The State Department of Transportation is planning a resurfacing project through Soldotna on the Sterling Highway in 2016.
The project will stretch from about a third of a mile south of the K-Beach Road intersection, to just past the Fred Meyer intersection.
Sean Baski with DOT Highway Design said one of the main scopes of the project will be to replace traffic loops in the intersections involved.
Baski: “Whenever you’re pulling up to a signal, you expect that you aren’t sitting at a red light without traffic going the opposite direction, we call that detection and those loops help with those kinds of things. We mentioned advanced loop placement and that’s so when you pull up to an intersection at higher speeds you don’t potentially get put into that weird yellow light situation where you’re like, should I stop, should I go, so those things help with those kinds of things.”
The project will also use a more costly asphalt in the hopes of avoiding rutting in the traffic lanes.
Baski: “And so the current plan is to use that hard aggregate. We’ve determined over a number of years that in certain areas it’s worth it to spend that extra little bit of money to get a much better benefit over time.”
That project is slated to be bid on this fall and is estimated to cost around $5 million dollars, almost ninety percent of which is federally funded.