Lee Highway Bridge Work Near Exit 7 To Begin Next Week

By David McGee
Staff Writer / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: July 4, 2008

BRISTOL, Va. – A nearly year-long bridge replacement project is expected to begin next week along a heavily traveled section of Lee Highway.

At the same time, the Virginia Department of Transportation has announced it plans to study traffic patterns and volumes along a section of the Lee Highway corridor – including the bridge construction area – near Interstate 81’s Exit 7.

“The signs are up and they are staging equipment,” City Manager Bill Dennison said Wednesday of contractor Simpson Construction of Cleveland, Tenn. “They’ll probably start next week, after the July 4th holiday.”

Plans call for replacing a nearly 70-year-old, three-lane bridge with a new five-lane span across Beaver Creek, just east of the Lee Highway-Airport Road intersection.

The $2 million contract mandates traffic must continue flowing in both directions, but some slowdowns are likely, Dennison said. The work is scheduled to be complete next June.

Also beginning Monday, VDOT workers will collect Lee Highway traffic data between the railroad overpass near Alexis Drive and The Highlands retail center, just outside the city limits.

“The tremendous growth along this stretch of [U.S.] Route 11 presents many traffic management challenges,” Donny Necessary, VDOT’s Bristol district transportation planner said in a news release. “We are hopeful this study will help determine some low-cost, short-term solutions to these issues.”

A section of Airport Road will also be included in the study.

“VDOT is looking to add an additional through lane to Airport Road from Route 11 back to south of the ramps for [Interstate] 81,” Dennison said. “There would be no city money involved but that would relieve some of the congestion we experience there.”

VDOT currently has no money for any new construction projects in that part of the city.

“The study will provide the city with some advance planning and how to deal with development along that section of Route 11,” Dennison said, adding he hopes VDOT would eventually study back to the area around Exit 5.

The city already has a number of other planned projects in that area, including a reconfiguration and traffic signal at Alexis and Travalite drives, a traffic signal at the entrance to the Wal-Mart center and a proposed signal east of the bridge project.

VDOT announced last year it plans to widen an adjoining two-mile stretch of Lee Highway from near The Highlands retail center to state Route F-310 near Exit 10. That work is now expected to begin in 2012.

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