ORANGE BEACH, AL - The Alabama Department of Transportation is seeking bids for three jobs in Baldwin County including work on Alabama 182, or beach road, in Orange Beach.
It is listed among the …
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ORANGE BEACH, AL - The Alabama Department of Transportation is seeking bids for three jobs in Baldwin County including work on Alabama 182, or beach road, in Orange Beach.
It is listed among the several projects the state will open bids for on Aug. 26.
The state is looking for a contractor to do median improvements and beautification, widening, resurfacing, traffic stripe and signals from near the junction of Loop Road, the entrance between Winn Dixie and Walmart, to just east of the Cotton Bayou Beach Access.
This is phase one of a project that initially was going from the Flora-Bama to the western city limits with the idea of controlling left-hand turn accesses on the road. All phases would add 13 left-turn islands, but in this one would have four.
“Our concerns for this area are the safety of the traveling public and the pedestrians, traffic speed, and importantly the pedestrian and bicycle accessibility,” ALDOT Southwest Engineer Vince Calametti said. “The capacity – we all know we have capacity issues out there.”
Calametti cited the 227 accidents on Alabama 182 from 2012-14 resulting in 49 injuries and six deaths. There were eight pedestrian accidents during the same period resulting in two deaths.
“On the average 72 percent of the crashes involved left turns,” he said. “Forty-seven percent are related to left turns on side streets, 39 percent on the main street.”
He also pointed out that currently there are 520 conflict points on beach road and the new U-turn system will reduce that by 35 percent. At Palm Point Center the system, officials said, will reduce conflict points from 39 to just three.
The new signals will work in concert with each other, Community Development Director Kit Alexander said.
“All of the lights will all be communicating and they’ll have timed windows where they can all changed in synch,” she said. “If you come up here you’ll have to wait until that synched time so that when all this happens it happens in the most efficient flowing manner. They’ll all be synched and communicating with each other.”
Mayor Tony Kennon said in his state of the city address city officials asked the state to do just one phase of the three – the center portion between Cotton Bayou Beach Access and Walmart – and study its affect.
“We’ve asked at this point to just do phase one, evaluate it, put phase two and three on the back burner,” he said. “In reality I’d rather have that money to go somewhere on Canal Road or somewhere else.
“It was a $20 million project to do the entire city from city limit to city limit. The first phase is only about $5 million. I’d love that $15 million to go toward something that will help us right now.”
According to the bid proposal it is a project of just more than a mile long, will take about 125 working days and cost between $2.6 million and $3.2 million.
Other Baldwin County projects include constructing the adaptive signal installations along U.S. 98 at various locations. The project is estimated to cost from $1.8 million to $2.2 million and is expected to take 250 working days.
Another contract in the county calls for constructing the bridge replacement and approaches on County Road 10 over Boggy Branch south of Foley and is about 0.769 miles in length. This project is estimated to cost from $648,376 to $792,459 and take about 110 days to complete.
