of roadways is Main Street, McKinley Avenue, Western Avenue, Haldimand Avenue and Cereal Avenue.
The main goal of that intersection work is to improve safety for vehicles and pedestrians. Rather than meeting at sharp angles, the streets will meet at 90-degree angles, which makes it easier for drivers to see traffic on other streets of the intersection. The estimated $3.2 million project should be finished in mid-2021.
Between the repairs at High-MLK Boulevard, Main-Millville-Eaton and the Main-Haldimand-Cereal group, officials expect that traffic should flow east-west along the High-Main corridor much more smoothly. They also plan to build, as part of work on the gigantic indoor sports complex and convention center called Spooky Nook at Champion Mill, a right-turn lane for westbound traffic on the High-Main bridge to northbound B Street so traffic flows more smoothly to that facility when it opens in 2021.
Officials also are looking at another proposed roadway called North Hamilton Crossing that would allow traffic to avoid the High-Main corridor and drive to the north of the city, likely with a new bridge over the Great Miami River and railroad tracks, somewhere north of the Black Street Bridge.
It likely will take a decade or more for that project, which is at only the first steps in the process, to be built, officials have said.
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