The ProPEL U.S. 30 East study report is still on target to be completed by the end of the year.
Rusty Holt, supervising traffic engineer at WSP, the engineering company studying U.S. 30 East for the Indiana Department of Transportation, reminded the Kosciusko County Commissioners at their meeting Monday that the last time they spoke to them was after the purpose and need document last summer.
“A few things have happened since then,” he said. “We made a lot of progress on our study, that’s why we’re making an update on where we’re at and up to.”
He said they’ve released the level 2 report on the study at the end of March and had a comment period through April. They’re going to take those comments and use them as they move into level 3 of the study.
“Level 3 will be in the summer and we’re still looking at the end of the year for the full report,” Holt said.
The ProPEL U.S. 30 east study area extends from Beech Road in Marshall County to the Indiana/Ohio state line in Allen County, with portions of I-69 and I-469 around the north side of Fort Wayne excluded from the study.
Because of the size and complexity of the U.S. 30 corridor, he said they’ve anticipating three screen levels for the alternatives analysis.
“This report is level 2, we’ll have one more after that. At each step along the way, we have fewer alternatives that remain, but the level of detail for each alternative will increase,” Holt said. “So during the level 1 screen, which we called Universal Alternatives, we had 55 improvement concepts that came out of that screen and into level 2.”
Those concepts included a variety of things, he said, including location-specific improvements as well as corridor-wide improvements.
Universal Alternatives was published in November, with the comment period going through December. That report was revised with the final version released when the level 2 report was released.
“The level 2 screening focuses on specific intersections, so we want to look at each intersection - what looks best, what works best for that intersection and what doesn’t work we’ll exclude from the rest of the study. And then when we get to level 3, it’ll be combined with those level 2 pieces into segments of improvements,” Holt said.
One of the things that appear in the level 2 document is access management, “which is really just a control of how people interact with U.S. 30, whether they access it at a certain point or cross it, so it’s a way to control that access in a way that is safer and provides better mobility for the people nearby.”
Another thing in the report is free-flow facilities. “So it’s the level of access for the facility. A free-flow would have no stop on U.S. 30, so all the traffic signals would be removed and U.S. 30 would not be forced to stop anymore. There’s a lot of area between just removing the traffic signals and having a freeway. A freeway would be the highest level of a free-flow facility. So if it’s just removing the signals but having intersections in the middle, all the way up to fully accessed control of freeway. So a free-flow facility is a pretty big bucket of improvement options,” he explained.
The third item in the document is intersection improvements, whether it’s just a proposal to upgrade an existing intersection in some way, all the way up to an alternative intersection such as a reduced conflict intersection, roundabout, etc.
The other thing in the report is crossroad overpasses and underpasses where they wouldn’t have access to U.S. 30 anymore but traffic could cross the highway without stopping and U.S. 30 traffic wouldn’t have to stop. “And then converting an intersection to an interchange, which we all know what interchanges are,” Holt said.
There were 55 improvement alternatives that came out of level 1, with 17 of those classified as primary and secondary. Primary and secondary are the ones that are practical and meet the purpose and need and goals that were identified in the study, he said.
Level 2 was where the evaluations of those began. “We had a five-step process for each of those intersections. We looked at the same five steps for each one of them, just to make sure we were treating them all equally. We answered the same questions for each one,” he said. “The 31 primary intersections are the most important roadways in the study area, where people access and interact with U.S. 30 the most. So all the signalized intersections, as well as anything that’s classified as a major collector or an arterial.”
Of the 31 primary intersections, he said 23 are signalized.
He then reviewed the five-step process.
The first step is trying to determine which of the 17 primary and secondary alternatives are applicable at one intersection. “Some of them you would have to implement at multiple intersections; since we’re not doing that at level 2, we’re just going to look at that at level 3,” he said, leaving 10 of the 17.
Of those 10, in step two, they looked at ones that change the traffic-control type - things that change how traffic interacts with U.S. 30. “So five of those and then five are the ones that are just improving the intersection however it currently stands.”
Step three was “taking those traffic control decisions and working through a decision tree with yes or no answers to figure out which type of traffic control works at each intersection and which ones don’t.”
Step four was looking at each individual intersection and expanding on “the things that come out of step three. So step four would say, if it’s a signalized improvement, here are five types of signalized improvements, which ones work and which ones don’t.”
For step five, anything that came out of step four would be provided a high level of a conceptual footprint of what the improvement might look like by area of impact basis, “not the actual improvement itself but how big the improvement would be,” Holt said.
From those five steps, he said they developed a table that ranks each alternative and gave it an assessment, whether it’s a low, medium or high impact; the purpose and need identified; as well as environmental, human, right-of-way and cost impacts. All of those are identified in the level 2 report, which can be found online at https://propelus30.com/.
Heading to level 3 of the study, Holt said everything that came out of level 2 will move into level 3.
“It will take each individual intersection, group them together in 3- to 5-mile segments and see how things work together,” he said. “So we wouldn’t put one improvement directly next to another improvement if they don’t work well together. We’ll see what works well together for a 3- to 5-mile segment, and then moving that through an alternatives analysis to provide different improvement packages inside of that segment.”
Holt said they are continuing to hold office hours on the study and take comments on the website. Level 3 is expected to be published this summer.
After Holt was finished with his update, County Commissioner Bob Conley spoke out against J-turns, saying “nobody in this world would ever want one,” with Commissioner Brad Jackson agreeing with him. Holt said there have been a handful of comments that expressed some appreciation for J-turns as they do improve safety in certain circumstances.
Commissioner Cary Groninger asked about the study of intersections that weren’t labeled as primary. Holt said in level 3, every intersection in the study area will be reviewed. “Every intersection will have some sort of recommendation inside the improvement packages,” he said.
Groninger also talked about the importance of U.S. 30 as a freight corridor, as well as its importance to the small towns of Etna Green and Pierceton as U.S. 30 runs through those towns.